[Subtitles by danielsangeo] Hey! Welcome to the Game Dungeon. Today, we're going to be earning this
show's title and covering "Dungeon Siege". Dungeon Siege is a fantasy action RPG. In the last episode, we had some
frustrations, so I wanted to change gears and in many ways, this game is the
polar opposite of "The Secret World". We'll get into that. So, once we get past the intros, we have
one of the more elaborate menus I've seen. BOOM! This menu makes me think there's a
bunch of gnomes inside my computer cranking all these gears
to make the game work. Let's get started. Now the story to this game is... I don't know. I must've played through this
game at least six or seven times and I still don't know the story. I mean, yeah, we have the
narrator giving me this exposition but it's all so dry and generic. I tried to treat the story seriously
the first time I played this but nothing stuck in my memory. This game may as well not
have a story. I'm serious. I'm usually not very impressed
by fantasy game stories, but this goes double for Dungeon Siege. The story is, there's some sort of evil
force and you're going to try and stop it. I'm pretty sure it's
something along those lines. So instead, here's the story as I see it: You're a simple farmer but then one day these orc/goblin
things start attacking your farm. I don't think this is the
first time this has happened, so you say, "Enough is
enough", pick up a weapon, and proceed to kill everything in sight until this stops happening
and you can get back to work. As far as I'm concerned, that's
the entire plot of this game. You're just some farmer who's
been pushed over the edge. Now I don't expect you people of the
future to be too impressed by this, but for 2002,
these graphics are really nice. We have the stream, your farm,
later you'll see the forest, This was a DirectX 8 game and I
feel like they were making the most with what they had to work with. While the terrain always
has kind of a blocky feel, the art design is pretty good
throughout the whole game. But the meat of this game is the combat, and it starts off... not so great? Your character misses a lot and it
doesn't feel particularly satisfying. Now I'm playing this guy as a melee fighter, but there are four disciplines in this game: melee combat, ranged combat,
nature magic and combat magic. My advice on this is going to run contrary to everything you read on
the Internet about this game, but I say go with melee combat
or archery. Screw magic. The magic in this game
for me is just not fun. It's effective but there's a small
delay to most spells you cast so everything just feels slowed down. You can get off multiple
hits with other weapons in the time it takes you to cast one spell. Now a FEW spells are
quick, but as time goes on, they stop doing enough damage and
you have to upgrade to the next spell which may suck and be really slow. Also, mages are the weakest
characters in the game and ALL their abilities use mana. I think they're totally not worth it. Now, they ARE playable. In
fact, they're incredibly varied. They spells for everything you can
think of: damage, buffs, curses, summoning, manipulating the world and so on. If you REALLY want to, I'm sure you
can play through the game as a mage, but I guarantee you I'll
beat the game before you do. Conventional combat is just so much faster. So we don't have a story to speak
of and the combat is kind of so-so. That's not a good sign. All I can say is: just wait. Oh, and something worth mentioning. This
game was obviously inspired by "Diablo" so we have the familiar red and blue potions but there is a short delay when you heal. That's because your character literally
takes out the potion and drinks it. So, instead of healing just being a button
that's symbolic the way it is in a lot of RPGs, here it's based on "How fast can you chug?" I think we can all agree, this
is the best healing system. I know lots of college students do. Also, you only drink what
you need to heal up so you can just drink half
and save the rest for later. I like this in contrast
to a lot of other games where you have to bring your
character to the brink of death in order to maximize
your healing efficiency. [exhales] So we head deeper into the forest because it's not enough to JUST kill
the monsters on our property, we have to push them back
or they'll just keep coming. Our main enemies so far are the Krug
and they're sort of like diet orcs. They're pretty generic, though. In fact,
just about every enemy in this game is. We're fighting giant mosquitoes, amphibious
fish, pit bulls, wolves, a bear... I'm not really sensing the great
evil the story was talking about except for the orc wannabes. It mostly looks like we're
just killing all the wildlife. Whatever. I guess the farmer
doesn't want to take any chances. Now eventually we run into a crypt
and get some skeletons and gargoyles so I guess that's sort of evil,
but this is super-generic. Now, we have something interesting
coming up, but before we get to that, I want to talk about some technical stuff. You may have noticed by now the
interface to this game is kind of tiny. Well, even though I was able to mod
this game to work in widescreen, the user interface uses fixed pixels. At the time of this video, 4K screens
are slowly starting to emerge, so this game is NOT future-proof. At 1080, these menus are pretty small; I'd
hate to imagine it getting even smaller. But, besides that, I ran into
a BIG problem with this game. At first, I was afraid I wasn't even
going to be able to MAKE this episode because my framerate was so bad. I was lucky to get 20 frames a second.
It was dipping down into the teens. I read some advice online on how
to fix it, but none of it worked. This is another one of those weird
games where a system from ten years ago runs it better than a modern one does today. But, I got lucky and figured out the issue. It's the shadows. If you enable real-time
shadows on the characters, the game will start to crawl. None of the other settings matter, but
if you enable blobby simple shadows, it all goes away. Thankfully, that's not
that big a deal visually, so I'm happy with blob shadows
if it means I can play the game. Still, this didn't happen when I
played the game a few years ago. Stuff like this is why I always
get paranoid about changing an OS. This sort of thing ALWAYS happens
with a new operating system. Sometimes there are fixes,
sometimes you're screwed. It's also why I sometimes
feel like punching people who think NEW software is always better.
Doesn't matter what it breaks; it's new! Okay, back to the game. We go through the generic crypt
beating up generic monsters. We get a BIG gargoyle as the miniboss-- BOOM! THAT'S WHAT YOU GET
FOR BEING MADE OUT OF STONE! And then, ah-hah! Another
person to talk to. Who cares? Actually, the last guy I
talked to wasn't that bad. He told me that the Krug loaded up a wagon and crossed a bridge while
it was on fire and... whoops! So I talked to this lady and she's
some sort of scribe. Whatever. But what's this? She wants to
join me in my quest to kick ass? Why yes! You may join me! Here, have some equipment I
was carrying and get suited up. And, just like that, we now have TWO
people fighting the forces of darkness. This is definitely better, don't you think? Combat isn't quite so slow
now. I'm starting to like this! So this continues on for a little while and
we start taking on bigger mobs. Very cool. We finally get to the first town and
my framerate CRAWLS on this cutscene, even though it immediately goes
back to normal as soon as it's done. At first, I thought this was going to chalk
this up to just another computer mystery, but I figured this one out, too. Apparently, when this game has
cutscenes AND antialiasing, it's impossible to record this
at more than 10 frames a second. Seriously, it's impossible. Bandicam,
FRAPS, Dxtory... none of them work. The only way I can imagine to record this would be to stream it into a SECOND
computer and record the feed, because, once again, computers of
today can't handle a 13-year old game. Gonna need TWO computers for that one! Either that or record it through a
camera because that looks slick, right? Oh yeah! Beautiful! It's still a mystery to me why
this works for 99% of the game but NOT on an in-game cutscene. Sometimes I think the entire
industry is conspiring to make antialiasing not work on anything. Okay, back to the game--again! You may not realize it right away but this first town is where
the genius of this game emerges. Let's start with the obvious. You saw how happy I was
with two people fighting. Well, this game lets you have not
just two fighters, not just three, EIGHT! EIGHT FIGHTERS! BAD ASS! Now you don't get all eight at once,
but you get a LOT in this first town. You can recruit one fighter, hire
another one, and... a nature mage? Well, not anymore you're not!
Here's your mace and shield, you can swing it like the rest of us. That's right. Any character in the game you
can repurpose at any time to change classes. Though realistically, it's
best to catch them early on so they don't fall too
far behind everybody else. It's almost like you're one big family. When your lead guy gets better equipment, he can always pass off the old stuff
to the guy underneath him and so on. Everybody gets an upgrade! So if you play your cards right, you can leave
town with five fighters ready to kick ass. But wait! There's more! You know how most Diablo clones have a lot
of loot that enemies drop on the ground? In most of them, they give you too
much and you can't carry it all. Well, instead of cutting back on the loot, Dungeon Siege takes it
to glorious new heights by letting you buy a pack mule to carry
three times what a normal character can. You can even buy more than one
if you're really obsessive. So, the next time you roll into town, it's going to be a payday to sell all
the crap you've picked up along the way. This game awakens your inner-kleptomaniac and brings real purpose to picking
up everything that isn't nailed down. Also, this game has an
automatic pick up button so you don't have to click on every last
item. Your characters can do that for you! Man, I'm getting excited. This game just gets so much
better after the first town. Now a lot of this game is very generic, but there are two aspects about
Dungeon Siege that are done so well, I feel like they propel it
into gaming hall of fame. The first, which you're going
to see a lot of, is the combat. Yes, the combat started off a little weak, but what can I say? Octuple
your fighters, octuple your fun! This is no longer a scrappy hero
and his sidekick. This is a posse! Who cares what the plot is? We're just going to roam the land
delivering the hard taste of justice to all these creatures
that don't deserve to live. And you can customize your party's
behavior almost completely. You can control everyone
individually or as a group, have them stick together or spread out, take formations-- Hup! Hup! Hup! Ah-hup! --play defensively or
attack anything that moves. And, unlike most Diablo clones, you don't have to individually
click on every single enemy. If you want, your fighters
will take the initiative and fight anything that gets near them
without you having to order them around. And that's how I like it. I'm not big into micromanagement. I love the fact that my fighters
won't just stand there brain-dead if they see an enemy coming. YEAH! GET 'EM! YOU DON'T NEED TO STAND AROUND
AND WAIT FOR PERMISSION! In some ways, this blurs the
line between an RTS and an RPG. Now, I've seen some people complain
about how this takes the skill away as opposed to something more like Diablo. My response to that is, "What skill?" There's no "skill" in pressing
a button over and over. The skill in Diablo clones mostly comes
from understanding the combat mechanics-- knowing who to target and when to retreat. And you don't lose any of
that with Dungeon Siege. If anything, at harder difficulties,
I think it takes MORE skill because you're trying to keep up to
eight people alive, not just one. Now, is this game kind of mindless? Yes.
Is this game really grind-y? Yes. But it is so much fun beating
the crap out of everything. This game is so addictive. It
almost never feels like a grind. It's just one long road of
beatdowns after another. And this brings me to the second thing
that Dungeon Siege truly excels in: this game is a journey. I'll
try and explain what I mean. When this game came out,
one of the marketing pitches was that you never needed to load
anything once you've started the game. It has a dynamic streaming system built in where you could theoretically
play the game from start to finish without seeing one loading screen. Now when I first heard that, my
thoughts were that sounded convenient, but loading screens aren't that big a deal. What I didn't realize is this actually
changes the whole feel of the game on a subtle level. Dungeon Siege is an extremely linear game. Sometimes you have side-paths
or a couple forks that rejoin, but for the most part, it's
just one gigantic path. You're always moving forward. Except for some tiny exceptions, you never really have a reason
to backtrack in this game. I mean, you can. You can walk all the way
back if you want to. It's all connected. But it's this sense of moving forward
and experiencing every inch of the trail --no time transitions, no
fast travel, no teleporting-- that really gives the game an organic feel and adds something to it
that's hard to put into words. On a more tangible level, this makes
visits to towns MUCH more meaningful. The game is paced so that, by the time you
reach a town, you are loaded down with loot, and every visit is a huge relief. It also means there's no
saving for a rainy day. When you come to a new town,
it's like the Oregon Trail. You want to spend everything you have
getting all the best equipment for your party because it could be HOURS out in the
field before you come across another town. I frigging love this! There's no instant gratification
of teleporting back to town. It forces you to commit to your decisions
and it increases the tension to the game. I mean yeah, you can always walk
back to town if you want to, but do you really want to
walk 20 minutes both ways? Not worth it, especially since this
game ANOTHER thing I love in RPGs: NO ENEMY RESPAWNING! Everything you kill STAYS DEAD. If you walk backwards, this
turns into a hiking simulator. Bup-badup-badup-badup-badup-badup-badoo. Just keep moving forward. Now, the downside to all this is
when you DO finally make it to town, if you want to optimize your party, you're
going to be spending a lot of time there. I can spend anywhere from 15 to 25
minutes JUST selling and buying gear and figuring out which
fighters should get what. This does get a little tedious, I admit, but, hey, you only have to
do it every couple hours. Plus, once you have a full
team with good equipment, you are officially a wrecking crew. The beatdowns never stop
in this game. I love it. But this game isn't without
problems. It has lots of quirks. One thing I didn't notice right away
is that the foliage near your character turns transparent as you get closer
so you can see what you're doing. That's fine, except
they disappear altogether. Watch me walk through this tree. TA-DA! And for my next magic trick, we
have water-breathing dwarves. This puddle is shallow enough that
most characters can still breathe walking through it, but not dwarves. He's content to just
chill there, apparently. Speaking of the dwarves, I do like how
they gave them a separate running animation and didn't just scale down the default one. I'd make my whole crew dwarves if I could. Now this isn't really a problem but
something else I noticed is that, in the world of Dungeon Siege, bows fire more slowly and do
more damage than crossbows which fire faster but do less damage. I honestly have to wonder if the programmers
misread the design documents or something since this the exact opposite of reality. Also, the minigun damage is WAY too low. And I was praising it earlier
but the combat AI isn't perfect. There will frequently be times where
some characters will just decide they don't need to join in on the fight
even if you tell them to automatically. Yeah, don't worry about your buddies
getting attacked. You're good. You're here as an impartial observer.
That's why we brought you along. Now probably my biggest annoyance
about this game is the elevators. Occasionally, you'll run into
moving platforms or lifts that you'll have to put your crew on. Sometimes these are big enough to get
everybody on board. Most times it's a mess. Dammit! No! This mine section is the worst. This is also one area where it really pays off
to have archers instead of melee fighters, especially with those
explosive barrels lying around. No matter how tough a
fighter you think you are, you get in a fight with a barrel full
of gunpowder, you're going to lose. [explosion] Yeah, see? On that note, I find it funny that
not only can you keep playing the game if your main character dies,
but you can disband them, too. There's no advantage in doing so, but can you imagine other RPGs where
you can just kick out the main character from the group if you didn't
want them? It would be surreal. And let's not forget the
title itself: Dungeon Siege. It doesn't amount to much. Even though you spend about
half your time underground, you only go in a couple
actual dungeons in this game. The best parts are where you're deep
in the wilderness aboveground anyway. They may as well have named
this "Action Fantasy Game 2002". The title "Dungeon Siege" just piles
on to the generic fantasy template the rest of this game has. Ooh, a dragon head. Yeah,
that's real scary, game. While there are a few small exceptions, I
want to say 95% of the enemies in this game you could find in Dungeons & Dragons. The game even has a Beholder
in it. What more do you want? So, game designers, remember: Want
to make a Dungeons & Dragons game but don't have money for
a license? No problem! Okay, a giant skull. You got me
there, game. That's original. So, how was the music? Well, I have mixed feelings
about the music to Dungeon Siege. On the plus side, there's a lot of it. I want to say there's over 50 different
tracks for different areas in the game. It's generally okay, nothing mindblowing,
but it fits the mood pretty well. Sort of. I should say that the music
fits the environment well. A recurring problem with the music is that it frequently plays this calm, slow-paced
tune in the middle of an all-out skirmish. I'm going to mute the sound
effects to some different areas. Tell me if you think this fits
what you're seeing on screen. [slow piano and string music] [medium-paced string music] [slow bell music] I have to wonder if they just asked
the composer to make the score before he knew what this game was about. Like they just handed him some
concept art of the environments and told him to hop to it. I mean, this music is pleasant but a
lot of it is not really connecting. Now, I understand they
probably didn't want to do this because this is a medieval
fantasy game but let's face it, you could have constant heavy metal playing [heavy metal music]
you could have constant heavy metal playing [heavy metal music]
and it would fit this game just fine. [heavy metal music] Now this game also
has a multiplayer component but I have never actually played
the multiplayer to this game for one simple reason: YOU CAN ONLY CONTROL ONE CHARACTER!
WHAT'S THE POINT OF THAT?! One single player is such a downgrade. But to complicate things, the
multiplayer to this game is HUGE. It contains its own original map,
completely separate from the campaign and it's somewhere close to double
the size of the single player game. I've never heard of something
like this happening before where the multiplayer has MUCH more content
than a game with a single-player focus also. I don't mean a better experience--there's
plenty of games like that-- I mean more of it. That's frustrating to have this
massive portion of the game locked away behind ho-hum multiplayer. I guess it has THAT in
common with the Secret World. Well thankfully, Dungeon
Siege is extremely moddable and there's been a mod made to enable
the experience for single players. It's almost like
getting a sequel to the game. Overall, the experience is
fantastic and in some ways, it's almost better than
the normal single player. That said, the multiplayer map is much less
linear which makes it better AND worse. Choosing where you
want to go is a lot of fun, but sometimes the wide massive
areas feel like you're mowing a lawn to try and see everything in the level. It doesn't help that your
movement speed is kind of slow. Oddly enough, Dungeon Siege is
a game that I think does better when you're on more narrow paths. The multiplayer also has teleporters
because the size is so massive which I'm not crazy about but they're used
very sparingly so it's not too big a deal. It is a big deal getting everybody
on the actual teleporter, though. Look how tiny this thing is. I guess I shouldn't complain since
I'm playing with a full party in a map that's meant for one person, but this is easily the worst
part of the game right here. Dammit... OH, COME ON! Anyway, the multiplayer
is mostly a giant remix of all the stuff from the single-player campaign
but it really feels like its own world also. It also has a new area that's
not in the single-player at all: a massive desert full of mysteries. Now that it's any better but the
multiplayer actually has a story, too, where you're recovering these artifacts
to unlock this ancient chamber which contains some unique enemies
also not in the single-player. Now I wanted to show this to you
but I had to make a judgment call if it was really worth the extra 15
hours on a game I've already played to show you one or two clips, so you'll just have to find that out
on your own if you're interested. Same goes for the secret chicken level. And while it's probably the best,
this is just one mod of many. I'm going to have to try some
more out myself later on. I know one group remade Ultima V
and VI entirely in Dungeon Siege. There's such a wealth of
content out there for this game, though due to its age, it's
starting to get harder to find. All in all, Dungeon Siege
is a fantastic experience if you like exploring the road ahead,
great combat, and not much else. ["May the road you follow be pleasant
and your vengeance complete."] Exactly. But, to be completely fair, while
I didn't think much of the story, there was one character I remembered
from playing this game multiple times. Ladies and gentlemen, say hello to Jeriah. He runs a trading post out
in the middle of the woods. ["Who are you, then? Another of that
short goblin cuss's errand runners? ["You tell that little green snotball I
don't have any high and mighty magic staff ["and I never did.
I don't traffic in exotics. ["And even if I DID have one, I'm not
gonna go trudging through the Eastern SWAMP ["lookin' to sell it
to some damned FOREIGNER! ["Now, if there's anything
else I can get ya today, ["maybe I'll consider NOT tossin'
yer ugly butt out into the SNOW!"] Also, I'd like to point out that
he has a human head on his shelf. So that's Dungeon Siege. Now I would end this here, but hey,
this game turned into a franchise. So I want to cover the rest of it, too. So let's get this all out in one episode. Prepare to be Dungeon Siege'd. ["Awww..."] Next up is the expansion: Legends of Aranna. It has you fighting in a new continent
and it's mostly just more of the same, though they do add a new jungle environment. It also adds some nice features like automatically calculating a weapon's
DPS, auto-allocating potions, backpacks, dinosaur pets, and it has a climactic
ending and an obsession with clock gears. It's a solid addition to the game. And, this is nothing
you haven't heard before but I wanted to point out that
this is an expansion, not DLC. It mostly reuses the same assets,
has a few small additions, but it takes about 15 to 20
hours to play through this. For the few of you out there who
don't understand why a lot of gamers don't like DLC, this is a huge part of it. This is what a lot of older
gamers expect from a new release. Legends of Aranna was a typical expansion
for the time, not an amazing one. But so many DLCs are for $10 or $15 and all
they do is add a couple hours to gameplay. Would you rather pay $15
for 2 hours of gameplay or pay $40 for a full and complete game? The people who complain about DLC do it not because they like to
complain about every little thing, but because they've already seen
how much better gaming can be and think other gamers are
tools for accepting less. Okay, moving on. Let's get to the big one: "Dungeon Siege II". I actually don't have as much to say
about this one compared to the original. It added a lot of new things, but it
lost some important stuff along the way. The combat is much more bombastic with
special effects flying all over the place. I admit, I'm fond of this one. BOOM! The game also tried a lot
harder to flesh out a story and while I think the voice
acting is all pretty good, I can't help but wonder
if it was a wasted effort. Hey, fantasy fans. Stop me if
you've heard this one before. The plot to Dungeon Siege II is
that there's this ruthless warlord who's aligned himself with an evil sorcerer and he's pillaging the land in
search of a powerful artifact which will give him ultimate
power and destroy the land. Oh, you HAVE heard that one in about
a hundred other fantasy stories? Yeah, me too. Oh, and remember how Dungeon Siege I
had lots of token fantasy creatures? Well, one thing it didn't have was elves. Well, Dungeon Siege II solved that problem. You start off fighting alongside an elf, then later go to an elf village, then see dark elves, dryad tree elves, elves, elves, elves. Christ. Now I think the best change of II
over I has to be the magic system. Magic is a totally viable option in Dungeon
Siege II and it all flows a lot faster. So, what's bad? Well, the first thing is they reduced
your fighter cap from eight to FOUR for your first time through, but
if you play the game over and over, you can bump it up to six. Still, I think that's kind of weak
as I want MORE fighters, not LESS. MORE! And they decided to add respawning
enemies which I am not a fan of. As always, I like my enemies to
stay dead. They don't do that here. Oh, and the AI got dumbed down so your
units can no longer take initiative. Yeah, that's right! Just stand there! PERFECT! Finally, they added frequent teleporter
checkpoints like in Diablo II so you can warp back to town constantly. While I think the teleporting
animation looks pretty sweet, this destroys that sense of
a journey the original had. I liked having to make
decisions out in the field rather than constantly run back
home to town, so that's a big loss. I think this is example where making
the game TOO convenient for players actually makes it worse. All-in-all, I think II is a good game
and had a lot of objective improvements, but it doesn't feel as unique
the way the first one did and it took away some of
the original's strengths. Although I will say II has one of
the best game TRAILERS I've seen. They absolutely nailed the
music and direction for this. This trailer is better than the game itself. So, not long afterwards, II got
its own expansion: "Broken World". They cut back on the budget for this one since they got new voice
actors for all the characters, but overall, I think it's pretty good. Like Legends of Aranna, it's
mostly just more of the same. I actually found myself a little more
interested in the story to this one since the idea is: you beat the bad guy in the last game but
it kind of wrecked the planet in the process so everyone blames you. You are
not popular at all in this game. ["It's because of you that my
poor Arlen no longer has a mother. ["GET OUT OF MY SIGHT!"] Okay, okay. Also, it has more dwarves
than the other games combined so it gets bonus points for that. After that, there was a Playstation
Portable game: "Throne of Agony". I never played this one but
it was just a mobile game and you only controlled one character
so I probably didn't miss too much. I think it has the coolest looking
cover out of any of the games, though. Next, we of course have
the Dungeon Siege movie by everyone's favorite director, Uwe Boll. I have not seen this since every review
I've read on it says it's terrible. And I have no reason to doubt them. The fact that they gave the Dungeon Siege
movie a STORY was their first mistake. The story to Dungeon
Siege has no value at all. I'm not even sure how you would
make a movie based on the game. I think it would have to
be an experimental film where you cover a group of fighters
on a trail for an hour and a half watching them beat up everything.
That's what the game was. And finally, we have
"Dungeon Siege III". My my. I read an article before about
how games that release demos tend to have worse sales than
if they don't release one at all and I feel like Dungeon Siege III is
a textbook example of why that is. I've only played the demo and...
wow. This series took a turn. I don't know the full
story, but at some point, Obsidian acquired
the rights to Dungeon Siege and decided to put their own spin on it. Remember how I complained
that Dungeon Siege II lowered the party count to 4 to 6 fighters? Well, Obsidian decided
to continue that trend and lowered the party to one and a half,
depending on how you want to count it. A helper character and
ONE fighter you control. The entire strength of the Dungeon
Siege series is having your own squad and they got rid of that. Hey, how about we make a sequel to
"Wolfenstein" with no Nazis in it, and a sequel to "StarCraft" with
no aliens while we're at it? The controls and camera are a mess
compared to the previous games. The art design is gorgeous
but this isn't Dungeon Siege. This game is a hack-and-slash, but that's literally the only
thing it has in common with it. Except for the lore, but the Dungeon
Siege lore is worthless anyway. I'm not sure what to say here. Maybe this game is okay. Or rather this game MIGHT be okay if
it wasn't named "Dungeon Siege III". So as a Dungeon Siege sequel,
I give this a failing grade. So, yeah, we're done here. This is the Dungeon Siege
episode and whatever this is, it's no longer Dungeon Siege. We got a little lost here. ["Yer about as welcome here as a badger in
a stone-cold outhouse, you know that?!"] Okay, awards time. First award-- Best beatdowns You wouldn't think this would be enough to
carry a game but, wow, for me, it sure was. Winding road. This game is a medieval road
trip and I love it for that. I'd like to see more games adopt
this style of one continuous journey. And finally-- All-time favorite. This game really clicks with me. It does some things really
well I just haven't seen since. That's the thing I don't understand. There must be a hundred
clones inspired by Diablo, but to date, I don't know of a single
game with gameplay like Dungeon Siege. This is squad-based Diablo. This is a fantastic idea that's
begging to be copied by another game. but I just haven't seen anything like it. Maybe there's a game like this that's
come out that I just don't know about but I've been looking. What Diablo clones can I have
eight characters on screen all fighting for me at the same time? Now some people might point
out that some Diablo clones let you have summonable
creatures to help you fight but I don't think you
want to play that card. Because if you want to
play as a Summoning Mage, Dungeon Siege lets you have up to
SIXTEEN CHARACTERS fighting for you. I don't get it. It seems like every
game that lets you have a big party is either turn-based combat or
else careful tactical combat. I don't want that. I want my crew to
just run in there and SMASH SOME HEADS! NOBODY WANTS TO BE THE NEXT
DUNGEON SIEGE! WHY NOT?! At the start, I said this was sort
of the opposite of the Secret World. That's because it has
great combat, a weak story, and is a single-player game but lets
you control multiple characters. I'm not really into MMOs and
this is a big part of it. Every time I see a game with
slow combat, I always think, "Gee, this would be so much better if I
could control four or five more people... "like Dungeon Siege!" This game has ruined most MMOs
for me and a lot of other RPGs. It's not for everyone, but man, for others, if you can play a game where your crew just
beats things senseless nonstop for hours, it does things to your brain. You start to think, "Things are all
right. Everything's going to be okay. "We can just beat up everything.
All our problems are solved." Okay, that's it! Stay tuned for the next episode for the
most hardcore Christmas game I've played. And cookies! [medieval music] [bombastic medieval music] "Hammer of Stabbing". Why yes!
I believe I WILL take one of those.
Dungeon Siege was quality. Wasn't a massive open world game like we're used to now, but the combat was visually impressive, the gear progression was satisfying, and the large party, stunning (at the time) visuals in a seamless world with no loading screens was a marvel to behold back in the day.
This game was my shit when I was a kid. The multiplayer problem was a lot better when the servers were filled, but I would always look forward to come home and play this. I was damn excited when my dad got me and my brother separate copies.
I loved unlocking the secret chicken level, me and my brother got a character (Wendyyyyyyyyyyyyyy's) to max level and stats, together we found an exploit in multiplayer to level characters quickly to 60 (involving guards and skeletons), starting new characters with a theme was always thrilling, and I have fond memories of the goblin area and just exploring the massive multiplayer world.
Didn't get to into Dungeon Siege II as I actually only bought it in 2012 for myself, but glad it kept to the same play style unlike the PoS that is Dungeon Siege III.
We were fairly excited for this game before release. A Diablo-clone from the Total Annihilation developers sounded like a great idea. They definitely knew how to do excess.
Unfortunately, the multiplayer sucked. It's a direct result of the party system. There were 2 or 3 of us playing at a time, but the game is balanced around there being 6-8 characters in the party. Halfway through the game it just became impossible to progress normally.
Instead, someone started working on a mod that would turn the game into a screensaver by giving the AI unlimited aggro range and auto-equipping new gear.
The same guy made a great video of 'most anticipated games' which is essentially the best overview of mostly obscure but potentially very fun / brilliant games.
Check it out https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pa29EM-YTwo
The long linear journey has caught my interest. I only ever played a few token minutes from a demo CD back in the day. Time for a real go.