Quote:
Originally Posted by jsteinhauer
I'm interested. I had it preordered, but I cancelled, due to a backlog of games at this time.
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Well, having spent a few hours playing Dungeon Siege III this evening, here are my first impressions:
Story
Strong storytelling has never been a strength of the Dungeon Siege franchise, and this entry is no different. There's some passable voice acting, but the vague story wraps itself around the 10th Legion of the Kingdom of Ehb, a combination of benevolent police force, clan, and army who were mostly wiped out by invaders.
You play as one of the children of the Legion, sheltered and hidden by one of its last surviving members, and your goal is to restore the 10th Legion and bring vengeance to its murderers.
Books and notes scattered all over the place give you more information about the world and the history of Ehb, but it's all more or less vanilla fantasy fare, and there's really nothing to see there.
Presentation
This is a pleasant surprise. While it's not the prettiest game out there, Dungeon Siege III manages to keep bright, appealing colors on-screen while keeping everything still visible and clear. Despite there being no overworld map, it's impossible to get lost since you can select any quest and press up on the D-pad to get a glowing path showing you where you need to go to advance.
Equipment affects how your character looks, and its accompanied by all sorts of neat particle effects (a hallmark of the series) so your weaponry sparkles and glitters based on what sort of magic its imbued with.
There's nothing really outstanding or flavorful about the art direction; it looks more or less like any standard vanilla fantasy game, but it at least manages to not be bad and the whole game has a soft glow about it that's pleasing to the eye.
Frame-rates generally are decent, though there's some mild-but-noticeable screen tearing at times. There's also some fuzzy textures here and there, but given the soft, almost glowing look of many objects in the game, it doesn't stick out like a sore them most of the time.
Gameplay
Dungeon Siege has always been a hack-and-slash fantasy game, and this re-invention of it doesn't really stray from that formula. Where it does improve on things are the RPG aspects.
Besides the usual dungeon crawling, you have your standard fetch quests / puzzles / etc. Nothing too ground-breaking on that front, but it's serviceable.
There's a minimap to show you your immediate surroundings (toggled by the down key on the d-pad), but no overall map. This would be a problem, except that pressing up on the d-pad gives you a glowing telltale path to your next goal for your current active quest (and you can choose which quest is currently active at any time).
There are 4 different characters to choose from, and each has skills, talents, and proficencies which you can learn and assign as you advance. Repeated use of a skill eventually causes it to become Empowered, making it significantly stronger and more useful, while Proficiencies let you tweak the direction in which each skill develops. For example, the warrior Lucas can choose to have his 30 second regeneration ability either give him up to 5 levels of additional healing per successful combat hit for 30 seconds, or instead to give him a boost to attack strength if damaged during those 30 seconds, above and beyond the basic regeneration effect.
Combat itself is moderately paced and simple enough, but with enough tactical choices to keep things interesting, particularly on the higher difficulties (I'm playing on Hardcore).
Each of the four characters plays very differently, and while they do share a couple of common abilities (like the ability to regenerate), even those basic skills diverge with their Proficiencies. Each character has two "stances" or weapon types they can use, which are useful for different situations, and generally speaking it works out quite well and seems fairly balanced overall.
There's a lot of items that you can obtain from enemies and chests; gear is specific to one character, but you eventually get access to all 4 characters in your team, so finding a good item never really goes completely to waste. Items are varied, randomized, and each possesses wildly different attributes which can complement different styles of play, so there's good variety of actually useful gear; a rare feat in these sorts of games.
Speaking of which, inventory management is pretty nice. Items can be compared against your currently equipped gear before equipping them, and if you run out of room before finding a shopkeeper, you can choose to convert any extra junk you don't need directly into gold, at any time. This is by far one of the most painless inventory systems I've encountered in an RPG of any sort, and that's fairly high praise.
Overall
I'm only a few hours in, but Dungeon Siege III feels like a solid purchase so far. It's not going to go down in history as the Best Game Ever, but it's a capable 3D fantasy hack and slash with a lot to like about the gameplay.
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