Dungeon Siege 3 Preview

Dungeon Siege III Co-op Combat

What is easy to do is pick up and play. If, for instance, your roommate is playing Dungeon Siege III and you want to give it a shot, you can just pick up a controller, a character and start lobbing fireballs or slashing swords in seconds. Most of the time throughout the game there'll be an AI partner hanging around anyway, so enabling co-op is simply the game handing control of that AI partner to you. While playing as the secondary character you'll be able to level up, snatch loot and customize skills, but once you disconnect the AI takes back over. There's no save file you can go back to if you want to play again with the exact same character. The additional characters in the game are instead auto-leveled while the primary player continues to kill things and make progress, meaning they'll always be strong enough to fight, but may not be specced or geared the way you like.


Based on my experience with Dungeon Siege III, having two people in play definitely helped. I was playing as Anjali, a female spear-wielding magic caster and fighting alongside Lucas, the more traditional armored knight class. While holding a spear Anjali can run around and string together some basic combos using the length of the spear to her advantage, tagging enemies further out of reach. With the click of a button her feet lift from the ground and her hair catches on fire. This magically-inclined stance lets her toss fireballs across the entire screen and opens up a different set of special abilities. There's no cost associated with swapping stances, so it can be done as often as the situation demands or just to annoy your co-op partner.

With plenty of ways to customize character abilities and lots of loot to collect and barrels to smash, it seems like Obsidian is doing a good job of getting the basics right for this style of loot-hunt game. The skills are fun to use, the loot plentiful, and it's obvious there are plenty of options for cool skill builds. Even though I look forward to checking out how crazy the action gets with four players running around, I'm still concerned about the way the co-op works. I'd prefer to have my loot, ability build and progress saved while playing in someone else's game. Does that sound reasonable or am I being too picky?