Dungeon Siege III Demo Review and Trailer

Written by Craig Will, puffkix Thursday, 02 June 2011 16:00

Back when the only computer I had access to for games was the one in my parent's house, I owned only one game: Dungeon Siege. I remember thinking how awesome this game was and I would play it for hours on end. My favorite part? The attention to detail. Specifically the fact that arrows stuck around for a while. In the ground, in the trees, and best of all, in bad guys. Skip forward to today and I'm playing the Dungeon Siege III demo on my 360, there should be a huge advancement - my 360 is 10x as powerful and capable as that first Gateway PC my parents bought. But something doesn't feel right.

In the first Dungeon Siege exploring was pivotal to getting the best loot. Wander off the path and find caves with bears to kill and treasures (pronounced tray-zures. Well, by me anyway) to plunder. In the DS3 demo the path has been laid out for you and it's pretty linear as far as exploring goes, not unlike Dragon Age II earlier this year. There are opportunities late in the demo to take branch x instead of branch y if you want to explore but they generally just lead to dead ends and locked doors.

Dragon Age II was able to balance the linear feeling by making the action fast and fun, despite the criticisms aimed at how "dumbed down" the combat in DA2 was it cannot be disputed that it was done well. DS3 doesn't seem to have it quite as locked down as DA2 did, feeling almost like a cross between a Hack'n'Slash like Baldur's Gate and Dynasty Warriors. Spamming the 'A' button kills most enemies, with the occasional 'X' or 'Y' to use special abilities. Oh, and the LT blocks but that doesn't seem to come in too handy. Maybe I just don't play right though. The cool thing about fighting is the two different "stances" each character has. Lucas, the warrior, can change from using sword and shield to quickly dispatch single foes to whipping out his beast of a two handed sword and decimating multiple enemies at once. Each stance has it's strengths as well as drawbacks and learning to switch between them will be key to mastering the fighting in this game. The other character available (in the demo at least) is a shape-shifting, fire-wielding, archon named Anjali. Her stances are wielding a two handed staff/spear to clear a room of enemies with wide sweeping arcs or becoming a fiery entity able to shoot fireballs and summon creatures to help her.

The two characters have a different backstory that is revealed in the opening cutscene after selecting which character you want to play as and it's interesting to see how the two stories are different yet intertwine and it will be interesting to see where that leads in the full release. Unfortunately, this game contains one of my biggest pet peeves when it comes to RPGs: a convoluted, messy plot that tries to be bigger than the game. BioWare has become proficient at telling huge, intricate, yet engaging stories and DS3 feels like it's stuck in the early days where the story had to unfold in cutscenes and papers/books scattered around the world. Sure, BioWare games do something similar with all the codex entries but those are mainly used to flesh out the universe, not to push the main story forward and Obsidian could take a page from that playbook. But really, this wouldn't be so bad except for the annoying voice-acting and muddy graphics.

This game is not as pretty as it is capable of being. Characters don't look very polished and the environments are bland and dark with very few memorable landmarks or locales. This is not what I expected in the several years since the first DS blew me away with it's attention to detail. This combined with the top down isometric view almost makes the game feel like an XBLA title instead of a full blown epic RPG.

In the end I think the demo has really killed the excitement I had about the Dungeon Siege series coming over to home consoles. I guess that's what demos are good for though, right? Making sure that people know exactly what they're getting themselves into before plopping down $60 on a game. Maybe the PC version will be more of what I was hoping for. Good thing I own my computer now.

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