Dungeon Siege offers an appealing mix of innovation and imitation. At first, one must assume the game is about its beautiful 3D environments. The world of Ehb is enormous, gorgeously detailed, and may be explored in one continuous journey with no load screens. Yet after a few sessions, the player realizes that the pacing of the game, and its balance of story and action, follow the down-to-business hack-and-slash formula established nearly five years earlier by Blizzard's Diablo. Above all else, Dungeon Siege is simply about killing all the monsters you can find and taking all their treasure. Uncomplicated quests are light on puzzles and heavy on enemies. Rewards come in the form of random loot that spills to the ground in a good fight. As they begin to feel the groove of the gameplay, players will cry out, 'They stole this from Diablo!' Chances are they'll keep playing, though, and soon will also be asking, 'Why didn't anyone think of doing it like this before?'
Dungeon Siege 2, free and safe download. Dungeon Siege 2 latest version: A dungeon crawling role playing game with swords and spells. Hack and slash your. Dungeon Siege 2 is significantly more restrictive. Oddly, you’re forced to pay a fee to the local innkeeper for every character slot you add beyond the second. Plus, until you beat the single-player game, your party is maxed out at four. To unleash six and unlock the highest.
Through an empowering interface, the single player directs a party of up to eight adventurers as they cleanse the monster-infested Kingdom of Ehb. Dungeon Siege features sophisticated party-management tools and the game can be paused at any point, but the way that it plays is only superficially similar to most other party-oriented combat adventures, such as the Baldur's Gate titles. Dungeon Siege is not laid out for that kind of tactical organization. The game is focused on chaotic, real-time battle instead of careful, incremental planning. Deep strategic challenges are few. The draw of each new encounter is not in the positioning or plot advancement, but in the thrilling combat action itself. And yes, they stole that from Diablo.
Actually, Dungeon Siege seems admirably shameless about its inspiration. Beyond the general style of play, the title recycles numerous specifics from Diablo and Diablo II. Perhaps these should be considered 'tributes.' Magic items are noted by their blue text, and have names like 'Amulet of the Badger' or 'Blade of the Fox.' Other elements, from the paper doll inventory window to the 'red equals health, blue equals mana' scheme, are instantly familiar. Also as in Diablo, characters are basic archetypes, defined more by statistics than by personal history or cultural background. Old tomes and bits of NPC gossip allude to the long and storied sagas of Ehb, but only to players who actively seek these things out. Most will be worrying more about the hit points and armor ratings of those scary looking Droog up ahead, and less about ancient game world legends. Nevertheless, those who do look for the stories will find they are well written and nicely presented.
Presentation is the area in which Dungeon Siege truly shines, surpassing the techniques of its PC RPG forbearers by a quantum leap and rivaling the best efforts of contemporary 3D releases in other genres. Although a useful 'megamap' facilitates cross-country navigation, it is common to lose one's way in the main view. This is to the game's credit; the player becomes lost in different areas not because they're purposefully designed to be confusing, but because they're so realistically huge and thick with detail. Though less of a technological breakthrough, the game's sound is also first-rate. Effects are full and crisp. Voice acting is sparse, but excellent. Music enhances the right emotions. Resolution, EAX support, and other video and audio attributes are easily adjusted for play on a variety of systems, allowing hardcore action gamers to make good use of their latest toys while still running solidly on the casual player's more modest system.
Aside from the spectacular presentational differences, Dungeon Siege is set apart from other action RPGs by its ease of use. It's a laid-back game to play. While it didn't discover the fun of straightforward hack-and-slash adventuring, it comes close to perfecting it. Instead of relying on cumbersome RPG standards to bolster the challenge, Dungeon Siege strives to remove all inconvenience. Nearly every task that was considered a chore in games such as Diablo and Baldur's Gate can be automated in Dungeon Siege. Need to organize your inventory to make room for that magic armor the Trog boss just dropped? Don't drag-and-drop each individual item to the top of the grid -- just press the 'K' key and inventory items instantly pack themselves to free up space. Instead of clicking on each individual potion and gold pile littering the floor after a big battle, just press the 'Z' key and the nearest characters quickly collect all the treasure in sight. Some players might almost feel like they're cheating. Inventory space limits and attribute requirements play the same roles as in other games, but tedious micromanagement is replaced by efficient automation wherever possible. In fact, it could almost be said that the game plays itself.
Of course, the biggest danger in creating a game that 'plays itself' would be keeping the player involved. As eight brave characters enter free-flowing battles against swarms of various enemies, the player's only direct involvement in the fracas may be a few game-paused mouse clicks. But the player's role is not diminished in Dungeon Siege, it is merely transposed. Instead of carefully steering individual characters and continually reassigning orders in the heat of battle, the player can set basic tactics for each character beforehand. Perhaps melee fighters should be set to 'Engage,' 'Attack Freely,' and 'Target Closest,' for example, while the archers and combat magician are set to 'Target Strongest' and the healers are set to 'Hold Ground,' so they'll cast their spells from a safe distance. Different movement, attack, and targeting behaviors can be assigned to anticipate different situations. There are many possible combinations for any party, and a hotkey system makes it easy to switch between preset configurations on the fly. The player is still in control, but basic tactical stances are more easily assigned before the battle begins.
Perhaps the most comparable precedent for Dungeon Siege is not Diablo itself but Delphine Software International's Darkstone. That 1999 game also closely followed the Diablo formula of heavy action and easy control, while adding multiple player characters, a simplified interface, contemporarily impressive 3D graphics, and a toned-down 'T' ESRB rating. Before its release, Darkstone was heralded as the 'Diablo-killer we'd all been waiting for.' Though many reviewers really liked the game and it sold well enough, Darkstone was often too easily written off as derivative, its brave innovations overshadowed by its competent imitations. But do we really need to 'kill' Diablo to enjoy another game created in its image? Hopefully Dungeon Siege will meet more distinguishing praise and better sales than its underappreciated predecessor. It is certainly worthy.
Graphics: The prettiest third-person RPG to date. Even many hours into the game, you'll still gape in awe as you enter a new area, encounter a new weather effect, or meet a new monster. Mountains and forests, buildings and bridges, individual trees and flowers are designed with artistic talent and rendered with technological expertise.
Sound: Battle sounds are crisp and rousing, ambient noises are spooky and unsettling, and the dynamic score is nearly always appropriate to the situation. Not the game's most immediately impressive feature, but the music and sound effects more than hold up their end of the presentation.
Enjoyment: Dungeon Siege finds the essence of what makes an action RPG fun. The ease, convenience, and engaging urgency of the Diablo games are made even easier, more convenient, and more immediately engaging, brought to life in a rich 3D game world you must experience yourself to fully appreciate.
Replay Value: One reason that Dungeon Siege can present such a detailed and varied world is that unlike the Diablo games, its levels are hand-designed. The lack of randomly generated dungeons is no great loss though, for the lands of Dungeon Siege are large. Once you finally do make it through the enormous Kingdom of Ehb, the multiplayer game offers completely new worlds to keep you hacking and slashing for many nights to come.
People who downloaded Dungeon Siege have also downloaded:
Dungeon Siege II, Dungeon Siege: Legends of Aranna, Diablo 2, Diablo, Dungeons & Dragons: Dragonshard, Divine Divinity, Elder Scrolls 3, The: Morrowind, Baldur's Gate
Dungeon Siege II, Dungeon Siege: Legends of Aranna, Diablo 2, Diablo, Dungeons & Dragons: Dragonshard, Divine Divinity, Elder Scrolls 3, The: Morrowind, Baldur's Gate
Platforms: | PC |
Publisher: | Microsoft Game |
Developer: | Gas Powered Games |
Genres: | RPG / Action Role-Playing |
Release Date: | August 16, 2005 |
Game Modes: | Singleplayer / Multiplayer |
Quick and dirty dungeon crawling 2.0
Ever since 1997’s Total Annihilation, its creator Chris Taylor has been perceived as a man with a vision to be reckoned with. When Gas Powered Games, the company he formed after leaving developer Cavedog Interactive, the gaming community completely expected a real-time strategy game to emerge from its halls. Instead, we got Dungeon Siege. While it didn’t quite live up to its initial promise — its story and gameplay fall a bit flat — its beauty was indisputable.
In further attempt to realize its potential, Gas Powered devised an expansion pack, Legends of Aranna, which showed that the company was certainly on track in terms of how to draw players into the Dungeon Siege universe, which many still think of as Diablo on crack. Taylor has made no secret about his desire to return to the real-time strategy genre, and so it’s no surprise we see a lot of what made the original great return and be enhanced in Dungeon Siege 2.
The story involves an epic and ancient conflict between the spidery lord Zaramoth and his shield-toting foe, Azunai. They sorta destroyed each other some eons ago, but it seems a power-hungry prince named Valdis now wields Zaramoth’s ultra-magical sword. In an interesting touch, you actually begin the game in Valdis’ employ. Eventually, you work to bring about his destruction.
The quests exist largely as window dressing for the click-happy combat—no nuanced conversation trees, here, kids–and they’re fairly standard-issue. Early on, you run into several old genre chestnuts, some variations of which have been cadged from the first Dungeon Siege: The Hunt for the Lost Person, for instance, or the ever-popular Find the Cure for Plague.
Those who liked the old automated system can still use it. For others, the good news is that Dungeon Siege II offers the option to exert significantly more control over the action. Character development, all but nonexistent in the first game, has been beefed up by the power of four. That’s the number of races from which you now can choose (Human, Elf, Half-giant and Dryad), and the number of fighting styles (ranger, fighter, combat mage, and nature mage) in which you can specialize.
Each style has up to 12 different skill-tree specialties you can work through, as well as a set of rechargeable specialized powers—like the arrow-friendly Thunderous Strike—that can be activated with hotkeys. Just like in the first game, if you want to succeed, specialization is critical. Trying to mix-and-match your ranged-weapon skills with a helping of earth-mage spells may sound like a great idea, but it’s actually a quick recipe for mid-game disaster.
As you level up and develop said skills, you spend hours hacking through the beautifully rendered environs and the game’s extensive bestiary. Eventually, you run into something with enough hit points to wipe out yor party, and you’re forced to respawn back at a nearby town. Now, you could use the teleporter to jump back out to the front lines, sans your hard-earned magical weapons, and scrap your way to recover the goods from your party’s corpses. But why? After all, there’s a necromancer conveniently loitering right next to the teleporter who’ll happily magic your stuff right back to you for a percentage-gold fee.
It’s touches like these in Dungeon Siege 2, while clearly included to minimize frustration, that contribute to a feeling that you’re really hacking down a gussied-up version of Easy Street. There’s a preponderance of shrines that confer temporary skill bonuses, a teleport spell that’s ridiculously easy to obtain, and a too-helpful quest log that leads you by the nose through every step. In a game where health and mana potions quite literally grow on bushes, the ways in which everything is arranged to make things simple and easy almost seems too much.
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In the original Dungeon Siege, you could recruit and manage up to five other characters at will (or a pack mule) to help you in your quest to save Aranna. Dungeon Siege 2 is significantly more restrictive. Oddly, you’re forced to pay a fee to the local innkeeper for every character slot you add beyond the second. Plus, until you beat the single-player game, your party is maxed out at four. To unleash six and unlock the highest difficulty setting, you have to beat the game twice.
Granted, you won’t be storming these dungeons for the storyline. If you’re like most dungeon-crawlers, you’re playing for the carnage and the loot: the gold, the rings, the boots of freakin’ plus-10 mighty ardor. In this respect, Dungeon Siege 2 features an embarrassment of riches, a risk-reward formula that plays like the best jackpot slot machine ever. As you hack, hack, and hack your way through your enemies, you’ll find yourself immersed in its simple, frantic action that ARPGs are meant to offer.
System Requirements: Pentium III 700 MHz, 256 MB RAM, WinXP
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