by Carpe De-ungeon?
Apologies; I don’t have any screenshots for this one–mostly because the Steam client doesn’t work with Dungeon Siege, and mostly because if you’ve seen any Diablo-esque, you know what this looks like. This all being said, last we left off, I squared Dungeon Siege off as seemingly a strong Tier 1 choice. The game was nicely paced, the interface was quick and responsive, and it was doing a few things differently when compared to other Diablo-esques (namely there are no levels, only stats and skills that increase through use).
As I continued to play, just as the game began to grow stale, I would run into something that forced me to play differently. First, I mastered solo tactics, largely involving kiting the enemy and pulling out a few of them at a time if they were in large groups. Then, the game gave me a party member, who I quickly specialized into bows (while I held the mantle of combat magic). After controlling a duo party became commonplace, I found myself suddenly with 5 party members, where group platoon tactics became necessary for survival–two fighters heavily armored up front, two damage dealers in the middle (myself and bow-lady respectively) and a healer in the back. With this, party inventory and equipment management became necessary, and I had to learn how to funnel the correct loot to the appropriate user. Quickly though, this became little challenge, and once my character’s stats and skills were streamlining to the correct locations, the game once again became effortless.
…And that’s where I find myself now. I’ve been playing for about 2 hours since that point, and the game has consisted entirely of (1.) Click on dark part of map (2.) Watch party kill bad guys while I (2a.) pull the party back if there are too many enemies (2b.) Tell the healer to swap to his damage spells if I’m not being overrun (2c.) push “H” to make all party members immediately heal up to full health if things go pear-shaped. From there I (3.) pick up all treasure and give it to the appropriate characters (4.) Throw out all the garbage and transmute it to gold. (5.) Do it all over again.
Herein lies the point of the game in which I simply cannot play it any longer. I do not foresee there ever really being a change from this dynamic. I love what they are trying here, and I love that it is original–Dungeon Siege is a party-based Diablo-esque, and aside from Dungeon Siege II, I’m not sure that I’ve ever really played a game quite like this. The problem is, that the designers needed to keep things simple so that gameplay stayed fast, which means that characters auto-fight if you set them up correctly. This means that you aren’t really controlling the fighting so much as you are just making sure everyone’s health bars stay full, and making sure they’re wearing whatever makes their arbitrary fantasy numbers higher. Likewise, your party members don’t talk, they don’t have deep back-stories and they don’t have personalities–they’re just puppets for you to control, so even though you have a party… they’re just controlled and interacted with as one blank unit. Admittedly, it’s a unit composed of several pieces, but still a single entity.
I think for what this game is trying to be, it has totally succeeded. I can’t really complain and say “oh, but this should have been different” or “if they changed this, it would be better.” I mean, it succeeds at being a party-based Diabloesque. I think my problem is that I’m not getting to make any truly meaningful decisions while I play it anymore. I’ve completed the learning curve that the game presented through its early phases (and it’s a good curve, the rate at which things are introduced to you) but the hill wasn’t particularly tall or steep, and now that I’m at the top there isn’t much to look forward too.
I’m relegating Dungeon Seige to Tier 2; there’s just not enough spark here to make me personally need to keep playing.