gas powered: Dungeon Siege II

Up until a couple of weeks ago, Gas Powered Games was going to have Dungeon Siege II ready for this Fall according to my watch list for 2004. A recent announcement has now pushed it into Spring 2005, which makes me wonder how much play balancing needs to be done in the game. The engine is more or less complete from the looks of it, and despite my offhand comments about its E3 showing will probably hold its own against the competition - as long as their promises of a more refined RPG experience are fulfilled.

At first glance, Dungeon Siege seemed like the exact remedy for fans that grew tired of Diablo II. It provided an enormous new world to explore, all beautifully modeled in three dimensions. It seemed like an evolutionary step in the genre, as long as you were careful to erase all prior knowledge of Darkstone. I played the hell out of Dungeon Siege when I could finally run it on my new PC, but in hindsight I look on the game a little more objectively. Easily the biggest complaint with the game was the lack of character customization and player involvement. At the time I felt this was completely natural - if you use a particular skill more, you get better at it. There were tons of items and different armor types to at least modify the appearance of your character, but in terms of fiddling with stats, those features were nonexistent. A particularly resourceful player could even script their party to play through the entire game unassisted, complete with collecting loot.

In Dungeon Siege II, Chris Taylor's team at Gas Powered Games is planning to change all that. With a highly customizable skills system and more combat involvement, DS2 may turn out to be more of an RPG than its predecessor. Like the original game, there are no classes for the main character: you simply equip a weapon or spell and train. Along with gaining experience by weapon or spell usage, you will get Skill points to spend whenever you level up. It's a welcome change to have added flexibility in multi-class character development, and a feature that borrows from the open character concept of the Divinity games. The careful expenditure of these points will unlock new abilities for your character - including the more potent Powers. Because this is a party-based game, though, some definite balancing will be required to prevent it from becoming an exercise in micro-management.

The new Powers can be particularly devastating, and will harm your party members if used hastily. So you will want to avoid unleashing a fiery blast upon a creature that your party is clustering. To that end, while issuing commands when the game is paused, you can combine these special attacks for a more efficient use of your party's Powers. Obviously there will be limits on the use of Powers successively - your characters will need to recharge to use them again. The Powers will be managed separately from the mana pool, however, and you will still be able to cast the normal array of spells while the character is recharging. The basic spells from the original game appear to have remained in the same state.

You might remember from the original game the variety of monsters that you had to battle during your long journey through its diverse landscapes. Similar to Diablo II, there were occasions where you would find monsters that were double your character's size. But where the former was happy to repaint existing monster sprites, Dungeon Siege provided a much larger array of enemies to cut down. I even remember fighting an Ice Dragon on more than one occasion in Dungeon Siege, its intimidating stature filling up a good portion of my screen. This time around, many of the monsters are designed to fill the hearts of even the most stalwart of adventurers with fear. Just take a look at the Morden Viir calvary: not only is it a fine example of some of the new enemies you will be fighting, it does a damn good job of making me want to play this game. Taylor boasts that there are also specific super-sized boss monsters that look like they've been ripped out of Final Fantasy - completely overshadowing your party and surely in possession of some earth-shattering attacks.

Besides the lack of hands-on character advancement, one of the biggest problems with Dungeon Siege's development was that it tried to be everything to all levels of gamers. With Dungeon Siege 2, Taylor again states that there will be "something for everyone", but the way I see it some part of this equation has to give. I want Dungeon Siege II to succeed, because the original took the successful "click-kill-reward" formula and still managed to come up with something fun to play and great to look at. But with games like Guild Wars, Knights of the Old Republic II, and Dragon Age heading to the PC in the next year, it's going to be tough to compete if all that is being offered is a rehash of the past.

I don't doubt that Taylor and his team will put together a solid RPG, but my initial impressions of Guild Wars always seem to obscure the view. Massive Single Player campaigns are important, and the Siege Editor was a valuable tool that was gladly accepted amongst the player community, extending the product's life with some standout mods*. Still, when you think about what has already been accomplished with Guild Wars, DS2's tweaked engine and added control over character development may not be enough to move units in the face of its delay until after Guild Wars' target release. Even party based combat, the management of which was not even necessary in the original, is easily bypassed by another outstanding feature in Guild Wars: you play with humans.

*A footnote: If you're interested, I highly recommend at least taking a look at some of the mods and total conversions that have been developed since Dungeon Siege's release in 2002. Copperhead, although not maintained anymore, is a great looking futurisitc mod that actually managed to model firearms. The Elemental has been called "biblepunk" by some, but don't be scared - it's actually quite amazing what has been done with the original game's engine and interface. And of course there's the unofficial re-imagining of Ultima V: Warriors of Destiny, called Ultima V: Lazarus. Strangely enough, you will actually need the the original Ultima game to play this mod.

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