Read full review here:
http://people.stdnet.com/jonathan/emu/dungeonsiege.htm
Game: Dungeon Siege
Price: $20 (Staples)
System: AMD K6-3 (450 Mhz), 192 M memory, W2K Server
According to my junk mail, Staples thinks I'm an "Office Supply Manager." So naturally, they sent me a $15 gift card to lure me into their store. Thus lured, I squandered my gift (and kicked in $5) to purchase a Microsoft game called "Dungeon Siege."
The last RPG I played was Zelda III ("A Link to the Past" for Nintendo-16) back in 1993. The last FPS I played was Duke Nukem (on a DX2-66) back in 1996. Dungeon Siege seemed to be a combination of both, in kind of a Drakkan (for Amiga) kind of way, so...I got it.
WARNING - THERE ARE MANY SPOILERS BELOW!
Begin: July 20, 2003 - Purchased Dungeon Siege ("DS"); took it home and read the manual after the kids and wife went to bed. The backstory was cheesy and weak, but I didn't hold it against DS because I expected the entertainment to be in the game, not the liner notes. I installed it on my aging home computer and launched it. Round one was jerky and slow, but once I turned off a couple of extra services and shut down a few extraneous applications, the game was off and running. I made a new character called "Banshee" and gave him an outrageous purple mohawk. Roaming around the low-level forests I turned him into a balanced character and was relatively hooked.
End: November 29, 2003 - On this night I decided to give Dungeon Siege one final chance. (I was tired of dinking around with Goblin gadgets in their underground factory.) However, things quickly went from bad to worse: I ended up fighting "copters" and treaded tanks with "lightning guns" and "flamethrowers" before I threw in the towel. What part of "medieval fantasy" does DS not understand? Life is too short for this; uninstalled.
In Between
I picked the name "Banshee" because I intended to delete this character and start over after I figured out the newbie dungeon and got a feel for the game. However, I never got around to deleting Banshee (darn, compelling game). Banshee soon picked up a little girl and taught her how to shoot bad guys with arrows. From there, I picked up the crusty old fighter inside the gates of the town and turned him into one of my warriors. I went back to the town later and bought the nature mage so he could heal the party in the dungeon. The dwarf outside the mines became my other warrior, I kept Merik and I bought the services of another archer and nature mage. When I quit, my party had 2 pure warriors (complete tanks), 2 pure archers (with good strength and armor), 3 dedicated nature mages (Merik, Ned and the guy from the swamp) and 1 archer/combat mage mix (Banshee).
My typical tactic (as my RTS opponents would warn you) would be to lure encountered monsters into an ambush using one of my two warriors. I would set my ranged combatants up on the high ground, stick one warrior up a few steps to intercept anyone making a run for my artillery, and send the other warrior to engage the enemy. After the first blows were struck, I'd pull my antagonist back under the umbrella of my healing spells and let my stationary ranged-attack corps pummel the monsters. The only time this tactic failed would of course be situations in which monsters got into the "back row", but these situations were easily avoided once I discovered DS's formation commands to organize orderly retreats. (I generally used the "V" formation, because it was by far the easiest to "wheel" and "about-face".)
I played DS maybe once every week or two. Each session was typically about two to four hours long (into the wee hours of the morning), but invariably, DS would present something asinine enough to let me put the game down for another week or two.
Given my ancient machine, I expected DS to be slower and behave worse than it did. Instead, I experienced only one crash, and that was in a snowstorm after I cranked the resolution to something beyond what I should have in a dark dungeon. Otherwise, the program was rock-solid.
The Good
* Great Scenery: I never said "I think I've seen this before" while wandering through the lands. As some reviewers have suggested, this may be reason enough to buy this game.
* Diverse Monsters: With one exception (see below), there were interesting monsters to meet, greet and kill in each and every level.
* The "Transmute" Spell: Just like late night timeshare commercials, this spell delivers CASH for your property. A perfect way to communicate to the inner miser in all of us.
* Merik on Ice: Although this might fall under the "scenery" category, rescuing Merik from his ice prison was an all-time memorable gaming event.
* The "Orb" Dungeon: Also in the Ice level, there is a puzzle dungeon which required me to deploy my pack mules to recover a mysterious orb. It's a great puzzle because it forces the player to divide his forces into smaller and smaller units until a final battle for the prize.
* Hotkeys and Save Anywhere: My buddies who spend more time playing games than I do tell me these are standard features in most games now. That's good news, but I have to tell you that as a married guy with children who played his first RPG games before the mouse was invented, I couldn't even play a game like this without these two features - thank you!
* Fast Mana Recovery: It's absolutely necessary in a hack and slash game like DS that your party gets just enough out of every encounter to keep it alive enough to kick in the next door. DS manages to do this very well, and even keeps a mage-heavy party (like mine) happy.
The Bad
* Cannot Customize New Characters: The only character you can customize is the first one you create. The rest come with stupid names like "Dyron" and "Ned". I don't know about you, but since my Bard's Tale days (1986?) I've been used to having a whoop-ass fighter named "Mungo" in all of my parties. (This is one thing Final Fantasy got right many years ago; even when the game changed characters on you, you got to name them.)
* The Big Room in the Spider Dungeon: In the first major dungeon there is a room so large in comparison to all previous rooms that I began to think it was a bug in the DS program after my first half hour of exploring. But, no, after several hours of hack and slash, you merely exit out a single door in the opposite side of the room.
* The Big Spider Boss: Upon seeing the "Giant Spider" in the upper edge of my screen, I powered up my warriors, raised shields and made ready photon torpedoes. Then I stepped into the spider's chamber of death, expecting horrible webs to impede my movement, hordes of baby spiders and the dreadful, poisonous bite of the monster itself. Instead, the STATIONARY spider (eat too many flies, tubby?) lobbed little white lights at me while my party members shot up the joint. You call that a "boss"?
* The "Crystal in the Temple" Quest: Lemme see, I take this little crystal, hack through two hours of monsters, clear the temple, and I get rewarded with a fifteen second trill of music? Uh...
* The Gypsy "Travellers": OK, I meet a band of Eastern European carnies. They're "Gypsies" right? No, according to DS, they're "Travellers." This just looks like a last minute, find-and-replace sop to political correctness.
* The "Bandit Boss": The Travellers ask you to kill the "Bandit Boss", a wimpy NPC my party literally killed before I realized who he was. This name is so generic, I have to assume they simply forgot to fill in the real name of the "Bandit Boss" before the code freeze.
* The Big Dragon Head Which Pops Out of the Water: Once is scary. Twice is tired. Sixteen times (i.e. the Swamp) is silly. This creature is as close to the "red imp, black imp, green imp" problem experienced by late-80s RPGs as DS gets.
* No Random Monsters: Once you kill all the monsters you see in DS, you can be sure the area is clear, now and forever. While this encourages players to press on, it also makes the player lonely if he needs to backtrack to the last store for another piece of gear and doesn't see a single living bad guy for ten minutes.
* Wacky Magic System: Forgive me if I go on a rant here, but it appeared that DS programmers designed flashy animation for magic spell effects, and then more or less assigned spell levels at random. For example:
o The spell to heal minor injuries is level 1. The spell to heal major injuries is level 32. OK, now where would you expect the spell to bring back people from the dead - level 64? No, "Revive" and "Resurrect" are level 5 spells. That's not a misprint - level F-I-V-E makes you God.
o Combat mages outgrow Firespray (level 1) quickly. Explosive Thingies or Soul Lance are good spells at level 5 and Flame is even better at level 7/8. However, the next good spell is Fireball at level 20 and I never found out what's beyond that. That's a LONG wait for a nuker, while your other party members get to play around with new weapons every other level or so.
o Some spells award an extra point of damage to the caster after the caster rises one additional level. Other spells award the point of damage after the caster rises 10 or 20 additional levels.
o Someone, perhaps thinking that someone would "solo" DS, attempted to balance the nature and combat mage classes. (Nature mages can shoot lightning bolts and create ice storms while combat mages can heal and make magic armor.) This balancing act ends up swapping the roles of the mages in the 10-20 level range; nature mages are better offensive fighters here and combat mages are better buffers.
The Ugly
* I think some treasure chests, barrels and the like were trapped. (Some would explode, and others were not.) However, I'm not sure, because I don't think I ever lost any life points opening these items.
* Where in the manual does it say that you can LEFT-CLICK and HOLD IT on any active player's spell icon and get a list of spells to use? I figured this one out on my own twenty hours into the game.
* I think I failed the "Get the Axe" quest because I accidentally transmuted the Axe in question into loose change. How about a prohibition on transmuting quest items? (For example, you cannot transmute spells, and you can buy or sell those at an store.)
* What is the point of the life and mana fountains? They are wimpy and seem to be finite, so eventually I just bypassed them altogether.
* What is the point of staffs which increase your melee skill and cause double-digit damage? Do they really want me to put my nuker on point?
* The only spell I seemed to get to "autofire" (automatically cast when an injured party member was near) was Healing Wind. I know getting into autofire situations could be a configuration can of worms, but how about a per-character, per-spell "autofire" switch so I don't have to hit the pause button in combat so often?
* Where did the floor-panel triggers and wall-panel traps go? The first few dungeons are typical RPG dungeons which contain several triggers and traps scattered throughout the maze. After the ice levels, however, these triggers and traps almost seem to have disappeared, even in areas that it would seem they should be plentiful (i.e. the goblin factories). WTF?
* I have a world map in the manual, but where was the indication in the game that I was in such-and-such area?
The Bottom Line
For $5 of my own money, Dungeon Siege was a great buy. I may even have picked it up for $20 knowing what I know now. If lead-you-by-the-nose, hack-and-slash RPG's are your kind of thing, go get DS. But, if you're more of a tactics and strategy guy (like me), it's back to the RTS genre, I'm afraid. DS is pretty, but at its core it's just another RPG which made me miss paper-and-pencil DND all over again.
P.S. No, I'm not going to even look at Neverwinter Nights, so don't ask me about it. I'm a happily married man, and I want to stay that way.
Dungeon Siege
Linear Mode
