Nicely put Tyjenks. A very pretty game, but nowhere near the depth of gameplay I would have liked.
Guess they were wrong to make an approachable game, since all the elitists snobs can’t micromanage. Oh wait, they can. But instead, they left the auto stuff on and complained instead of TURNING IT OFF.[/quote]
I picked up the game a few weeks ago for $14.99 from BestBuy. I’m at Castle Ebb. Maybe I’m missing something here, but I haven’t seen a whole lot of “auto” stuff to turn on and off. I’ve tried turning off the “Auto Following” and that helps, but sometimes my characters seem to want to follow each other anyway. A lot of the time they also seem to ignore my instructions for who to attack in the midst of combat as well. I have learned to “micromanage” my potion drinking, which seems both necessary and a major pain in the derriere. Not sure what other “auto” stuff there is to turn off.
From a party RPG standpoint, I definitely prefer the control I have in the Infinity Engine games. From a single-action RPG standpoint, I prefer Diablo II because the D2 skills make play much more interesting.
I do think I’ve gotten my $14.99 worth, but this game could have been a lot better. Graphically it’s very nice (although I miss having real grass as in NWN vs. DS’s flat green texture). But from a gameplay standpoint Dungeon Siege is pretty flat.
Leveling up doesn’t seem to mean much, in part because I can’t choose how it affects my characters, I don’t really see much difference between a Melee rating of 5 vs. one of 35. I’m sure it’s there somewhere, but I’m not seeing it explicitly, so leveling up just isn’t that much fun – in D2, it’s very clear you’ve leveled up because you have a cool new skill to play with. The “skills you use level up” design is probably more realistic than the “allow the player to up whatever skills they want” design found in most RPGs, but it’s not as much fun.
Using mages isn’t as much fun as it could have been because of the “only two magic spell quickslot” system. I’m simply not willing to go in and reconfigure the spellbook during combat, so that limits each mage to only two spells to use. For a nature mage, one of those spells is “Healing Hands”, which leaves them with only one combat spell and no variety. It would have been nice to quickslot several spells and use whichever one fits the situation, but that’s too much of a pain given the limited quickslots provided. They don’t even have to be “quickslots”. In Baldur’s Gate/Icewind Dale, clicking on the spell button brings up non-quicksloted spells – that’s two clicks. In Dungeon Siege, to change a spell, I click on the inventory button then open the spellbook then drag and drop spells in the spell book, then close the inventory, the select the newly quicksloted spell, then click on a target - what a nightmare.
As someone else once wrote, combat sometimes seems like a “potion drinking” simulation. I spend more time staring at the damn health levels instead of actually watching combat, because I need to drink potions all the time. I’m not quite sure how the DS system affects this vs. D2 or the Infinity Engine games, but it definitely seems like much more of a pronounced effect in Dungeon Siege. D2 maybe the same, or it might be a bit better since I only have to worry about one character. In the Baldur’s Gates/Icewind Dale games, I definitely drank potions when needed, but I didn’t spend all my time staring at the health meters. Maybe it’s because in BG/IWD the combat goes a bit slower, so I have time to enjoy combat and make sure no one’s health goes to zero. I wish the drink potion button didn’t causes everyone below 50% health to drink regardless of which characters are selected. Since drinking a potion stops the characters from taking any other actions (which is a good thing) and since the drink potion button makes almost everyone drink, which is a bad thing, I’ve taken to manually opening a character’s inventory and having just the characters about to pass out drink a potion. This is a major annoyance. I wish they had set things so only the selected characters drank potions, or maybe so only the characters whose portraits were blinking drank. When I switched from using the drink potion button to micromanaging potion drinking, my combat efficiency went way up, but what a pain, having to do all that clicking.
Also, I don’t think the treasure system is very well balanced. I spend all my time dragging treasure out and selling it all off. I almost never use any of the caps, gloves, or boots I get. There’s so much magic stuff, I spend more time micromanaging stuff than I’d like. Hmmm, which of these 35 different magic boots is best. Ah screw it, I don’t care, let’s just sell them all off, I don’t want to deal with it. I do pay attention to magic armor and a little to magic weapons, but there is so many boots, caps, and gloves, I really do just toss them. I’m sure my party would be stronger if I paid attention to them, but I just don’t want to deal with them. I think D2 suffers a bit from this as well after you reach a certain level - as I recall, my level 40+ Druid sells off almost all his treasure and rarely gets anything worth keeping. However, in the Infinity Engine games, getting a magic item really does matter. I think Baldur’s Gate/Icewind Dale has a much better balance of treasure.
I think I’ll probably finish the game. But this game could have been so much better. It would be nice to have someone license the terrific graphic engine and come up with a better game.
