Genre: Role-Playing
Website: --
Lee:
- Platform: PC
- Hours logged: 43.5
- Playthroughs: 1
- Rating: 8/10
- Lee (3/18/2014): I remembered playing Dungeon Siege just after I moved to Oregon nearly 10 years ago. A few weeks ago, I got the wild urge to relive that experience, and a Google search showed that Steam had the game. I was so excited to play Dungeon Siege that I bought the bundle containing all three games in the series. Did I mention that I love Steam? Which reminds me of this subtly hilarious moment in gaming: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vewmAjTqGHg.
What did I like about Dungeon Siege? This game held a pretty decent nostalgic factor (though it was nothing compared to that of two similar entries in the gaming universe, Diablo and Diablo II). I have also been needing to get a good RPG going, and this game definitely satisfied. The game graphics were slightly outdated, but there was clearly a lot of effort put into the creation of the rich and appealing landscapes, structures, and dungeons. I also enjoyed the straightforward character leveling mechanism. Each of the characters in your party can gain experience in four different skills (melee combat, ranged combat, combat magic, and natural magic) by simply using those skills. When enough XP is gained in a particular skill, that skill levels up. And finally, another aspect that I enjoyed...the loot! My obsessive nature dictated that, out of the time I spent playing this game, hours were dedicated to sorting loot, equipping characters, and selling off the excess and inferior equipment.
The things that I didn't like were mostly related to interface issues. The controls took some getting used to. For some reason, I kept wanting to use the WASD keys to move my characters around, instead of clicking around on the screen with the mouse. The ability to select your party members by clicking on the actual characters (not just the character icons on the screen) led me to constantly selecting random characters from my party when trying to attack mobs or navigate through the different levels. The AI for the inactive party members seemed to have a lot of customization options, but none of it worked exactly how I wanted it to, and my dipshit healer and my mule kept getting lost or killed. I did use the character icons on the screen to select characters and open up individual character inventories quite a bit, but the icons ate up a huge amount of the screen real estate, and I found myself constantly moving the camera to see around them. Another camera issue that drove me crazy was the inability to bring the camera down closer to the ground to see from a character's point of view. If the character was standing in a doorway, then the door frame and wall were all that I could see until I did a "leap of faith" and walked into the room. It really pissed me off when there was a mob standing just inside the door that I would have noticed if I could have looked over my character's shoulder. Another complaint that I had was related to the Steam port of the game. Apparently, according to the nerd forums, after beating the original version of the game, the ending scene and credits would roll, and you could then use that character in a multiplayer world. When the developers stripped the multiplayer function of the game out before handing it over to Steam (or however that transpired), they removed the end scene and credits and dumped you back to the title screen. Kind of not cool. (Note that I looked up the original ending on Youtube, and it was pretty lame anyway, but still...)
While playing the game, I opted to remain loyal to the NPCs that offered to join my party for free, instead of hiring the stronger, more capable, less shitty mercenaries. OK, so I'm a cheap bastard even in-game... I trained every character in both melee and ranged combat, until a mage specializing in natural magic offered to join my cause (for free), whom I ended up using exclusively as a healer. About halfway through my playthrough of this game, I got excited about the idea of playing the game again, except giving each character only one skill focus and utilizing more magic users. That is when I started to notice the drudgery of killing thousands of mobs, level after level. I started hoping that each new chapter would be the last, but the game kept going. Then I ran into a seriously tough boss that I couldn't even touch without getting wiped out...so I "pulled a Lee" and switched to easy mode. In retrospect, I should have just started over right when I first got the idea of switching my play style. I might have had a slightly more interesting and captivating gaming experience.
I will come back to the Dungeon Siege series, but I think that my next RPG efforts will be put toward finally logging a playthrough of another old favorite, Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind. Buckle up, bitches!
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