Dungeon Siege (DS) is the next step in the evolution of the role-playing game (RPG) genre. Diablo was a bit of a genre bender, featuring elements from RPGs, first-person shooters (FPSs), and so forth. Though DS borrows quite clearly from it in various respects, it breaks its own ground on several others. Frankly, some of the innovations in DS are years overdue. Big kudos go to Chris Taylor and the folk at Gas Powered Games for bringing the game to life so beautifully.
Hands-down, DS is the best looking game of its kind made to date. In fact, it's arguably the best looking game of any kind made to date. From a technical standpoint the DS engine is utterly amazing, capable of rendering huge outdoor areas with an incredible wealth of detail, plenty of enemies, and very highly detailed characters all at once. I've never seen such detail in a true 3D game before. Sure, Diablo II (D2) can put a lot on screen at once, but it's all sprite-based; in contrast, DS is fully 3D. That's a huge difference.
This beauty does come at a price, however. My system includes an Athlon 1700+ XP CPU, 512 MB of high-speed RAM, and a GeForce 3 Ti 200 card overclocked to the same performance levels, roughly, as a standard GeForce 3 card. Despite my relatively beefy system specs, I still encountered slowdown at times when running at 1024 x 768. Of course, I do have all the detail settings maxed out, but I can run most other contemporary games at 1280 x 1024 that way. Still, DS does so many things right in the visual arena that I'm thrilled just to be able to run it, and I'm even thinking about upgrading to a GeForce 4 video card simply to eliminate the slowdown. It's that impressive.
So where do I start? DS is a quantum leap forward in several visual respects. First, the character models are so well done and so well animated that they look better than other similar games made thus far. When I zoomed in on my primary character I could see the detailed shape of his nose, which was actually protruding from his face and not merely painted onto his skin. Speaking of skins, I don't know how DS does it but it represents characters and their equipment better than any other similar game. Subtle differences make it a simple thing to tell whether your character is carrying a dagger, a sword, a long sword, a really big sword, a Seck sword, etc., and that's not even mentioning the various magical effects! Similarly, all the possible types of armor, helmets, boots, and other accouterments are all rendered perfectly. The characters just look stunning, including even the lowly pack mule!
Second, DS supports an incredible amount of detail in the world. In the swamp, for example, I was utterly dumbstruck when I saw perfectly rendered individual lily pads, tree stumps protruding from the water, swirling circles of some kind of white stuff on the water, incredibly detailed willow trees with all their overhanging limbs perfectly rendered, etc. Similarly, in crypts one finds bits of spider web, small figurines lying on the ground, rock outcroppings, the beautiful radiant beams of the sun cutting through the haze, etc. No other game has come close to the level of detail that DS provides. As such, the world of DS is easily the most carefully crafted world ever to be realized in a video game.
Third, the special effects in DS are positively stunning. Swords leave a trail when swung, as do maces, staves, etc., though each has its own interesting and unique sort of motion. The spell effects are as marvelously detailed as they are diverse. A healing wind can be seen swirling about the party, while metal shards can be seen to arc out from the caster's fingertips toward the target. As odd as it sounds, I let some characters die from time to time simply so that I could watch the spell effect of their resurrection. The effects are just that good.
Fourth, despite all the stuff in the world, the DS camera is almost perfect. It's a bit tricky to see things in the forests sometimes, but most things that get in the way of the player's view become gradually transparent in order to "get out of the way". Similarly, the camera does a good job of providing a good view of the action, though it's not entirely without flaws. Personally, I wished that I could freely move the camera without it being tied to a particular character, as DS is so beautiful that I wanted my party to "pose" for screenshots, but that's not a major complaint.
In short, I have only minor complaints about the visuals in DS. It's the most visually amazing game of its kind I've seen produced to date. Whether that's due to Chris Taylor and company or whether that's because Microsoft made sure that the game made the best possible use of the DirectX technology I neither know nor care. I just love the results. DS is the insert-your-favorite-supermodel-here of video games in the beauty department.
The audio isn't as outstanding as the visuals, but it's pretty good. Many of the sound effects are pretty compelling. I think several of the spells sound kind of lame, particularly when compared to a game like Baldur's Gate (BG), but some of them are outstanding. The sound of metal shards crashing into the enemy, for example, is not to be missed. Similarly, all the creature sounds are pretty good, the ambient sounds are very good, and the music, though largely forgettable, is also pretty good. It adds a nice dramatic flavor to the game without getting in the way of the action.
Where the audio fails is on two counts. First, there must be some kind of problem with the playback, as the audio "stutters" on my system. This is particularly noticeable with the healing hands and healing breeze nature magic spells. The sound will often break up and "stutter" as it plays. I've tried increasing the game's CPU priority, decreasing the resolution at which I play, and every other tweak I could think of to fix it. I haven't a clue what the problem is, but it's pretty annoying.
Second, various audio samples are triggered from time to time for no reason. For example, I use the overhead map a lot, and when I hear the sound of arrows firing that means it's time to get out of the overhead view and look for the bad guy at whom my party is shooting. But more often than not there have been no arrows fired. This is also true of armor-hitting-the-ground sounds, the "whump" of an explosive powder combat magic spell, and plenty of other sounds. I don't know why they simply trigger from time to time while my party is walking, but it's very annoying. I really hope the developers address these issues in a patch.
On all other counts, though, the audio is largely a success. I find the shopkeeper banter to be particularly amusing. It's funny, but it seems as if virtually every non-player character (NPC) throughout the game with wares to hawk is downright nasty or at least insulting to the player. While such a bad attitude is normally counterproductive to sales the irascibility factor makes the DS merchants all the more endearing.
The interface is somewhere between good and excellent. All of the menus and so forth are perfectly done, including all the lovely little animated bits. Configuring keys, loading and saving games, etc. all work as they should. The careful theming may be merely icing on the cake, but it's some damned pretty icing.
The in-game interface, however, is merely good. The bits of the display are nicely laid out and functional, but I didn't want only to be able to minimize them; I wanted to be able to hide them completely ala Baldur's Gate II. DS is just so beautiful that the display gets in the way rather frequently. The rest of the game is so visually stunning that readouts detract rather noticeably from the game. Black & White got this right, and I think DS would benefit from the ability to remove all of the interface junk from the screen.
A specific complaint with the weapons panel is that only two spells can be kept available at one time. Any serious spellcaster is going to eschew both melee and ranged weapons, for the most part, in favor of his spellcasting. So why can't he simply use the melee and ranged weapon slots for more spells? Seriously, if you're playing a nature-magic user, you're going to want an offensive spell (e.g., something like zap, ice shard, etc.), a spell to summon a protector, and at least one healing spell available in addition to the ubiquitous resurrection. The game limits you to two, however, which makes accomplishing things a bit tricky during combat.
A second complaint, as indicated above, is that I wish the camera controls were a bit more flexible. DS is such a beautiful game that I so wanted my party to "pose" for certain screenshots, but I was always limited with the camera placement. I could have pulled off some beautiful screenshots if only I could have moved the camera around freely but I couldn't. I know it can be toggled out of follow mode, but it's extremely limited in what can be done with it.
DS is also rather nicely evolutionary in its game mechanics. I can't figure out for the life of me why so many other game designers have missed the obvious. The pack mule is the perfect example. I know for a fact I spent more time arranging my inventory in other RPG games than I did doing anything fun. DS makes great strides toward eliminating this problem, though it doesn't quite make it go away. Whenever I finally got to town, selling off all the goodies I had collected was more than a bit tedious as I had to sift through and figure out what to keep and what to sell. If I ever make an RPG of my own, you can bet that much of the buying/selling will be more streamlined still.
Another wonderful element is that players can easily change out their characters' weapons, spells, etc. on the fly in combat. I did complain earlier that a mere two spell slots in the interface is an annoying limitation, but the ability to call up radically different party configurations with only a key press is a huge step forward in this kind of game. In BG, for example, it's nearly impossible just to switch back and forth between using a two-handed bow and using a sword and shield combination. DS makes this effortless, and that's a big deal to me.
The developers also did the smart thing when it comes to handling the pathing problems that plague other games. I spent far too much time fighting my own troops in BG and other games, but I didn't spend one single minute screwing around in DS because the members of my party were getting in each other's way. There were a couple of minor pathing issues even in DS, but allowing the party members to walk through each other, in effect, solved the vast majority of problems I've faced in the past. True, it looks a little funny when they go trotting merrily through each other, but given the choice between fun escapism and frustrating realism a game should always opt for the former.
One annoying flaw, to my way of thinking, is with the balancing of the different skill trees. When I finished the game, my largely melee-only character had almost made it to level 60, my combat mage wasn't far behind, and my archer wasn't too far behind the mage. At the same time, however, my nature-magic user, who specialized almost as heavily as possible, had made it to a paltry level thirty-three. In effect, this prevented me from seeing roughly half the nature-magic spells in the game (or more). It sure would be nice if the nature-magic folk leveled as easily as the other trees. It seems like a balance problem as it is.
It also bears mentioning that the entire nature-magic focus seems kind of lame compared to the others. They don't have any great offensive spells, which is only somewhat annoying given that it's not their main focus. Their healing spells, however, are few, far between, and don't improve that much compared to the mana cost. Their summoning spells are worse insofar as they eat tremendous amounts of mana and don't provide a creature that will hold up for more than a few seconds. Going into combat, it sucks to drain the nature mage's mana completely to summon a creature that will be dead before the nature mage has finished gulping a potion! Maybe I just have a problem with summoning spells generally. I didn't use them much throughout the game as they seemed to cost far too much mana for the value they delivered.
DS has a story? Oh, yeah, the Krug, the Seck, King What'shisname, and all that stuff. I guess that was a story. I'm not sure why, but the story in DS is entirely forgettable. Not one bit of it stands out to me. This isn't a game like BG, which has an utterly epic feel to the story. DS is more like RPG-lite in this sense. There are bad guys with lots of bad minions, and the whole 10th-legion thing only makes it more imperative that the badness be dealt with. Somehow all of this gibberish makes sense out of your wandering through the countryside killing virtually everything that moves.
The immersion factor would be improved greatly, I think, if the story were more important to the game, but the lack isn't a show-stopper of a problem. The ending is also a bit lacking, after all the effort that went into the rest of the game, but I suppose it does set the stage for a sequel. In the long run the story for DS is quite forgettable, but it's more substantial than with many other games of this kind.
DS scores big in the content department. The game is pretty simplistic and pretty shallow in its mechanics, but it sure does give you a lot to do. DS is at least a good 30+ hours of play, and that's assuming that you stick largely to the beaten path. With all the quests and other interesting diversions it's more like 45+ hours of play. Along the way, the player will walk through farmlands, forests, mountains, tunnels, caves, a swamp, a huge dragon's lair, and even an enormous castle. DS really wins big with the variety of environments it offers, particularly when you consider the insane level of detail they all boast.
Additionally, there is a large number of different kinds of foes to face, all of which are pretty interesting. Most of them require no significant change in tactics, but there are some that really take you by surprise. I particularly liked the neat varieties of dragons that appear in the game, the largest of which was utterly stunning, easily outdoing anything I had seen in any previous game. That was a dragon seriously worth fighting, though fighting him, like virtually every other encounter with a "boss" monster, was more a test of patience (and potions) than wits.
The single-player aspect of the game is pretty "meaty" by itself. Yet, as I understand it, the multi-player aspect utterly dwarfs even the single-player campaign, though multi-player has a rather big flaw as I'll get to in a moment. With all the different environments, enemies, items, characters, quests, and so forth, DS really delivers a lot of content, and good value for the money. It's refreshing that I don't have to mention how short the game feels as I've been forced to do with others of late.
DS also deserves big kudos for being one of those extremely rare games that is absolutely solid. Not once have I had it crash on me, no matter how long I've played it or what I've done in it. Frankly this is shocking, given that Microsoft is the publisher, but it almost seems as if DS is more solid than the operating system on which I'm running it! I sure hope other game developers will take a lesson from DS on this point and strive to build games of higher quality.
The only real complaint I have against the content is that there weren't enough quests. The quests were relatively simplistic, which was also kind of disappointing, but maybe that's why there are so few; i.e., to avoid drawing the player's attention to the fact that they're so limited. I don't know. What I do know is that the quests were fun, despite their limitations, and it really would have given me more to do as a player if there had been more of them. It would have been particularly nice to have a greater level of interaction with the game's NPCs in accomplishing those quests, though maybe that's too much to expect.
On the other hand, though, the final "boss" in DS, was one of the best encounters of its kind I've faced. Ol' Gom is tough, changes his look as he's beaten down, pulls some really nifty tricks, and yet isn't so incredibly powerful that the player can't take him down with the application of some intelligence. In short, he's the perfect kind of boss encounter, one that's a real challenge but not one that's ridiculously frustrating as so many are. I have nothing but praise for the developers with the way the final boss is handled.
Though I haven't played much of the multi-player aspect of the game, I have been able to come to some conclusions. First, the lack of saving sucks. I don't know what the developers were thinking, but while it's neat to be able to go exploring around all the different places, depending on your level(s), it would be a lot nicer to be able to save and restart a game from where you and your friends stopped the last time. This seems like a huge omission. It wasn't so onerous in D2, really, because at least the quests the player had completed remained done and the player could venture on, but DS seems so much more shoddily handled, in contrast, that it really detracts from the multi-player experience.
Having said that, however, DS does make it incredibly simple to get into a multi-player game. There is absolutely no pressure here to remember where to go next, which character was carrying the sacred item of so-and-so that must be taken to the mighty guy-of-importance, etc. Rather, the toughest question facing the player is, appropriately enough, "Where do I want to kill today?" In short, the multi-player game's greatest failing is also its greatest asset. I'll need to put more time into it, but my initial conclusion is that if you like simplistic yet fast-and-furious on-line play, DS will be a great game.
Overall, DS is a strange game for me to like. It's so incredibly pretty, and the near-constant carnage is so interesting to watch, that the relatively shallow game somehow remains entertaining. Maybe we should call this "the Diablo effect", as those games are similarly shallow yet really hold one's interest nevertheless. If you're the kind of gamer who wants a deep RPG filled with story, character development, intrigue, etc., then DS clearly isn't for you. It's just too shallow a game to allow the kind of character development present in other titles.
If you're the kind of player, however, who can let himself get sucked into the sights, the sounds and, of course, the 'splosions (BOOM!), then DS is right up your alley. Somehow, despite its simplicity, it really managed to suck me into the game in such a way that I kept playing and playing. That's always a good sign. It's fun, it's a good value in light of the sheer size of the game, and its game mechanics are pretty innovative. If nothing else, its worth buying just to check out the path I expect future games to follow.
05/09/2002