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Dungeon Siege Preview

With Steven Kent’s exhaustive book “The Ultimate History of Video Games” (previously published under the title ‘The First Quarter’ - see appropriate BigKid review to your left) currently absorbing any spare chance I have to read, it’s fitting that along should wander Dungeon Siege, a game embedded with so many elements of games from the past.

Mind you, they never looked quite this good.

Chris Taylor and his cohorts at Gas Powered Games have been slaving away on this title for quite sometime. Last year at E3, Rob and I wandered the show floor(s) looking for something to impress. Sure, GameCube had some nice stuff, but the crowd that had decended on the Nintendo stand was less than enticing; think sweaty geeks at their worst.

I spotted Dungeon Siege first, courtesy of a tour of the Microsoft booth by a lovely lady that remains my favourite memory of E3, just managing to edge out the Xbox party that went down later that night. Rob would later insist that nothing looked all that good at E3 that year before I hauled him to the Dungeon Siege section and he was forced to concede that not everything failed to impress.

So almost a year later a preview copy of the game arrives in the BigKid mail box. A game like Dungeon Siege receives no small amount of attention during it’s development, partly because the game warrants it, partly because Microsoft market their products and then some.

For those that don’t know the premise behind Dungeon Siege, it’s pretty simple. It’s an RPG where the development team has attempted to remove the number crunching that has historically gone hand in hand with the genre. Why a pen & paper dynamic has remained a part of the video game RPG is an interesting question, but one answered not by this game, because it plays a very, very small role within it.

Players who have traditionally enjoyed crunching the numbers in the Baldur’s Gates and various other RPG’s may find Dungeon Siege lacking somewhat, though those who’ve not been bothered by the difference between having ten dexterity or eleven will likely find the game an enjoyable experience.

The story is fairly standard RPG fare: a humble farmer, you are drawn into a wider-reaching conflict when your community is invaded. While the story initially seems to consist of little more, reading various books that you stumble across reveal the back story to the game, and various theories about who is repsonsible for the invasion that are passed on from in-game denizens go on to support a conspiracy theory of your own formed by the history of the land. A different approach to story telling in games to be sure, a move that I applaud, though how it will play out through the final game remains to be seen.

Entering the game, the character creation is a fairly limited process of choosing either male or female, a few different heads and hair-styles along with clothing. From there play begins.

Once inside, you are thrust into combat immediately, which takes form in a few different ways. Naturally, weapons are prevalent, both melee and ranged, along with two schools of magic: nature and combat.

Melee weapons are made up of swords, axes, staffs and just about anything you can pick up and swing at somebody, including (but not limited to) a leg of lamb. Bows make up the ranged weapons, with a balancing act of damage versus delay and range coming into effect when choosing how to rain down a volley of arrows upon the enemy.

The two schools of magic vary fairly drastically. Nature magic is made up of spells that would be more often found being used by Druids and Healers; some attack, plenty of buffs (stat increases) and healing spells, whereas the combat spells consist largely of spells that will do damage to whatever you’re fighting, be they straight out damage spells, or more beneficial types such as life-taps.

Each of the four areas of combat can be specialised in, though most players will likely find themselves engaged in two or more aspects to ensure survival; fighters will never be without need of a heal and casters will rarely lack cause to draw a sword of some description. While purists would say this dilutes the essence of RPG’s, it allows for a wider variety of play styles, and limiting combat to the four different aspects allows a concentration of abilities and talents not often seen in more traditional RPG’s.

Regardless of how you choose to play, the game adapts with enemies dropping items that are of more use to you than others. For instance, a combat magic user will find more combat spells drop than those of the nature school, where as a fighter will find few spells available altogether, but they are well-compensated in the array of weapons dropped.

Along the way, you have the option of inviting NPC’s (non-player characters) to join your party. The interface in-place to control the party members however lacked the ease of use that accompanied such features in the Baldur’s Gate titles, and along with the time consuming task of inventory management, dealing with the members of your party isn’t always the most exciting task in game.

Thankfully then, it is possible to proceed on your own (not before robbing the NPC’s of valuable possesions of course!). While a certain amount of care and caution is needed to battle the hordes (and hordes is a most appropriate word) of enemies that will fly at you from time to time, those who prefer a solitary experience (myself being one of them) will find it ultimately more satisfying than struggling to keep party members in check.

Graphically, few bones can be picked with the title. While close up the models are detailed textures of relatively low-poly models, most of the playing is spent with the camera pulled a fair distance out, if not all the way. From this perspective, the game is simply beautiful and it allows the player to view everything they need to.

Sound as well, is flawless. Having recently brought an entirely new computer, complete with my first real, good and proper sound card, the effects present in Dungeon Siege are incredible. The seamless loading in the game will have you battling enemies above ground one moment with wind whistling around you before climbing down into acave and having the clinking of sword on sword echo about the cave. The sound designer at Gas Powered Games deserves to be pat on the back with large sweaty wads of cash as they have more than done their job this time around.

All in all, Gas Powered Games appear to have crafted a solid adventure-gaming experience. Calling the title a role-playing game appears initially to be premature, as it has more in common with RPG-lite titles such as Diablo, and indeed shares more similarities with Blizzard’s hack’n’slash creation than other games in the RPG genre. Where it excels over previous RPG-lite experiences though is just about everywhere, from sound to graphics to the gameplay, Gas Powered Games have potentially created an epic experience that no gamer, RPG fan or otherwise should ignore, though if I had a dollar for every time I mentioned the potential of a game…well…you get the idea.

Expect a full review in April.

  posted by splash · at 11:27 am · filed under Previews