Dungeon Siege II for Windows

This game probably provokes more thoughts out of me than any other game in the past.  So, instead of breaking this out in a long essay, I'll chop it into non-traditional pieces.  (Side note: If you read my reviews before, you know that I'm not the traditional reviewer.   For example, if a games graphics don't add or subtract too much from the overall experience, I barely mention them.)  So, here they are:

Type of Game:  The first thing that one should note in today's world, that if you call your game an RPG, that doesn't make it so.  This case resides here.  Dungeon Siege (DS) presents itself as a true RPG.  It is not.  It has RPG elements in it like many and varied quests.  However, the overall play is quite linear as generally you have two directions to go: forward into the fog of war, or backwards to where you just were. 

Dialog is a joke, as really you only have one response to chose from after an NPC speaks to you.  The response is used more as a page break than any type of choice.  You can't usually alter anything about the plot through your choices.

You get stats by how you do battle.  If you throw a lot of spells, intelligence gets boosted, for example.  This is a nice keep from the original game that works very RPG-like as you define yourself from your play.  Although, it may be a little more fun to choose those stats.  I probably should mention that there are some things you can choose with leveling, like special powers/abilities.

The rest of the game isn't very expressive.  You can't play good or evil.  You can't affect the plot in any way.  You can choose quests but they are mostly stand alone excursions that you have to walk over on your way through the linearity, anyway.  Many will feel like they just exist to run through hoops until the end.

Sound like fun?   It does get better because after you give up on wanting a good RPG, you allow it to be a good third person action game.  In fact, a FPSer might think that this is a wide open game with lots of different armor, weapons and builds.

It uses a point and click approach with some variances like camera control.  The third person graphics are good with easy to see characters and prompts.  So, it's easy to pick up, and does have some depth.

Coding: Programming is one thing that I rarely ever notice unless it is bad.  Both Dungeon Siege games are exceptions.  I was impressed by how some DS I overcame a lot of the coding errors that plagued most 3D, third person, real time action games.  They have a nice roving camera which only error is that it tends to want to go a little too top down on occasions.  The camera can be manipulated, with zoom, and is smooth.  Although, I still got that classic sore neck from trying to put my head down and look upwards, as if that will allow me to look at the scenery under the top plastic of my computer screen.

Gas Powered Games could have put more thought into controlling party members (of which you can get up to 3 on the first run.)  The  party members aren't total idiots like in most real time games.  They actually can be useful to an extent.  Although, in overpowering fights they tend not to follow the retreat shout.  That's forgivable since they behave well in terms of heals and staying in a fight until the bell rings.

Rarely, did I feel any lag on a now aged computer.  Even in large fights, everything went well. The game is also good and long, both in time and in space.  Having everything move smooth to the end without the usual keyboard double fist smash is a rarity for me.

Inventory: Yes, inventory!  An odd category, I'm sure, but think of all the pain or fun you had with inventory.  It can be burdensome with small space or with the wimp who can't carry more than a shield's worth of weight.  It also can be enjoyable squirreling cool objects away for better days.

DS II has no weight requirements but a limited space.  The space is big enough, but there are so many drops through the game that you can't play that far without having to sell or store in a chest back at a safe city.  I always think that is a ploy by designers.  They make you lug stuff back constantly so that the game gives you more hours of "play."  This game didn't need that.  It had enough on its own.

The good news is that selling is actually kind of fun.  In fact, in some dry spots of the plot, it becomes the most enjoyable thing.  The driver behind this is that there are so many items to wear, enchant or maim with.  There are many unique looks within this framework of items.  Some get-ups are pretty cool looking.  Classes of heroes also dictate stats and look.

I especially liked that they used the concept of set outfits, where if you wear one item it might be a good boost.  If you have two or more, you get stat bonuses on top of the individual stats of the (individual) objects.  The bad news is that due to random drops from bad guys, it's hard to get full sets.  Oh well.

They do have enchantable objects which you can boost with different reagents.  However, the stuff you can buy or find is usually of stronger points, so it makes them almost useless.

Getting back to the shopping, I found that due to the range of stats, it made think long and hard what to equip and what to sell.  (Variety is the spice of life.)  That is a good staple for them to build off of if they want to go more RPG in the next game. 

The progression of giving items to you is very steady and scales well with the level of you r character.  There is a little bit of problem when you dawdle around with your party.  The items start outpacing your members such that you have to wait another couple of hours of gameplay before you can equip anything, if that short.

Save System: This is a modern topic which needs addressing.  Let's start with the good.  The "quick save" scheme is incredibly fast ... and that's about all the good stuff that I can say.

DS II uses a teleporter system which sounds like a great idea at first.  You think that it can save time, especially since this game runs so long in one meandering direction.  However, I think they put the teleporters in really for the save system.  When you log out and log back in again, you show up at the last safe city's teleporter.  This is essentially a waypoint save because you have to reach the next teleporter in the meandering chain in order to make progress in the game.

Teleporters only become active when you reach a one.  It stays active forever, but it is inactive the whole time before.  So, when you get ½ way from one teleporter to the next and save, log out and come back, you can only get to the old teleporter.  With tons of monster respawns, this is really just making you play the game over for the first ½ of the way to the next teleporter.

This is even a bigger issue since teleporters can be an hour-and-a-half of game play away.  This means that you have to invest that amount of time.  I'm sure this makes sense to egotistical producers and/or designers who think everyone will want to play their game for hours, but in practicality, it doesn't work.  Some teleporters are less than a half hour away, but the rub is that you don't know that.  So, when I played the game, I always tried to figure out if I have enough time to play.  That not only takes away from the amount of times per week that I could play, but also adds the stress of finishing my way to the teleporter such that I enjoyed the game less.

The save system is also odd in the fact that you are only allowed one save per character.  I'm used to saving in a few files that I cycle just in case one gets corrupted.  Here, you can't do it.  Now, like I said, the programming is spot on, but what about a power surge, etc?

Story: When I saw the trailer for the cinematic movie for Dungeon Siege, I was wondering what they could possibly do with the plot from the first game?  I proceeded to skip it when it came to the theaters.  Hopefully, they used DSII for the movie.  It was much better ... although I still probably won't see it.

The second game's plot is a marked improvement over the first game.  It starts a bit too slow but keeps going in a long game with many pieces.  In fact in the midst of hacking and slashing, you tend to lose track a little to it.  That's too bad, because if I hadn't, I believe that I would have been really into it.  Albeit, once the game revs up, the story unfolds nicely.

There are some drawbacks.  You play the part of a loser, and I'm not over exaggerating that much.  Remember, you get very little choices in terms of character, so you get to play a jerk with no brains through the game.  Fun.

That also brings up the problem of solving the quests and story points.  You really don't get too much of a hand in it.  You don't get to figure out the story through dialog.  The story gets told to you through your characters one-choice answers.  That's not the best method in the world.  The quests turned this around somewhat with many pieces of extra plot added through them.  Usually they did a good job embellishing the main plot line.

The ending is pretty standard fare for modern games with a small but nice twist at the end.  Unfortunately, that end also comes with the obligatory non-ending, setting up the expansion pack.  If 90% of the people complain about these non-endings, why does everyone keep making them?

Anyway, they try to expand the plot a little with your party mates talking to each other and you.  That's cool when it works.  However, the time when most of your mates start talking to you is at an area trigger which also brings on a wave of antagonists.  I probably made it through about 25% of those talks due to the dialog box cutting off so that I could fight.  I didn't even cut out of the dialog box.  The game did it for me.  Maybe I'll have to think the programming section over again.

My wording is probably a little too harsh in this aspect.  The game's plot definitely adds more than it takes away from the game.  It isn't that my criticisms are about the games failures as much as it is that the game fell short in those areas, such that they don't get the five stars.

Gameplay(or what's left undiscussed of it): The gameplay was good with caveats.  The point and click system works relatively well.  DSII also kept the same high action, large brawls from the last DS.  The large melee scenes are fun to experience.  Sometimes, I felt like I wanted to put my guy on autopilot and sit back and watch.

They also have special powers based on your class and leveling.  DSII works these well as you don't have to save these up to use once per day or only on certain bosses.  They aren't limited either.  No "Only works on Levels 12 and under" moves.  You can blow up some pretty good bosses with killer moves.  It's nice to have a special ability that actually makes a difference (and you can use often.)

Summing Up: Overall, this game was fairly good.  However, I think they will export some of their following because of the frustrations in many areas.  I enjoyed this more than DSI, but that's it.  Due to the length of the game, the frustrations got multiplied such that I don't trust the next one to come out.  I liked this enough to give it an overall good review, but I won't buy another in the series.