Dungeon Siege - How the hell was this ever popular?

[duanth123]

I don't know about epic adventure.

When you really think about it in DS1 you played some random, mentally deranged farmer who, in response to being attacked at home by a few midget orcs he's able to effortlessly kill with a hatchet, runs across an entire continent's worth of biomes in what feels like 2-3 weeks, forming a posse with 7 other similar looking murder hobos in the process, and since they are also autistic savants who experience decades of training by whacking bugs, yetis and goblin robots standing in "I'm on my cigarette break" groups of 5-10, sort of just fades out of existence.

I'm not convinced DS1 even occurs; in reality, the farmer is brutalized by the first midget orc he sees and, as he's getting his head caved in, thinks to himself, "yeah that's totally what would've happened."

 

[Harthwain]

I think Dungeon Siege took some steps in the right direction, but I'd change it slightly: make the player the caster of the group, meaning he plays a significant role of aiding his companions (underlings?) by manipulating the battlefield with magic. Along the lines of Sacrifice. While you have to pay attention to what is going on to cast adequate spells, there is little need to command each fighter as they can do good enough job on their own. From this point on you can focus on making cool spells. Maybe even go crazy and let the player make his own spells or something.

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

The bad ass farmers use a hoe and hurl chickens.

 

[Sarathiour]

I finished it at the beginning of this year, wanted to finish what i started as a kid.

I'm not going to pretend it's good, or that the scenario even remotely make sense.

It's an intriguing concept, because it played like some hybrid of an rts and diablo. You have to manage a team of murderhobo in real time, and there is enough capacity and possibility to make you believe that thing could get interesting at some point.
Unfortunately, balance and leveling mechanism turn this thing into a nightmare : you gain xp mostly by dealing damage, which mean healer always lag behind. But you need some healer, chugging health potion only get you so far. So you try using offensive magic, but you have to get to at least midgame for it to even start catching up to melee, and you're still gonna get fuck by archer. It's even more retard, because you can clearly see that some spell were designed for hybrid, but a pure caster will only unlock those in lategame, so good fucking luck for anyone you have not micromanaged every fight. It get worse, because unless you're already played it before, you will only realize that upon reaching midgame, and it's already too late, because every point of difference between the main stat make it exponentially difficult to catch up.
So they get stuck casting shitty zap spell, but as they are underleveld, they deal no damage, and therefore gain no xp.

Lastly, anything you will encounter will effortlessly outpower your guy in 1v1, so you have to make sure to always be the one to dogpile, because you're gonna loose the fight pretty badly otherwise. So you have to resort to the old bait and pull cheese.
Dev seems to be somewhat aware of that because they will regularly try to prank you by putting huge ambush at the end of an elevator. The fucking goblin biome is particularly egregious, because they got massive aoe ranged damage, and can wype your team in second. So you have to start getting creative, and sending one man as a suicidal bait on those thing, to clear the fog of war and pull back the lever once a reasonable number of enemy step on the platform.
They is also stuff like a boss trying to prevent your escape with bone spike, but you can still go trough effortlessly .
You're supposed to export your save for the multiplayer once finished, but steam version does not have it, and my game after defeating the final boss anyway.

The only good point of the game was it technical prowess for the time, it dunk so hard on NWN that it's embarrassing.

 

[T. Reich]

I don't know about epic adventure.

When you really think about it in DS1 you played some random, mentally deranged farmer who, in response to being attacked at home by a few midget orcs he's able to effortlessly kill with a hatchet, runs across an entire continent's worth of biomes in what feels like 2-3 weeks, forming a posse with 7 other similar looking murder hobos in the process, and since they are also autistic savants who experience decades of training by whacking bugs, yetis and goblin robots standing in "I'm on my cigarette break" groups of 5-10, sort of just fades out of existence.

Nigga, you've just described 95% of all the RPGs that have ever been created.

 

[d1nolore]

Well, it’s not a RPG. It’s a fantasy action game, FAG for short.

 

[IDtenT]

I'd be interested in a DSII remaster.

 

[Radiane]

The game features nice graphics, two distinct magic schools, and later on you can equip your chars with huge guns and whatnot. Also items lying on the ground can be transformed into instant gold, so no lugging around useless items you just want to sell at the nearest shop. A well made game.

 

[jungl]

Still a better game then pozzfinder kingmaker. The launch for this game back in the day was absolutely AMAZING compared to 2 years till playable with no bugs kingmaker. Single player mode was really fun and then there was multiplayer which was more fun then diablo 2 multiplayer cause everybody wouldn't be running around like a marathon sprinter pulling mobs around them like that game.

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

Ever play the DSII mod that requires the DSI game? Oh what was it called? I have it around somewhere. DS2 mechanics in DSI is horrible. Lordy.

 

[Baron Dupek]

LoL Space Siege. Wonder what happened to that game.

It sucked, badly. Even worse than Dung Siege. It was forgotten p. fast after release. I played my share of bad games, bad RPGs and bad sci-fi games and this one is most bland-banal-shit-boring it's not even funny.
They said replacing your body parts with cyber junk would be something important storywise.
If you change body parts for augs you get maybe 1-2 different lines with some NPC(s?) and that's it. And those augs will give you immense 1-3% power boosts. Whoop-e-doo.

 

[Sarathiour]

pozzfinder kingmaker.

Rent free

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

Ah yes... Ds 2 Legendary mod
https://www.nexusmods.com/dungeonsiegeii/mods/4

https://www.moddb.com/mods/dungeon-siege-legendary-pack

I guess DS 1 still has mods
https://www.nexusmods.com/dungeonsiege1/mods/topalltime/?adult=2

https://www.nexusmods.com/dungeonsiege1/mods/
but I can't recall the supposed epic ones that had huge new areas to play but was like MP but could be played SP. meh.. my memory.

myros mod maybe?

 

[Poseidon00]

I thought this shit was one dimensional and boring when I was 9 and thought the NWN OC was the epitome of quality

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

Oh god NO!

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

Lol... reset and replay with your main alt.

 

[IDtenT]

WTF, DSII runs high-res widescreen surprisingly well without any stretching to anything - even though it's not natively supported.

 

[fantadomat]

LoL i remember this one,it was painful back then. Tho the system is not that bad,but the linearity and generic design was painful.

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

Well, I'll torture myself with space siege. I'm pretty sure absolutely zero replayability.

I certainly won't be playing Thundcats.



Lion-O:
Dungeon, Dungeon
Dungeon, DungeonSiege, NOOOOOOO

Dungeonsiege
Really blew
DungeonSiege ain't new

Farmer magic
Makes me snore
DungeonSiege PU

Dungeon, Dungeon
Dungeon, DungeonSiege

Dungeon, Dungeon
Dungeon, DungeonSiege

Dungeon, Dungeon
Dungeon, DungeonSiege

Dungeon, Dungeon
Dungeon, DungeonSiege

DungeonSiege....

 

[Junmarko]

Never played the first one, but I remember playing the shit out of Dungeon Siege 2 back in the day. Yes, it's pretty mindless, no strategy involved besides holding left-click, potion-chugging, managing loot and every now and then hitting an ability button to counter enemy swarms. But it's not any more or less advanced than any other hack'n'slash, just different - only an autistic turkey would want to debate the minutia there. You're brain is still switching off while you go looking for your next loot upgrade at the end of the day, it's dumb fun.

What made it stand out were the hand crafted dungeons & map layouts, intricate and more interesting than Diablo's RNG - also just watching the scope of chaos that gradually gets more and more absurd through the course of the game made it very addictive. I remember by the end of it you were doing a long trudge climbing up the the top of this mountain, you'd be so overpowered that enemies would just explode into gore, then get to the top and fight Baron Von Satan™ and defeat him with the two fused halves of your restored Annunaki Shield™. It was funny, and I guess comparatively next to Diablo 2, what it lacked in a cool gothic horror setting, it made up for with an "Epic B-movie" like charm, difficult to pull off. Chris Taylor seemed good at that though.

 

[pakoito]

I remember the secret rooms and okay puzzles in some of the dungeons.

 

[Junmarko]

I remember the secret rooms and okay puzzles in some of the dungeons.

Yeah, they were cool.

Funny, can't say I'd ever go back and replay it, at the time it was fun, but I'd pick it up over some of these newer ones. It's the only hack'n'slash I can think of that did enough things different to put it ouside the catagory of "Diablo-clone" - and it didn't do much.

Sucks Chris Taylor isn't doing much game-dev now days. Total Annihilation and Supreme Commander were awesome, he certainly had good ideas, knew how to escape making just carbon-copies.

 

[Zboj Lamignat]

What made it stand out were the hand crafted dungeons & map layouts, intricate and more interesting than Diablo's RNG

There are actually quite a few things that make DS2 stand out compared to other hns. Party based, different companions with companion quests, quite expansive quest chains, often spanning multiple chapters and areas that you could unlock only after meeting certain conditions, different pets with different options and pretty original way of developing them, amazing and extremely functional journal that should've set the standard for all game journals tbh.

Its outstanding flaw (apart from being hns and standard issues that entails) is the charbuilding. Yes, it has multiclassing and even prestige classes with the addon, which is also not really a standard in the genre. But the skill trees are just painfully generic, shit and boring and everything else connected to it feels extremely on-rails.

 

[luj1]

Its better than the trash we have today

 

[Louis_Cypher]

I'm playing Dungeon Siege 1 again right now. I wanted to complete it finally, because it's an early gaming memory. It was my first ever ARPG, when I played back in 2002. I wasn't an RPG player of any sort, I just loved fantasy literature, and wanted to experience being 'The Fellowship'. It's not perfect. I understand the flaws, from a Codexian perspective. The Codex isn't going to approve a game where you barely have to think tactically, and levelling is so simplified that it's basically just an xp gauge.

One thing I think it possesses though, is good atmosphere. You can tell they really put a lot of effort in to art design, and had skill in this area that companies today often don't (with hundreds of bland Warcraft 3 lookalikes). The ambiance and sound design is good. The environments are good. It has a nice aesthetic, neither grimdark nor cartoony, a setting that is in peril but not without hope and goodness. It's been enough for me to stick with it, despite the gameplay being mediocre. That is sometimes how games are; a decent setting, good art design, can make you forgive a lot.



I'm guessing Chris Taylor and team were probably not RPG players, but liked fantasy, so wanted to made you 'feel' like you were inside an epic fantasy journey, more than challenging you mechanically. I think boiling leveling down to a meter getting higher with each hit, is exactly how a non-RPG player would see RPG gaming as an outsider looking in, if they had no idea about pen and paper's institutional history. It probably appealed to, and allowed a lot of new players into the ARPG genre. How many of them graduated onto more mechanically complex RPGs is hard to say.

I think there is a place for faster, high lethality RPGs, like say the Japanese Ys. Now, Dungeon Siege is hardly as prestigious to gaming Ys, but the appeal is sort of similar in some respects. Ys 1 took me about 8 hours to complete, but was no lesser for it. Looking at my play times for several RPGs, they clock about 70-90 hours. Some of the highest took 120 hours to complete. You don't always want to spend that long experiencing a story; relative directness with a couple of side quests, can be okay.

Atmosphere. At least, that's why I loved Dungeon Siege, at the time. It was great to just relax and wander around in this big continuous world with some of the best Jeremy Soule music playing in the background and watch as my party butchered weird-looking creatures for loot so we could get cooler-looking gear. And then we'd enter a new zone, and the scenery would change, and the music would change, and the color of the fog would change, and I'd wonder what creatures lived in this new environment.

Somehow all elements of the game just clicked aesthetically. Remember those bottomless pits full of fog? And you'd wander out onto a long rope bridge and see another zone below you, with more pits and more rope bridges, and enemies wandering around? Good stuff. Why don't more 3D RPG's use depth like that?

It's true that technically, the game itself is pretty terrible. There's barely any game at all. It's a linear hack-n-slash that literally plays itself. But sometimes you don't really want anything more than that. Sometimes that's just what you're looking for to wind down. As long as the presentation is good. And Dungeon Siege did present itself well.

So there's my defense of the game. Not very Codexian, but the game is impossible to defend in Codexian terms. I guess you could say it had Soule... It sang the blues, and I listened.

This mirrors my thoughts too.