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Dungeon Siege III (PlayStation 3) review"(...)That the animation and fighting stances are easy to to look at, as well as entertaining to play with helps as well. It is fun, it is interesting - and I'm buggered about it because it's so easy to have the deep group-dynamics that took weeks of perfection to accomplish - in other, more cumbersomely designed role-playing games." |
Once upon a time, co-op play online was a difficult and arduous affair, fraught with terrible dangers such as disconnects, serial cables and lock-ups. As well as unbalanced and badly scaled encounters. Mismatched levels between players, and endless waits and equipment screen moments. And where is your friend now that you lay coughing in your own blood, after that unfortunate run-in with the Azure Dragon-kin? Off somewhere in the dungeon dimensions, making off with your loot, unique items and spell-books most likely.
But not this time. While Dungeon Siege 3 doesn't exactly march in to fill an empty rank in the adventure games lineup, it's difficult to not be impressed by the careful design that makes a combined drop-in online and couch co-op adventure game work so smoothly.
Press X to role-play!
Dungeon Siege 3 takes place in the former kingdom of Ehb, after the last king died in circumstances that left the 10th Legion under siege and without allies. And very quickly also no soldiers. 30 years later, the remnants of the 10th Legion gather again. And you play one of the four heroes that will help the Legion rise to power once more. But in what fashion, and whether it will be different from the fallen Legion - this is what you will decide throughout the game.
Do you treat your enemies with respect even in defeat, or do you punish their transgressions in cold righteousness and swift vengeance? Will you choose what is convenient for your goals, or will you favour principle and idealism? Will you forgive and look forward, or will you have your and the Legion's revenge?
Of course, it is a more or less linear path you follow in the game from start to finish. But the quality of the writing when it comes to the overall setting, as well as how the dialogue changes subtly in order to wrap the choices you make (or to mesh with the order of your dialogue picks), makes sure that the decisions feel important and a part of the story.
When the quests also happen to be connected to each other through the story's running themes of vengeance and reconciliation, it's very easy to start thinking that these choices will come back to you again later. And in some cases they actually do, and feature in the nothing but brilliant “moving parchment” episodes that accompany the start and finish of each act. Or else they cause references and small changes in encounters later on. At other times, it's only your reputation as a Legionnaire that is at stake.
So there are no “wrong” choices to make in terms of being able to play the game from start to finish, as you walk through the shortest routes in the various and uniquely drawn 3d areas. No matter what you do, the story will play out in largely the same way, and the acts will last about as long every time (give and take a few hour-long sidequests). But what you do will be placed in the game and wrapped in what will seem like an unbroken script - that tells the story of the 10th Legion's rise. Fully accompanied by an expertly made musical score (from the composer who made the music for Dead Space), and a well-directed narration.
Better yet, the relatively trivial ambiguity of the choices for the most part, and how the other players in the game can suggest dialogue choices (and get bonuses and trophies for agreeing as well as disagreeing with the host's pick) - and how the narrative eventually culminates in one or two substantial choices, this makes this game capture the pen and paper role-playing moments as well as any online role-playing game I've played.
Which is ironic, because the game plays like an action-adventure with some role-playing elements in it. Or a classic dungeon crawler, and not like an RPG at all. Still, you choose a preferred style for your characters. And there is quite a lot of strategy and depth involved when moving around in the fights, and in how you support your companions. The encounters at times will be all but impossible to beat unless you understand the need to have one of your companions block attacks while the other moves in for the kill.
Since all of the characters also have two stances that tend to be either wide-area or focused attacks, as well as abilities that play into the specialisations, the game tends to encourage a much deeper cooperation and strategy than in most games like this (which is typically: choosing which back should have two axes instead of just the one).
It's easy to end up in a situation where you save the group by a strategic area-attack with a status effect, or perhaps a well-placed staggering ability-attack, for example. On top of this, there are many buffs that could help maximize another character's ability attacks. Combos which will be easier and easier to accomplish as the game progresses.
That the animation and fighting stances are easy to to look at, as well as entertaining to play with helps as well. It is fun, it's interesting - and I'm buggered about it because it's so easy to have the deep group-dynamics that took weeks of perfection to accomplish - in other, more cumbersomely designed role-playing games.
The Host Rules
Essentially, what Obsidian has made here is a way to piggyback on the host's game. You share the equipment, money and characters the host has, and advance through the game together, obeying the host's dialogue choices, and saving the level up configuration for the host's heroes. How this works is that at any time during a game, you can add another player - and then they follow the host around for as long as they like. Offline and online, it magically works in the same way.
Other neat design choices include the fact that the AI takes over if you are in the equipment screen, or in the text-chat. And that the loot is character specific, rather than universal. Meaning that gathering loot and finding better equipment benefits the group, rather than being a recipe for ruining friendships.
In a similar way the group always plays on the same screen-area (the view zooming out slightly when surrounding a boss, for example), and can't run off on their own. Which is of course a good thing, since the encounters and the boss-fights scale depending on how many players are in the game, and what the level of the host's character is. In other words, the game is structured in such a way that playing this game online with strangers (or even vicious little brothers) actually works. Not as in “works somewhat”, but as in “works effortlessly”.
The problem with this design, though, is that your adventure is lost if you played the game together with the host, and the host continued playing without you. Because there's no way to save the game as a companion, and then continue this particular game later. Still, when the game is designed for drop-in multiplayer (with neat functions in the menu saying such things as “take a break”, which is when the AI takes over). And the adventure is as episodic as it is, it's difficult to see this as a problem. After all, you will without a doubt want to play through the game on your own at least once, while someone else perhaps could help you with a difficult boss or area in parts of the game. In the same way, you could avoid overwriting the save ahead of your favourite parts of the story, and invite friends in a private game to play with you there.
Meanwhile the level-up mechanism is also so quick and relatively straight forward that it's not an issue that “your” character isn't saved. Of course it would have been fun to save some particularly neat loot - but min-maxing your character and duplicating the unique items into the same game grows old very quick. So for the piggy-back design, the light ability branching when you level up, along with balanced loot for the current level of the party was extremely successful. If we by successful mean that the game is effortless to set up and fun to play with friends, online or offline.
Obsidian (with a new self-made engine, and a new publisher) don't break any unbroken creative barriers with Dungeon Siege 3. The game is also relatively short (12 hours, if you rush through it - I spent about 20 on the first "normal" playthrough), and could qualify as one episode in a role-playing game made ten years ago (even if, of course, it's twice the length of other games made nowadays). But they do provide a solid, bug-free and carefully designed multiplayer experience through a well-written and well directed story. In other words, my only gripe with this game is that it is not a deeper role-playing experience with a more wholesome and customisable ruleset - and that it does not last, at the very least, three-four times as long.
(Also feel free to read my semi-technical walkthrough of the game's mechanics, along with some thoughts on scoring this game on my blog elsewhere on the site).
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Community review by fleinn (June 27, 2011)
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