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Dungeon Siege III Being Developed by Obsidian
Square Enix has announced that it will be publishing Dungeon Siege III, which is in development at Obsidian Entertainment, makers of Alpha Protocol, Neverwinter Nights 2, and the as yet unfinished Fallout: New Vegas. Obsidian will be receiving input from Gas Powered Games, the developer behind the first two installments in the Dungeon Siege series. No release date has been set, but the game is planned for the PC, PS3, and Xbox 360, and it will include a co-op mode.
Don't worry, Obsidian will be the ones to develop it. So it won't be bad because of square enix, it will just be a buggy unfinished mess with unsatisfying combat and a camera that hates you.
Innovative/rich storytelling. Lacks polish. Story-killing bugs will be corrected in a future patch. Expansion coming in 5-8 months.
Not that I'm cynical.
They're ok-ish. Diablo clones, basically, whose only real distinction is that you get control of a full party, rather than the usual individual (with possible AI follower) that you get in the genre. However, I note that this is allegedly going out the window in the third game, so you'll be controlling a single character, as in umpteen other games.
I played the first game to completion, and about half of the second game before I got too bored to continue. The first game started out well, and the whole "no loading screens" thing felt pretty novel at the time; walking into a building or dungeon and having the game transition seemlessly felt pretty novel in the days before WoW (and even WoW has loading screens when changing continent or going into an instance). Early on, it felt pretty fun, with lots of changes in the environment and the terrain. Unfortunately, the game's mid-section is tedious in the extreme, with some very long, highly repetitive dungeons which just seem to go on forever. Things improve somewhat again towards the end, with a few large and extremely epic boss fights, but I'm not sure how many players would make it that far. The game also had a few balance problems; in particular, it was very hard to keep characters levelled up in nature magic (the healing-build) at the same rate as your other characters would be advancing in the offensive skills.
The second game I found it much harder to get into. Despite a generally better and less generic plot, it seemed to have a lot of the flaws of the first game, but amplified further. The early combat areas were monotonous, and maybe it's just me, but I found the difficultly level extremely steep (and while nothing special, I'm not generally bad at this genre). One thing common to both games is that you'll get more out of them if you have somebody to play them co-op with.
So the third game... I don't think I personally will be bothering. It's not a genre I'm head over heels in love with, and with the full-party-control apparently cut, I'd probably wait for Diablo 3 if I wanted to play a click-fest.
Obsidian: we'll take your hit game and make a sequel that's half as good!
Hooray! Two of the most over hyped developers in the industry team up with the most over rated publisher to make a sequel to one of the most over rated franchises!