OmniWarez

Helping you to make your life easer and cheaper

Think outside of the box!

Dungeon Siege 2

File types: ISO, 4 CD's.
Tested: Yes.
Includes NFO: No
Includes Crack: Yes.

August 15, 2005 - It seems like it wasn't long ago when PC RPGs were dead in the water, around the mid-90s. Then came BioWare, Black Isle, Bethesda, Looking Glass, and a few others... and then the cycle of popularity turned once more, to be reborn later in the form of console hybrids and World of Warcraft. I found myself playing a Star Wars RPG on the Xbox and having more fun with an RPG than I had for a while on my own PC. Now my old school love is deep in the moat of financial reality, in a maturing industry where dollars must be made on blockbuster, multi-platform projects. So when I sit down with Dungeon Siege II, the context has change dramatically from when a game could be hardcore, only on the PC, and last for a ridiculous amount of gameplay hours. Given the straightforward, action RPG design of DS1, I was expected nothing more than a brief diversion from the summer doldrums -- a game that would probably be good enough to last me a little while until the holiday flood. Instead, I found myself knee-deep in an adventure that draws influence from my favorite games and butts heads with the new reality of heavily marketed, shorter experiences. All that said, Dungeon Siege II is not without its flaws. But at its core, it's quite a hoot.

At first, DS2 is not a particularly impressive game. At first, it looks visually identical to the first game, save for higher-res textures and some fancier lighting effects. Unfortunately, most of the officially released screenshots show the action very close up, when in fact this is tactical suicide. You'll be playing the game zoomed out all the way, and DS2 looks quite good from this distance. The environments are very well crafted and impressively varied. For some reason, antialiasing does not appear to show up in the screens I've posted -- the real thing looks much cleaner. Overall, DS2 looks a lot better in motion than frozen in time. There are some in-game cutscenes with rough animation transitions and no facial movement, particularly early in the game, but you won't see so much of that as the game progresses. You'll also see pre-rendered clips that use the engine, which is a little confusing, until you notice little details that are difficult to capture otherwise. Overall, other than relatively low-poly character models (and that's mostly limited to NPCs and your party members, not the monsters), I wasn't disappointed in DS2's visuals.

What you'll notice next is the sound, which is quite good. If nothing else good could be said about this game, it would be the excellent audio cues. For example, there are several classes of gear that enemies will drop, and one class is the armor and weapon sets, a la Diablo II. The set pieces will make a dramatic thump when they hit the ground, alerting you immediately to a potentially awesome piece of loot you'll want to check out ASAP. Each class of gear also has color-coded text floating above it -- gray means it can be enchanted, white is a standard item, blue is enchanted, turquoise is rare enchanted, gold is a set piece, purple is unique, and so forth. After plowing through a crowd of beasts, you can tell at a glance what you want to grab -- or you can press Z and have your party members gather everything up.

I'm also pleased to report that you don't have to go back to town, hunt down the local scholar, and pay money to have items identified. It was always annoying in Diablo to bring something potentially cool back, only to find that it cost more to get it identified than you could sell it for. When an item drops in DS2, it will have its basic name, such as "Rare Good Sword," and you'll get the details, "Beryl Long Sword of Penetration," when you put it in your inventory. There's also a subclass of quality, starting with Good and going to Great, Exceptional, Legendary, and probably a couple ranks in between. The higher the quality, the higher the basic stats. If the item is enchantable (in which case it won't have any extra stats), this naming category determines how much space you'll have for enchantments.

However, I personally didn't find the "reagent" system to be as useful as I'd hoped. More often than not, the loot I found was better than the loot I could enchant myself, with a couple exceptions. And my storage space was crammed full of enchantment items I never ended up slotting into anything. There were problems with the loot tables throughout the game, in fact, that made me really appreciate how much time had gone into them with Diablo and WoW. Sometimes it would a small thing like a monster in the mid-game dropping something that might have been useful to me early on but wasn't now. Other times, it was seeing the same "unique" item on more than one occasion, even when I was already carrying it in my inventory.

But getting back to sound -- There's a staggering amount of voice acting. Considering how much there is, I was impressed by the overall quality. I did find a couple characters a bit over-the-top or amateurish, but it was the exception, rather than the rule. It's no wonder this game came to me on four CDs. Well, that and the massive amount of art required to render the rainbow of huge environments and the beasties throughout the game. On a side note, I noticed that fighting a human was a pretty rare encounter. You'll fight humanoids, but when you have to fight an actual person, it's always quite clear that this person is dishonorable and determined to fight you to the death. The music, by the way, is themed, and it's subliminal enough to never get repetitive. Most of the time, I didn't even notice it was playing until the action stopped.

Now that we have the immediately noticeable things out of the way, let's go to the other end of the spectrum -- the meat of the game that slowly fills in over the course of the hours. There are no loading screens, save for when you're actually starting the game. There's the teleportation effect that lasts for a few seconds, during which everything is loaded behind the scenes, but you'll never be sitting around waiting for a progress bar to crawl from one end to the other. With that pace breaker completely moved from the design, you can really appreciate the flow of the different areas and of the story itself, which is quite involved. The game is separated into three acts, with each act separated into a varying number of parts, and many parts culminate in challenging boss battles. I never found any of those encounters to be too difficult and got through each on of them on the first try -- just barely. The difficulty is very nicely balanced, although I might have unknowingly benefited from stumbling upon just the right combination of party members and selection of gear and skills.

As with Diablo II and WoW, DS2 has a skill tree you can unlock to specialize each character class into three sub-types. The melee fighter can focus on dual wielding, sword and board, or two-handed weapons; the archer can do crossbows, bows, and thrown weapons; and so forth. Then you have special attacks you can unlock, the selection of which is dependent upon how many points you put into each skill. Plus, you can upgrade your special attacks, increasing range, damage, and/or duration.

But combat isn't all wine and roses, and herein lies my main beef about DS2: line of sight. If you're fighting an enemy who's around a corner or at the top of a steep slope, your ranged attacks can and will be useless. This is particularly aggravating when you waste a special attack. Ranged fighters will not re-orient themselves to actually hit a mob who's around the other corner, and slope attacks are inconsistent enough that you have to go to the top or pull the enemy down to you to be effective. In an environment as varied as DS2, you will encounter this situation constantly, which usually forces Mirror mode attacks (as opposed to Rampage mode, where each party member can choose their targets). In fact, I found myself controlling each focus-fire attack. I don't mind it so much, but others might not want to babysit each encounter. Thankfully, you can turn off the "feature" that forces you to click the mouse for each swing of your weapon or launched fireball, at which point things get much smoother. When I was first told that combat wouldn't automate itself as much as DS1, I assumed it would be more than basically disabling auto-attack, but this doesn't seem to be the case.

There's also an issue with party member aggressiveness, although it becomes much less of a problem once you have three or more members. Ranged fighters have a habit of running up and shooting, which is a problem when you want to just pull a few guys at a time, rather than the whole shebang. The game world is sprinkled with minibosses, delineated by a glowing ring, and you simply cannot run up and start thwacking away unless you have a death wish. These guys hit hard and take a lot of damage, so you want to pull away their entourage whenever you can. As the game progresses, you'll eventually be able to take them head-on, but it takes a while to get to that point.

Don't wait, download now!