You'll have to look very hard to find something to complain about with this game.
Written: Aug 10 '02
Product Rating:
Pros: Excellent graphics, addictive gameplay, interface achieves near perfection, and a good plot.
Cons: Brings even powerful machines to their knees.
The Bottom Line: Yes, this is truly better than Diablo 2 in almost every way. You have to look pretty hard to find a reason to complain about this game.
grimjack2's Full Review: Dungeon Siege for Windows
Every review starts with a comment or opinion in regards to this game being the ‘next’ Diablo. Well, my vote is that it really is, and that it deserves all the praise that it is getting. Dungeon Siege has most of what made Diablo so addicting, fixes everything that was annoying about it, and then it still manages to top it in almost every way.
I remember Total Annihilation getting all the attention for being a 3d version of Command & Conquer. Well now here is a 3d version of Diablo. Actually it isn’t quite the ground breaker some people are making it out to be. I remember playing Darkstone a few years ago. That game also had a true 3d engine, and it also allowed you to have two characters, which some thought was a big deal as opposed to the solo character in Diablo. Dungeon Siege allows up to eight characters, and most impressively, it is easy to manage your large party, even in combat.
The designers really seemed to study Diablo and then remove all the things that gamers complained about. In Dungeon Siege you don’t need to worry about any weapons or armor getting damaged and needing to be repaired. Did anyone actually think that added to the enjoyment of Diablo 2? There is a hotkey for all selected members to pick up all nearby items on the ground! And you don’t have to worry about arrows anymore. Having a ranged weapon just gives you unlimited ammo. Potions still cannot be stacked, but they don’t have to be drunk in full, and you can get rid of smaller flasks by pouring them into larger, unfilled flasks. There is even a hotkey for all party members to drink an available health or mana potion if they are under 50%. This lets you focus more on the wonderful animations of the characters and creatures in combat. You have a slot for your ranged weapon, your melee weapon, and two spells. It is easy to switch between these, even with a key press, without going to your inventory screen.
When your character’s health gets below 1/3, their character picture begins to flash making it much easier than constantly staring at the health and mana bars like in the earlier games. Although most of the time the monsters are so strong and some of your magical characters are so weak that you can’t help from watching your stats more than the beautiful graphics of the battles. Staffs are swung like martial arts weapons, shields actually come up to block. Most of the magic spells have beautiful lighting effects that actually seem to have a randomness to their graphics. Each weapon is clearly distinguished in your character’s hands, and every piece of armor is represented properly. The detail is so good, I only wish it could be appreciated more during battles.
I love shooting a monster charging me with multiple arrows and seeing them all stick in his body until he is killed. All the monsters look great, and are actually pretty varied. If I had to categorize them, there are clearly some ranged fighters & melee fighters for most of the monster classes. Some are airborne flyers, and some pop up out of the ground to surprise you. Some are hulking monstrosities that take a minute for six of your characters to pummel to death while he beats on the weakest member of your party. Some have ranged weapons and know how to keep their distance to commit maximum damage while avoiding taking any themselves. Some enemies have an area of effect damage that can be deadly to your tightly clumped party.
It’s often important to know when a vastly superior monster is in the midst of some ordinary minions of his. If you can’t tell visually due to too much happening at once, you can hold the mouse over the enemy to see their stats including their name, how much hit points they have left, what their primary attack is, etc.. For your own party, you have the option of seeing health and mana bars under each character for an easy visual reference.
And for those who liked to show off the three or four boss characters in Diablo to your friends, they haven’t seen anything yet. Those ‘bosses’ were maybe twice the size of your Diablo character. Here Dungeon Siege has many creatures that are seven or eight times the size of your characters, better animated, and are so common that many just sort of appear in the midst of the other creatures. There are huge dragons, giant tentacles, giant spiders, monster worms and etc.. After about halfway through the game, these became just other monsters to fight, but as I write this I realize that in any other game these would be moments filled with awe at just the graphics. This game is that good. So good that you want to show off more than just the final bosses to your non-computer game playing friends.
However, in this game the boss monsters (or any monsters) don’t respawn, so it’s best to save your game whenever the music begins to sound more tense if you want to show off the large baddies to your console game friends. When I killed my first swamp witch I panicked and thought in death she becomes a new wrath like being. When they die you see a winged skeleton float up (towards heaven?). When I fought my first wrath, I had to pause the game and cycle slowly through the animation to see if what I thought was correct. Yes, the wrath does take his own head off and start beating your party with it. And why can’t the cyclops completely cover himself with his loin cloth?
Combat feels like it is going to be overwhelming at first glance, but it isn’t. I couldn’t imagine handling eight characters with the Diablo interface, but the game testers and designers seem to have really worked all the kinks out of this game. The game is real time, but because you can pause the action at any time and change orders, it allows some strategy normally only found in a turn based game. Wizardy 8 did something similar, but this game manages it even better.
Also, similar not to Total Annihilation, but to the other Command & Conquer clone, Dark Reign, you assign parameters to how each character behaves. He can stand his ground or chase after any enemies. They can target the closest, strongest or weakest enemy. Your formations allow your magic healers to stay in back out of harm’s way casting heal spells. Archers can flank the enemies while your melee fighters go toe to toe with monsters. The monster artificial intelligence is above average with some monsters knowing when to run away, and some creatures even fight with a pack mentality, so it is only fair that you have a way to do it as well.
One of the biggest complaints I had in older Diablo-type of games is trying to manipulate all the various items you find in the game so that they will fit in your inventory. Actually the problem is that we need about ten times the inventory space than we are given. This game makes some advances in the way that you have twelve spells in spell books, and you can open multiple character’s inventories side by side making it easy to transfer stuff between them. However, the biggest advance might be the pack mule. This pack mule is basically an extra character, only his job is to simply carry a large quantity of items. The problem with the pack mule is that it is a character on the screen, which affects your overall frame rate, and you have to keep an eye on him in combat otherwise you are risking his death. He is most vulnerable when retreating since he often lags behind your party. In multiplayer there is no pack mule, and in either single or multiplayer, there isn’t any sort of town stash like the chest in Diablo 2 since you almost never retrace your steps.
Everyone remembers playing Diablo 1 where you spent most of your time using a town portal to travel back up to the surface every time you killed a creature to first identify, and then sell off the armor and weapons that you found. In this game, everyone on the forums states that they never came close to running out of money so it never became a big issue. And since the game is fairly linear, you never really think of going back to a town once you’ve passed through it. Still, Town Portals would have been nice so that you could travel quickly back to a place for selling or buying supplies. And just for the record, I never really ran out of money, but there was often some incredibly nice stuff I would see in a shop that I just couldn’t bring myself to pay for since I knew I would probably find something similar for free before long. And early in the game I had a chance to purchase up to three people and a pack mule, but could only afford two.
Some other things deserve mention for how the game makes it easier for you to do just what you want to. You select which weapon or spell you you’re your character to use, and he will act appropriately. If he has a sword and there is a nearby creature, he will move up to fight him. Same goes with bows if he is just slightly out of range. If you choose a character to ‘wield’ a healing spell, he will automatically run up to cast the spell when a party members health reaches below 50%. This alone deserves the programmers much praise!
If a character is using an item that they normally couldn't, but temporarily can because you have a spell giving you higher stats, which then wears off, I love the fact that the character will automatically switch to another more usable item. If you use a two handed weapon, your shield cannot be used, but that doesn't mean that you have to drop it on the ground like in Diablo. It is there in your inventory, still gives any bonuses to stats, but does not block or add to defense.
The interface is very clever in the way that the on screen HUD can cover the screen with only as much information as you need. Don’t want the party formation stuff on all the time? You don’t have to. Don’t want to see the spellbooks listed in inventory? Then you can turn them off as well. There are 2 displays with at least two levels of depth that is completely configurable.
A lot of the keyboard interface feels like I am using Microsoft Office. Ctrl-A selects all. You can even use a rubber band box to select multiple items on the ground or characters. Ctrl lets you select multiple items or characters. Right clicking often brings up a list of secondary commands to choose from, and etc.. This feels strange in a game, but makes perfect sense and actually works well.
Another clever solution to make collecting all those items not seem such a waste of time is the transmute spell. You can cast this spell on almost any item and it transforms the item into gold which is a small percentage of what it is worth being sold for in a shop. This way when you pick up that fifth rusty mace, when you have much better already, it isn’t just something you leave on the ground like you did with Diablo.
The single player game is very linear. I’m still not sure if this is a good thing or a bad. I don’t think I ever had a choice of paths to take that were anything other than clearly a dead end dungeon versus the necessary path. There are one or two places where you can avoid a small dungeon or go around a large group of enemies, but for the most part the designers really want you to see everything in their world. Considering how good it looks, I don’t blame them.
The game’s beautiful graphics is both a plus and a minus. It is a plus for all the obvious reasons. Better sense of reality, ease of control, makes your console owning friends jealous, and makes you feel glad you have a powerful graphics card. However, as pretty as the graphics are, the design of the game makes it hard to enjoy the graphics the way they should be enjoyed.
Half of the game takes place in the outdoors, and these are really beautiful outdoors. Trees look good, very little of the terrain looks repetitive, and the world hides its boundaries well making you feel like you could travel anywhere in this world. There are snow and rain effects that look great, and work well. Fog is nothing new, but it did add to the feeling of danger when you could hear wolves coming before you could see them. The waterfalls in the game are the best I've ever seen. Even 20 hours into the game, I had to stop and marvel at how well one looked.
Some aspects, like the fog, make the game more difficult. Night time makes traveling through the forests tough. It’s hard to see in the darker dungeon’s. It is almost frustrating, but I don’t mind having it harder to see in a dark dungeon than a well lit one because they are going for an effect, rather than making it hard to see because of a limitation in the engine or poor design.
Sometimes it is hard to see where you are going so you tip the map all the way down and scroll as far back from your party as you can in order to see where your potential enemies could be coming from. Then when you want to creep forward a little bit at a time you end up tipping the map to almost an overhead view.
I was often zoomed out to the maximum when travelling, but zoomed in to my characters to admire the great graphics when I put on a new set of armor or wielded a new weapon. All the items seemed to be unique, and some magic staffs sparkled, and a mace that casts lightning could actually be seen discharging with each hit. Even the characters moved differently depending on the weapons they were wielding. Long staffs aren’t a weapon you want to use often, but the fighting animations are great.
The engine does a great job of making anything in between your party and your view mostly transparent in order to see your self. Sometimes you are in a deep forest or have a rock in between your viewpoint making almost the whole foreground opaque. This ends up just making the game seem a little blurry and hard to make out what is going on.
The overhead map makes it easier to get to where you are trying to go, but can actually be somewhat frustrating. It is smaller than most overhead maps in game and tends to show you areas that you can never get to, like small cliffs that are actually borders. I do like the fact that it clearly labels items and gold that you haven’t picked up yet. You could almost play the game from it, but it is most useful when backtracking or trying to find that hidden path you know you missed but can’t figure out where.
The game’s graphics do seem demanding. On my P500 with a Geforce 2 MX card, I often dropped to a framerate of just under 10 per second during battles with lots of enemies running around. I don’t feel too bad though, because according the forums, even the finest systems available today only seem to be getting around 25-30 fps. That would be very bad for a 1st person shooter, but for a 3rd person statistical based RPG it isn’t too bad at all. This might be the first game I’ve ever seen that has the option to show a continual frame rate counter on screen located in the setup control panel rather than from an obscure command line available only at run time.
I should also mention the variety of sounds in the game. The game boasts EAX, but I didn’t really notice it being used too much. When my characters end up submerged in water there is a clear difference, but I didn’t really notice anything inside of small caves versus on an open field. I did notice that being close to machinery makes noise that seems positional. There are often so many sounds happening at once that it is hard to differentiate the different battle sounds, but it was helpful to hear monsters coming from behind you or from off screen so that you could have time to react.
I played the game through single player. There is a story but you spend so much time wandering between new plots and quests that you’ll probably forget the big picture. Most people view the game as a simple challenge to fight more creatures to gain more experience and get the better magical equipment so that they can fight harder creatures. Diablo didn’t invent this hybrid of RPG/Hack & slash, but they did come up with a successful formula that no one has veered very far from since it came out back in 1996.
Before you begin you are allowed to chose from a few different faces, bodies, genders, etc., but this isn’t the most important character in the game like with other RPGs. He can die or be replaced at any time by any other human in the game. I’d say there are about ten total in the game that you come across which you could have join your party. The anonymous farmer turned hero you begin the game with can be just the starting off point. This and the first character you come across are the only really open ended characters you could have join your party. Everyone else is pretty much already so far experienced in a certain class that it is wasteful to try and make them something else.
You don’t chose any character sets in the beginning, but instead how you chose to play the game determines your class. Interestingly enough, although you seem to be pressured to be a fighter in the beginning, you could try to be a perfectly balanced character, but you will be plagued by difficulties doing this. Once you are clearly a warrior, deciding to switch over to a magic user will be difficult because when you go up levels, your strength will still be going up more than your intelligence. Sometimes you want to be a pure warrior, but you will need to have some skills with ranged weapons in order to hurt charging monsters before they reach you. Even spell casters need to build up their strength if they want to wear and use decent weapons in a pinch.
A more advanced character skill set would have been welcomed by me. There are really only three stats and four character classes. Maybe a more specific breakdown of weapon skills could have made some decisions more complicated.
I probably would have liked some more complicated dungeons too. I don’t think I found more than three puzzles, and these were very straightforward. There are a lot of secret areas, but none that were that hard to find.
One last nice touch I thought was interesting was that save games mark how long you've been playing the game for. Since a total death forcing a resave are rare, this accurately tells you how much of your life you've spent playing the game. When they say there are 10-40 hours of enjoyment in the single player game, they mean it. Although I can’t imagine even running through the game in just 10 hours. Actually, I would think 25 would be the minimum I could get through the game.
They designers make a big deal out of the fact that the game is seamless, by never loading levels. Obviously there are loaded levels similar to Half-Life’s, only we don’t get the constant ‘loading’ message, and I only detected a hard drive access once or twice. It isn’t that big of a deal to me if the game pauses for a moment to load a new area.
The multiplayer should keep the game alive for months to come. Cheaters have already shown up in multiplayer games which is what killed Diablo 1 too early. Diablo 2 had some better checks, and it wasn’t until people found ways to replicate items on their home Lan servers that the cheaters really took over again. Hopefully the programmers here won’t let this happen for a while.
The other thing keeping this game alive for a while is the fact that it comes with a map and scenario editor. I haven’t really tried it, but I’ve seen the user maps floating around the web. I can’t imagine someone making something that seems really fresh, but I’m often amazed at what the MOD community can do better than the original designers.
Dungeon Siege keeps getting compared to Diablo, which I think is very appropriate. This game really is what that game would be if it were written two years later. I do want to say it is actually more than just Diablo 3, but all the major elements are there, only with a much better graphic engine, group management, and interface. If you liked Diablo, than Dungeon Siege is a must have game. If you didn’t like Diablo, you may still like Dungeon Siege, but even if you don’t, you will want to just watch it being played.
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