Dungeon Siege II Preview
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If you're one of those people who wants to know everything there is to know about Dungeon Siege II, then you're in luck. There are a ton of previews of the game out there in the Internet -- we report one just about every day in our news section -- and we even have a Dungeon Siege II preview of our very own.
So I'm not going to give a general preview of the game, since that will probably just cover information you've seen countless times before. Instead, I'm going to take a close look at the press build of the game that Microsoft gave out about a month ago, and I'll discuss a few of the areas that I think are interesting.
The Story
Quick, how many people remember the story behind Dungeon Siege? Anybody? If you had asked me that question a couple weeks ago (before I played through the game a second time so I could compare it to the sequel), I probably would have said it had something to do with the 9,248 monsters who really didn't want me to travel the one road between my farm and the castle at the end of the game. Fortunately, if you're a little hazy about the details as well, it doesn't matter because Dungeon Siege II doesn't have anything to do with Dungeon Siege.
Dungeon Siege II revolves around the Sword of Zaramoth and the Shield of Azunai. When the sword and shield met in battle 1000 years ago, the sword shattered the shield, and the First Age of Aranna ended, making way for the current age. Now a prince named Valdis has acquired the Sword of Zaramoth, and he's trying to track down the pieces of the Shield of Azunai so he can end the Second Age and presumably create some sort of twisted Third Age.
As the game opens up, you're actually in the employ of young Prince Valdis. You're a mercenary in his army, and your orders involve storming the island of Greilyn and taking the piece of the Shield of Azunai stored there. Of course, it's only after you've liberated the shield piece (played out in the tutorial of the game) that you discover that Valdis is evil, but by that time most of your comrades have been killed -- they had served their purpose, after all -- and you've been captured by the dryads who live on the island.
In other words, you start out in a bad way, and it'll take you the majority of first act of the game to convince the dryads that you're not really evil, and that they should let you go home. Such convincing requires completing some combat-oriented quests -- no surprise there, given the nature of the game -- but at least you don't start out as a farmer wielding a hoe.
Character Creation
Dungeon Siege did not give you a lot of options for character creation -- basically you just got to choose a gender, a face, and a hair style. None of it really mattered, and once you started putting on some equipment, you couldn't really tell the difference anyway.
Dungeon Siege II is not entirely different. You still only get a handful of cosmetic choices to try and make your character unique, but at least now there's an important decision to go along with it. Besides choosing your appearance, you also get to choose your race.
The four races of Dungeon Siege II are the human, the dryad, the elf, and the half-giant. The races have different sizes, which helps to differentiate between characters, and they also get some bonuses and penalties. For example, the half-giant, who can only be male, gets +6 strength, -2 dexterity, 2 points in the (fortitude) melee specialization, and the ability to regenerate health over time. Dryads, meanwhile, can only be female, but they get -2 strength, +4 dexterity, +2 intelligence, points in the (dodge) and (natural bond) specializations, and a 10% resistance to death magic.
Skills and Specializations
In the last paragraph I used the word (specialization) twice, and you might be wondering what that's all about. Well, Dungeon Siege II has the same four basic skills as Dungeon Siege -- melee, ranged, combat magic, and nature magic -- but new to the game is the concept of specializations, which gives you something to do each time a character levels up.
Specializations in Dungeon Siege II work much like the skills in Diablo II. That is, each time a character levels, the character gets a specialization point, and the character can spend the point on any of the 48 specializations in the game (there are 12 specializations for each skill). However, the specializations have prerequisites. For example, the (fortitude) specialization, which increases the hit points of a character, requires that the character have a level in the melee skill. Other specializations have much more stringent requirements. The ranged skill's (mortal wound) specialization, for example, requires that the character be level 36 and know four other specializations.
Specializations can be learned multiple times (with diminishing returns), and so characters will have to make a series of decisions. Should they go for offense or defense? Create more powerful spells or cheaper spells? And should they try and pick up some levels of a skill just so they can learn one of its specializations?
In all, specializations make it more interesting to develop characters, and they make the characters more unique. That's a good thing in general, but it's especially good for Dungeon Siege II, since there was so little to do development-wise in Dungeon Siege.
Companions
Speaking of developing characters, in Dungeon Siege II, just like in Dungeon Siege, you'll be able to use an entire party of characters to help you get through the game. But while your party size appears as though it'll be smaller (looking at the interface, I'd guess the limit will be five or six characters rather than eight), the companion characters that you pick up promise to be more interesting.
Right off the bat I could tell something had changed, because the first companion I allowed to join my party kept talking to me. Later, as I built my party up to four characters, the companions often commented on what was happening, and sometimes they even talked among themselves. I even saw a couple of doors that could only be opened by particular companions.
The feeling I got from playing the press build is that companions will be a little like those found in the Baldur's Gate games, but slightly less interesting. None of the companions I met gave me any quests, and none of them had what you might call a memorable personality (in fact, I couldn't keep the two dryads in my party straight), but at least they seemed to be paying attention. This is still a big step up from Dungeon Siege, where companions were mindless automatons.
The World
If you had asked me prior to the release of Dungeon Siege whether it was possible to create an interesting RPG world that was essentially one long road, I wouldn't have believed it. But developer Gas Powered Games did it -- at least to some degree. The world was distinctive and interesting, but it didn't lend itself to telling any sort of story. And how could it, when you never stayed anywhere long enough to get to know the characters involved?
Well, things are a little bit the same and a little bit different in Dungeon Siege II. From what I've seen, the world will be one long road again, but now the game comes with teleporters. Much like the set-up employed by Diablo II, it looks as though each act in Dungeon Siege II will feature a hub town connected by teleporters to the rest of the areas in the act. That means, while new areas will progress linearly from explored areas, you'll be able to jump back to the town at any time (there's even a teleport spell for this) to sell items and to check on quests. And that means you'll be able to talk to people more and get to know them better, which is paramount in telling a story that people might care about. In fact, despite a similarly linear world, Dungeon Siege II feels much more like a regular RPG than its predecessor did.
Combat and Control
If developer Gas Powered Games heard one criticism of Dungeon Siege more than any other, it was probably that characters worked so well on their own that people barely had to do anything to play the game. Perhaps as a result, they've changed the way that combat and character control work.
For starters, (stance) orders (such as holding ground) can only be given to the party now, rather than to individual characters. That makes things easier, especially since there are only four stances rather than the 27 possible combinations of orders available before. The four stances are rampage (attack at will), guard (attack only when attacked), mirror (attack whoever the leader is attacking), and wait (do nothing). However, from my experience, only rampage really worked well, and it basically mimicked how characters behaved in Dungeon Siege.
And so perhaps the only real difference in combat and control involves the currently selected character. That character won't do anything unless you explicitly tell it to do something, and, worse, in order to attack, you can't just click on an enemy once, you have to right click on it each time you want the character to attack. Thankfully, you can hold down the right mouse button to cause the character to continue to attack, but that didn't work very well in the press build I played, and combat as a whole turned out to be a clunky mess.
I hope Gas Powered Games changes their mind about combat before they release the game. It's nice that you actually have to be more involved during battles (although I didn't mind letting my party do its thing in Dungeon Siege), but there's no good reason why you should have to click on an enemy more than once to attack it. The extra clicks just add stress to the hands of the players, and as somebody who plays games a lot, that's stress I don't need (I can't even play the original Diablo anymore; that game just wears my hand out).
Conclusion
The press build of Dungeon Siege II that I played was released in late March, and since the game won't hit stores until later this summer (knock on wood), things are certain to change. But so far at least, Dungeon Siege II is looking good. The graphics engine is superior, there are more options for character development, it appears there'll actually be a story, and more. I'd be shocked if Dungeon Siege II doesn't turn out to be a good game, and better than the original.
