Dungeon Siege II

You'll gain roughly the same experience in the game whether you play with companions or not.

If an NPC has a green "!" over its head, that means it has a secondary quest available, but you'll only be able to trigger it by having the correct companion in your party.

All levers, buttons and doors are shown on the mini-map with blue dots. So when you're exploring, you're best off to zoom in the mini-map as much as possible to make those blue dots more visible. No primary quests require you to go through secret doors, but many of the secondary quests do. Plus, secret rooms often contain valuable treasure.

When you start a new game at a higher difficulty setting, almost everything about your character transfers: equipment (including what's in your storage vault), pets and companions (including ones stashed in the inn), chants, and map exploration.

The game keeps track of the world status of all three difficulty settings for each character. That means you can only complete a quest once per difficulty setting. It also means that if you can't use the "continue" button on the main menu page to load your game, you can instead select your character and then select a difficulty setting to do the same thing.

The secondary quests in the game require a certain amount of backtracking. So if you find a locked door that you can't open, or a lift that you can't fix, or an area where you see enemies but where you can't yet explore, you should try to note down where they are, because you'll almost certainly be returning to them later.

Mana steal and health steal work with spells as well as weapons, and it's important to give spellcasters mana steal so that they don't run out of mana during fights.

If you find you're running out of room in your storage vault, you can use companions and pets for extra storage. In fact, that's the best use for a pack mule.

Shops restock their wares every time you load your game.

Lightning spells travel through walls as well as enemies. In many places you can use lightning to attack enemies without them being able to attack back.

During each session of the game, you'll find at most one copy of unique and set items. So if you're trying to complete sets of equipment, or just see everything there is to find, the longer you play, the better.

It's a good idea to have at least one of your characters be a melee fighter. Don't rely on pets for this.

Not all items can be enchanted. Only items with gray text that say they're enchantable can be enchanted.

Companions only gain experience when they're in the active party. However, if they fall far enough below the level of your main character, they'll jump up to (roughly) that level.

The maximum possible resistance in the game is 80%. Moving to a higher difficulty won't reduce your resistances.

When determining if magic items drop, the game uses the highest "chance to find magic items" from all of the characters in your party. It doesn't matter which party member lands the killing blow.

Depending on the version of the game that you're playing, the four party orders (wait, mirror, defend, and rampage) can have different hotkeys, or they might not be hotkeyed at all. We always use "7"-"0" for these orders, even in Broken World where "9" and "0" start out assigned to something else. You can set your hotkeys by going to options->input->hotkeys.


Broken World

When creating an item using a recipe, you can use the base item listed in the recipe, or you can use a better version. For example, if the recipe asks for a great fighter helm, you can use an exceptional or legendary fighter helm instead.

The Blood Assassin and Fist of Stone classes are actually multi-classes. They can use their own powers and skills, and they can also use the powers and skills of their two core classes. To assign experience to these multi-classes, you should use weapon enchantments. Weapon enchantments are special buffing spells that assign experience to the core classes using a 70/30 split.

The "???" creature will appear in Broken World just like it did in the original Dungeon Siege II campaign, and it will even drop a Mysterious Teleporter Activation Stone, but there is no Mysterious Quest in Broken World, and the activation stone doesn't do anything.