Reviewed by: BobiRoka
Developer: Gas Powered Games
Publisher: Microsoft

One thing I’ve always disliked about RPGs is the choice you have to make at the start. Fighter? Mage? Healer? How can you possibly know which path to take until you’ve already enjoyed what plot twists and set pieces the game has to offer?

Dungeon Siege never made you do this. In fact, Dungeon Siege didn’t make you do a great many things. It understood. It knew that certain elements of the classic RPG template didn’t have to be so fiddly, and so without completely removing said elements, GPG managed to serve up a streamlined hack n’ slash game which happened to be especially condusive to co-op LAN/Internet play.

But that was over three years ago, before Neverwinter Nights showed us how close-knit multiplayer D&D games could work on our PCs, and back when the thought of paying monthly for RPG thrills on tap made us shudder. Fast forward to present day, and you can’t help but wonder about the relevance of a sequel to a game so easily eclipsed…

…And it’s criminal really, because the more I play Dungeon Siege 2, the more I remember why I enjoyed the first game so much. And I don’t mean to suggest this is simply more of the same, rather, old hands will feel immediately at home. Even to a newbie, this is a veritable playschool of fun compared to the gruelling first few hours of older (wiser?) RPGs.

However, it’s those older games like Icewind Dale and Baldur’s gate that spring to mind as I navigate my way thru the temperate forests and desert wastelands of Aranna. While the camera is fully rotating and you can zoom in and out of the action, the horizontal axis is limited to the point where you have to be fully zoomed out to see what’s coming. So most of the time your merry band of adventurers are quite small onscreen indeed, but zoom in close and it’s apparent that GPG’s proprietary Siege engine has been polished up for the current wave of GPUs. Not that you’ll be surveying anything but the lavish environments in any great detail, for most of the time a dazzling display of character animations, spell explosions and blood splatters will leave you in a state of non-comprehension.

It’s all very rewarding I suppose, in an immediate sonic/visual type way, and of course, you have individual character panels to track the status of your party in the midst of combat. It’s just that DS2 seems to have gone a little overboard with its onscreen depiction of events. It’s a tad too messy on this gamer’s eyes if truth be told, as if the aesthetic decisions were made by someone observing, rather than trying to play the game…

“We need more blood”
“B...b...but I can’t see the enemy to target them”
“Who’s the Art director here?”
“Oh well, I guess we’ll have to implement some kind of soft auto-target then…”

I’m quite sincere… that conversation probably happened. How else could I be marching my ragged band through countless swathes of enemies in DS2, playing with a dog, talking to my housemate and smoking a cigarette at the same time? And what’s more, why am I still enjoying what must surely be a thoroughly unchallenging game?

Because that’s only the half of it. That’s why…

Allow me to begin my explanation with a brief examination into the heart of the accused. Dungeon Siege, or rather, the land of Aranna in which the game is set, is persistent. Not massively persistent and 24/7 in the same way as something like World of Warcraft, but seamless and persistent from the moment you boot up the game. Kill a wave of monsters and they’ll gradually repopulate the map again. Progress is made by fulfilling the objectives detailed in the game’s quest journal and unlike the first game, where NPCs were arguably just markers along a long winding road to the finale, this sequel has – very much to it’s merit – secondary quests. And lots of them too…

The extensive Teleporter network actually has a meaningful existence this time around, as you to and fro across the massive landmass of Aranna, dropping off quest items and hunting down NPCs. It’s inevitable that you come across a bunch of low-level nasties en route who insist on standing in the way to receive a total pasting and so you oblige, since kills = experience and/or gold…

Then there’s the character development paths and party organisation aspects, which probably account for about half my time with the game. If tooling up the ultimate adventuring party and considering multiclass options and spell load-outs is your thing, then you have to try this game. The first game did a good job at this, but DS2 is something else entirely. Hmmm… where to start…

For the uninitiated, Dungeon Siege works on a skills (as opposed to class) system. The four skills are: Melee, Ranged, Combat Magic (Direct Damage/Area Effect) and Nature Magic (Healing/Buffs). So if you give a character a bow, their ranged skill goes up, make them cast fireballs and their combat magic skill goes up, and so on… However, this doesn’t just define what gear you can equip, or the range and potency of your spells. Oh no, DS2 also features a rather extensive set of ‘speciality’ trees organised into tiers according to character level. By advancing in these trees and meeting the relevant prerequisite specialities, your characters gain and improve their ‘Powers’. So far as combat is concerned, these ‘Powers’ are devastatingly powerful abilities that can be used to swing the tide of battle, but must be recharged by using the relevant skill they are related to. So for example, using Heal spells a lot would recharge a Nature Mage’s “Invulnerability” power, and so on… I sound like the manual etc.

Suffice to say, DS2 offers an open-ended character development system of greater depth than it’s predecessor, the pay-off for investing time in this aspect of the game being the kill and the loot attained by successfully overcoming ever greater feats of hack n’ slash bravado. It’s tried, it’s tested, but to be fair, it’s been a while…

It’s at this point however, that I’m reminded of the first game’s peers more than the first game itself, since fans of the first game (myself included) are likely to notice several omissions. Firstly, much of the first game’s appeal – in single player mode at least – came from the ability to command a party of up to 8 characters. In DS2, this number has been reduced to 6, but only at the ‘Veteran’ difficulty setting, which can only be unlocked by playing through the whole game at it’s default ‘Mercenary’ setting. Since the party size has been halved, it’s obvious why the separate formation and stance options are absent. Instead, tactical decisions have been reduced to a simple choice of stances: ‘follow’, where all characters attack the same target or ‘rampage’, where characters fire at will – useful when the party is outnumbered.

Disappointed? Sure I am. However, this simplification of tactical options makes for a less staccato gameplay experience. Having fewer characters to worry about allows you to focus on the finer points of each one – in real-time; the stance switching works far better in practise than the old system and those aforementioned ‘Powers’ offer both a tactical choice in combat and eventually, a genuine motivation for character development. The problem of limited spell slots has almost been eliminated by the addition of two auto-cast slots granted to each character. Stick your choice of healing/buffing/de-buffing/creature summoning spell-combo into these slots and you’re effectively customising your own AI scripts for each party member to follow when not directly under your control. Genius!

Of course, with all this clever automation of game mechanics it’s reasonable to ask how much is left to the player when it comes down to the actual hacking and slashing. Not a lot to be honest, aside from targeting the swarms of enemies with the right mouse button, letting off each character’s selected ‘power’ when available (powers recharge as characters successfully attack), switching stances when necessary and administering health/mana potions via hotkeys. If it’s any consolation, I rarely found myself pausing the action, but then DS2 combat is a far more thuggish affair than the comparative RTS-inspired elegance of the first game.

All things said however, this sequel seems like less of a treadmill than it’s predecessor, thanks to a more intriguing plot, some diverse set-piece battles and a cast of NPCs with some decent dialogue to deliver (well, most of the time anyway). The experimental RTS elements from the first game may have been streamlined into non-existence, but DS2 seems a ‘wiser’ RPG for it.

Presentation	7
Migraine inducing levels of fantasy gratification. Stunningly immersive environments. Decent voice-acting for the most part even if the script can be a tad dodgy sometimes.
Gameplay	7
Immediate, creative control of combat. Endless Party customisation. A bit too chaotic at times though. Some nicely thought out puzzly sections...
Value	9
A Massive single player adventure with a high level cap. Fairly extensive multiplayer options. Loads of replay value thanks to infinite character possibilities.
Benchmark	5
Obviously the first thing to compare this to is the first game, and it's difficult to say whether it's any better or worse.
Score	7
Diablo with Brains. Again...

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Minimum Spec	Reviewed on
1GHz Processor 256Mb RAM 64Mb GFX Card.	P4 2.53GHz 1Gb RAM ATI 9600 Pro 128Mb