Single Player

Non-stop chop

The first few seconds of the game really set the tone. You start with weapon in hand, fighting for your life. Swarms of enemies are attacking your farm and there’s nowhere to run. You pick up whatever equipment they drop and head for civilization. After 30 minutes of fighting, you find a friend and drag yourselves to a town. You talk to a few people, stock up on weapons and items, and set out for the next dungeon and town.

This is the basic formula for Dungeon Siege – 95% fighting, 5% story and shopping. This is a good thing for everyone that likes RPGs heavy on action, light on story, much like the Diablo series. When it comes down to it, a lot of people like RPGs where you kill lots of monsters and get cool weapons and items. In Dungeon Siege you can’t take more than two steps before a monster is attacking you. Most of the time it’s a swarm of monsters attacking everyone in your party. The combat is all in real-time, with the ability to pause, just like Baldur’s Gate II. Pausing tends to take away from the frantic, combat-oriented pace of the game. I tried to do everything on the fly to keep the real-time strategy feel, and I think the game plays much better that way.

Sloppy fighting

Gypsy camp

Dark swamp

The AI is good and bad. There’s not much to the enemy AI since 99.9% of the enemies only have one type of attack. When your characters are in range they’ll get as close as they need to and attack until they die (a few try to run if they’re low on health, but not many). The characters in your party have issues. Everything is based on the orders you set – attack freely, attack closest, move anywhere, etc. The problem is that they don’t help each other. If your combat mage is being attacked by a skeleton, but the skeleton isn’t in range of your other party members, they’ll leave your mage to die. It seems obvious to me that your party should automatically cover each other, but they don’t. There’s also a problem with getting into position to attack. Ranged (arrows or magic) characters sometimes run through a group of monsters to attack something right next to them. Melee fighters will run to an enemy far away, even when set to “attack closest”. Most of the time you can catch these mistakes yourself by hitting the pause key, but pausing takes away from the frantic pace of this game.

The inventory is the generic RPG system. Characters have slots for melee and ranged weapons, shields, rings, amulets, and armor. They also have a “backpack” to hold whatever else they pick up. One great innovation is the pack mule. The pack mule is a donkey that travels as a member of your party (it even takes up a party member slot). I like it because it has a huge inventory capacity – you can pick up lots of items to sell when you reach a merchant, or store items you can’t use yet. With the pack mule you’ll always have plenty of potions. It also has good AI; when you get into a fight the mule will distance itself from your party. If it’s attacked it will defend itself. There were very few times when I had to protect my ass, and it only happened in confined spaces and when an enemy popped up behind my party.

Flashes=magical attacks

A cemetary

Undead

The long green mile

The maps are incredibly linear. Or should I say, the game is one long, straight level. The game is designed to get your from point A (start) to point B (the end), while killing enough monsters to get your main hero to level 50 or so. There’s not much deviation from this since there are no random or respawning monsters. I’ve always argued that linearity isn’t a bad thing in games – it’s hard to tell a story if the game doesn’t control where the player goes.

Dungeon Siege feels more linear than most games because there are only a couple of side quests or distractions away from the main plot. There are slight diversions in the paths between cities, but it’s more like when you’re a little kid and you’re walking down the street, and you want to stay on the sidewalk but you come up to a court. You can keep going down the street if you get off the sidewalk and cross the court, or you can stay on the sidewalk and walk all the way around the court. You get to the same point eventually – in Dungeon Siege these slight diversions are filled with monsters and treasure. The no loading also does makes the game feel linear – even though it’s a nice feature it makes the game feel like one really big level. It’s a lot like playing a SimCity-type game, where the lack of breaks is like staring at the same city map for hours on end. It’s no more linear than most games, it just feels like it is.

The single player campaign is nice and long. It took me about 30 hours to beat it, but I really truck through games, so figure 40-50 hours of gameplay for most people. It may seem to go quicker than that though, since Dungeon Siege is one of those games you can get really addicted to. You’ll find yourself thinking “I’ll just finish this dungeon before I go to bed…” then, “I finished the dungeon, I may as well get to the next town...” The next thing you know it’s 8am and time to go to work. I found myself stopping only at shops since it takes 15-20 minutes to outfit a party of seven with new equipment and spells.