DUNGEON SIEGE III REVIEW
Originally created by Chris Taylor, the Dungeon Siege franchise has a reputation of quality among fans, there was a little bit of concern that the newest outing may not live up to the legacy of the previous titles. After giving the game a go, it is obvious that any such concerns were misplaced.
The story may not break from the cast, but it serves the gameplay well. Events are written to adapt to your play style, granting stat incentives based on your actions. For example, early on in the game, you are delegated with helping out someone in a local town. You only need to assist one person for successful progression in the story, but there are a total of three possible side-quests that you can accept. Choose to complete all three, and you can earn some extra cash. Refuse the reward from all three, and your character is awarded a stat bonus for being an honorable hero.
At other points in the game, you are forced to choose between various abstracts. Do I rescue this person or not? Do I kill this villain or show mercy? How you decide does not have an immediate impact on play, but it does force a subtle change to the story. Does this mean that you can have a vastly different adventure every time you replay? Nope. But it does offer up enough differences to make your replay adventures worthwhile, as some Accomplishments are mutually exclusive. If you're not up for replaying half the game just to see how the alternative version of a later decision plays out, don't worry; Dungeon Siege III provides fifty different save slots, so you can archive every step of your adventure.
Although the story provides a nice backdrop, the core gameplay within Dungeon Siege III is streamlined combat. It's almost as if the developers at Obsidian tried to take what players liked the most about the prior games and distilled it down to focus on that aspect. In some respects, the team may have gone a little too far, reducing basic combat to a button feeding fest, but there is a bit of depth there if you look for it.
Key to maximizing your offensive power is in effect balancing the three different types of attacks that you possess. The basic attack powers up your focus meter. Your focus attacks are more powerful and are akin to spells. Using concentration attacks powers up a special attack orb. The orb can be used to release a super attack, a powered up focus attack or to cast a healing spell. Because of the way the three different levels interact, you are naturally pushed into changing things up. It is a surprisingly casual-friendly system, while at the same time offering enough diversity to keep veteran players fascinated.
Where the game staggers a bit is in its inventory management and character skill tree. Inventory management is a fairly primary system, with nucleus stat comparisons being the only real difference between pieces of plunder . Changing out outfit and weapons doesn't really change the look of your character and even in the menu, individual pieces don't look different. Sure, rares may have a different color name, but otherwise all weapons of the same type are visually interchangeable. There is no way to assign an item set, which means you can't easily swap from one style of play to another simply by switching gear. To do so requires manually changing out each piece in inventory.
The character skill trees are similarly basic, with a pre-determined set of abilities that everyone who plays is bound to unlock. You can't save up power points (as soon as they are granted, you must use them), and you can't directly upgrade a base power by doubling up on points. Instead, you custom-make by spending proficiency points. Each ability has two techniques that allow some specialization. Each technique has five levels, but you can only spend a total of five skillfulness points per ability, preventing players from maxing out everything. Finally, there is a passive natural ability tree, which allows for further squeezing.
Lastly, the natural ability trees are a nice way to get incentives, but the real character buffs come from the items that you find and equip, not the skills that you unlock as you level up.
In short, playing the demo is pretty much just like playing the real thing. If you like the demo, you'll like Dungeon Siege III. If you didn't then well its not for you.
Dungeon Siege III may not be a perfect game, but for dungeon crawler fans, it offers up hours of enjoyment with solid combat complemented by a dash of humor. It's not going to appeal to everyone out there, but if you're part of the target market, it's an excellent way to pass the time while waiting for Blizzard to hurry up and finish Diablo III.
