The Rise and Fall of Dungeon Siege

[Music] in the realm of action-oriented videogames few are as Zen as dungeon crawlers even at their most complex demolishing and looting enemies and the likes of Diablo or torch light is as hypnotic as it is satisfying their gameplay loops providing a perfect mixture of habitual repetition and utter excitement and to a small yet passionate subset of PC gamers during the early 2000s few games offered a better blend of these elements than Dungeon Siege created by gas powered games a Redmond based development studio led by the legendary Chris Taylor Dungeon Siege received significant praise upon its release in 2002 for its unique party-based gameplay and its seamless loading screen free world resulting in a dedicated player base quickly rallying around its design yet even amongst its most ardent fans it also received significant criticism for its bare-bones story as well as its tendency to play itself as a result its creators worked hard to ensure its sequel featured a more impressive narrative and a deeper more involving combat system upon its release in 2005 the end result of their efforts wouldn't upend its genre but it would still prove a hit among fans and continue to inch the series closer to role-playing stardom unfortunately after the release of a decent albeit gimped spinoff on the PlayStation Portable the following year the series would proceed to go dormant for half a decade in addition to being adapted into one of the worst video game movies to ever reach theaters when it would finally reemerge it would do so under the guidance of a different studio and end up being utterly unlike what had come before it this is the rise and fall of Dungeon Siege [Music] [Music] like so many other video game series Dungeon Siege was created by a large and talented group of individuals all of whom believed fully in his potential and contributed steadfastly to its development throughout the years it was active yet among this group there was one person who played a more pivotal role in its development than most Chris Taylor an avid video game player and designer from a young age Taylor got his start in the industry in British Columbia where he spent his time working on sports games for distinctive software in the late 80s after this Taylor moved to Washington State to join cave dog entertainment in the mid 90s where he and the rest of the studio staff went on to release Total Annihilation a futuristic realtime strategy game set in the midst of a galactic war at a time when the genre was still coming into its own Total Annihilation wowed fans and critics alike with its fully three-dimensional units and terrain as well as its bevy of innovative gameplay mechanics and concepts influencing many contemporaries to follow in his footsteps and elevating its creators almost overnight into strategy gaming eminency eager to try and keep Total Annihilation player base happy cave dog staff would proceed to tweak and add new content to it over the months that would follow its release but after completing work on the game's first expansion in 1998 many within the studio became anxious to move on from the realm of real-time strategy and try their hand at a diablo ask action role-playing game they didn't yet have a name for what it would be but they knew that they wanted it to be party based take place in an expansive 3d world bereft of loading screens and innovate heavily upon the traditional role-playing game interface in order to make venturing through its locales as seamless and immersive of an experience as possible one thing led to another and after much deliberation Taylor and a sizable number of cave dog staff struck out on their own to establish gas powered games and began working on what would become Dungeon Siege from the get-go the newly formed studio had lofty expectations of how quickly it would be able to complete its opus believing that it would be able to get Dungeon Siege onto store shelves in just two years yet the longer the game's development progressed the more it became apparent that this wasn't going to happen in a post-mortem on Gamasutra written shortly after dungeon sieges release for toast key akka of gas powered games would attribute a large degree of the project's extended length to the team's extreme ambitiousness arguing that in the long run it caused the team as much pain as a created pleasure everyone within the studio desired to try and utterly outdo the competition and this desire often translated into them conceiving brilliant original ideas on how to make Dungeon Siege stand apart from it instead of allowing the player to start out the game single-player campaign as one of several predefined classes for example the team decided to make it so that players would start as a generic classless character and gradually evolve themselves into a different type of fighter they wanted to become by repeatedly making use of specific skills or abilities likewise while trying to figure out realistic ways to let players hoard more loot when out in the field and not feel like they were battling with their inventory sizes something that Taylor constantly found himself doing when playing Diablo they stumbled upon the idea of having a trusty pack mule carry their excess loot but for every pack mule that made it off the drawing board and into the game the team feature creeped a dozen more ideas that ended up being deemed unnecessary or too difficult to implement causing the project schedule to gradually slide further and further off-track compounding issues further was the fact that nobody on the team had ever truly made a role-playing game before or had any experience running their own development studio and when it came to making dungeon sieges world free of loading screens there were no shortage of problems that needed to be overcome at the 2003 Game Developers Conference the company would detail how in addition to tasking its engineers with crafting a uniquely powerful engine this loading screen free directive forced its level designers to completely rethink their production pipeline unlike most other games with buffer provided by loading screens enabled developers to stick levels next to each other without concern as to whether they float naturally into each other the lack of loading between dungeon sieges levels meant that all of them needed to fit together seamlessly thus in order to ensure that they did the team adopted an assembly line like approach to crafting them where each designer worked exclusively on a specific aspect of every single level such as its environment type layout or lighting only to hand it off to the next designer for them to do their part this way everyone became intimately familiar with how every level was constructed and made sure they all could be put together without issue later on all of this resulted in Dungeon Siege development cycle lasting for years instead of two and the staff at gas powered games experiencing some of the worst crunch that they had ever inflicted upon themselves yet they continued to truck ahead out of both a love for what they were making as well as each other and before anyone knew it numerous publishers were knocking on their door willing to help market and fund their work in an interview with games TM in 2015 Taylor would recall being surprised at how many outfits were interested in partnering up with them after having their heads down in the trench solo for so long this burst of support was hard for them to fully grasp but in the end they chose to go with Microsoft after the tech giants then vice-president of game publishing at fries personally reached out to him and expressed how excited they were to expand into the PC games business finally after repeated delays and an intense amount of fine-tuning both parties managed to get Dungeon Siege out the door in April of 2002 [Music] [Music] pundants almost uniformly agreed that even though it wore its love of Diablo too strongly on its sleeve to be considered revolutionary and was fairly simple when compared to some of his genres more tactical offerings it still made for a very enjoyable time whether done online with friends or offline with a menagerie of player-controlled characters pillaging and looting ones way through dungeon sieges environments was a considerable amount of fun with every enemy encounter flying by and a joyful heartbeat of thrashing metal and spells much praise was also directed at the game's user interface which allowed one to reposition and scale most of its elements as well as perform a variety of other forward-thinking tricks previously unseen in most other dungeon crawlers and no complaints were had about the fact that all the while one ventured through the game's gorgeous environments one never had to worry about encountering a single loading bar most people's compliments ended however when it came to dungeon sieges writing set within the charming but comparatively generic kingdom of ebb almost everyone agreed that his story was bland to the point of being forgettable and seemed to exist solely to provide the player with an excuse as to why they were venturing through its varied locales this had been partially by design yet also partially by necessity while few within the studio had massive storytelling ambitions from the start of its development the complexity of the games technology had also prevented them from being able to include as ambitious a story as they wanted once they were actually ready to start implementing it many also Bamonte how easy it eventually became to program one's companion characters to fight and kill on the players behalf without needing to give further directives with many of its critics claiming that this resulted in the game often feeling as if it was playing itself these critiques would hit gas powered games hard' and make it begin evaluating almost immediately how it could address them yet just as hard-hitting would be its financial performance despite the studio's best efforts to make Dungeon Siege a massive hit the game sales wouldn't generate quite as big of a splash as its creators wanted it to the disdain from critics for its story and tendency to play itself undoubtedly played roll in this under performance though Taylor would personally pin a large part a bit on dungeon sieges scale and interviews after its release expressing that had both himself and the rest of gas powered games attempted to rein in Dungeon seizures design and make it smaller and more concentrated instead of trying to compete with his genres most expansive titles more players may have been motivated to check it out despite shooting for the stars Dungeon Siege was far from a diablo killer but it was still a great game and a solid foundation for what was to come [Music] I like many of its dungeon-crawling contemporaries Dungeon Siege was followed by an expansion pack after its release titled legends of Arana the expansion came courtesy of Mad doc software a new england-based developer that had previously worked on real time strategy games such as Star Trek Armada 1 & 2 as well as Empire Earth the art of conquest speaking to GameSpy ahead of the expansions launch tailor would explain how he considered mad doc founder Ian Davis to be one of his most trusted friends and that after deciding to forgo making legends of Arana themselves both he and the rest of gas powered games agreed that Davis's team would be best suited to develop it in their place when legends of Arana arrived in November of 2003 however many were divided on the quality of Maddox work with a lengthy story set shortly after the events of the base game a variety of new tweaks and improvements to its mechanics and an assortment of new weapons and features for players to take advantage of in the midst of battle there was little argument that it was lacking an original content or value as each copy of the expansion also came packaged with a full version of the original Dungeon Siege but after spending dozens upon dozens of hours exploring every nook and cranny stowed inside gas powered games original title and a year and a half waiting for the expansion to arrive most gamers had already played the original Dungeon Siege wanted something a little more revolutionary they wanted something that would address the base game's most glowing problems with rigor in an attempt to offer a significantly better experience and while some felt that legends of Arana provided this a fair few did not [Music] nonetheless maddox expansion helped keep it series nested in both the CD players of many a gamer and the public consciousness of the industry as a whole while gas powered games figured out how to carry it forward even though the studio remained incredibly proud of what it had managed to accomplish with the original Dungeon Siege its staff knew that if they wanted the role-playing game sequel to shatter its sales records they would need to thoroughly address all of the issues that players had taken with it another half step was out of the question they needed to provide their fans with a game that would where it's respect for their critical input as if it were a badge of honor as a result from the moment they began working in full force on Dungeon Siege to the studio staff made it their top priority to have it contained a much richer story and a deeper more involved combat system and its predecessor in order to achieve the former the team tasks themselves to create more dialogue and cutscenes for the sequel's non playable characters to partake in than ever before as well as further fleshed out the franchise's lore likewise for the latter the teams significantly overhauled how one controlled their party's actions making it so that when in combat players would be forced to play a much more active role in directing them instead of letting them go about their business with near autonomy in addition the team took it upon themselves to craft the sequel's environment so that they would be more open-ended and nonlinear as well as allow players to achieve greater levels of personalization when customizing one's party members through a variety of new means such as skill trees and eager to capitalize on the success of the first games pack mules they also brought a host of exotic pets into its fold for players to both nurture and use on their opponents when in the heat of battle all of these changes made for a considerable amount of work yet in the end gas powered games managed to pull through and complete Dungeon Siege - in a year less than it had taken the first game to come together while this was still more time than they initially wanted to spend on the sequel the studio staff were proud all the same of what they managed to accomplish as worse critics most found that the improvements they had made to Dungeon Siege two's combat and customizability had both succeeded in furthering its level of depth as well as reducing the sense that one was steering at a fantastical screensaver instead of playing a game and few disagreed that its writing while not quite up there with the best that its genre had to offer was nonetheless a step in the right direction when compared to what the first Dungeon Siege had offered with its litany of main quests and side quest alike stringing together an actual legitimate narrative for one to consider instead of just a series of events designed to shuffle one through multiple locations making everything even better was the fact that the players companions now exerted personalities that were thicker than paper and spoke colorfully among themselves while out adventuring it still wasn't as deep or varied as some fans wanted it to be and many found that its engine while still allowing for some very pretty environments by the standards of its year of release was beginning to show its age but even amongst us harshest critics there was little disagreement that gas powered games had created another high quality experience [Music] after Dungeon Siege two's release the series publishing rights switched hands from Microsoft to take to well the new york-based publisher wouldn't take significant advantage of these rights in the long run it would nonetheless help oversee the release of two new Dungeon Siege experiences towards the end of 2006 the first was an expansion to dungeon siege 2 titled broken world developed internally by gas powered games broken world much like legends of utter honor before it offered an original story set after the events with a base game as well as a mix of new features designed to further enrich its proceedings in the same vein as legends of Arana however these offerings ultimately failed to rouse players in the same way that gas powered games prior works managed to with pundits decrying its dungeons for being frustratingly simple and repetitive and its overall length for being far too short upon its release many also felt that its graphics were even more in need of a refresh than before especially when it came to the quality of its character models broken world had the potential to highlight everything about the base game that was great and further illustrate gas powered games commitment to making it series better and better but instead it did more in the opposite direction and unintentionally accentuated its weaker aspects after only a couple of months broken world would be followed up by Dungeon Siege throne of agony for the PlayStation Portable developed by supervillain Studios an Irvine based developer established in 2004 by a collection of former Neversoft employees throne of agony provided PlayStation gamers with a significantly more pared down experience than its PC brethren instead of allowing one to gradually mould their characters class and attributes over time and emphasizing strategic party based gameplay throne of agony only gave players the ability to choose from three pre-made characters and featured a more action intensive combat system that one largely played solo or with a single other friend via ad hoc all of this made for a significantly toned down take on the Dungeon Siege series and anything that had come before it yet while many players would express disappointment at this simplicity when they got their hands on thrown of agony most would concede in the end that it was still a decent experience and a solid addition to the playstation portable library following this gas powered games would move on from the Dungeon Siege series for the first time in a decade and try its hand at a number of new properties the first most successful of these would be Supreme Commander designed by the studio to be a spiritual successor to Total Annihilation Supreme Commander impressed realtime strategy aficionados with its high degree of complexity and wealth of innovative new gameplay features with this strategic zoom mechanic which enabled players to dart in and out of any point of the map and absorb critical information about his layout with the bat of an eye proving exceptionally popular afterwards the studio would proceed to work on an expansion and sequel to Supreme Commander an ill-fated MOBA titled demigod and an intergalactic themed role-playing game inspired by Dungeon Siege titled space siege the latter had come into being after gas powered games became inspired to try and transplant its original dungeon crawlers gameplay into a more futuristic setting believing that doing so would allow it to explore more interesting narrative and mechanical possibilities than it had been able to within the confines of a high fantasy backdrop it was an exciting concept in theory yet in practice most players found that what space siege offered in terms of its more advanced and nuanced setting was more than offset by its lack of polish while it featured a few clever ideas brimming with potential such as allowing one to upgrade their abilities using cybernetics at the cost of their humanity critics generally found these ideas to be more poorly implemented than not and the game as a whole to be more tedious than engaging Taylor would attribute these failings to the speed with which the game was created explaining that both himself and the rest of gas powered games were so enamored with the idea of sending Dungeon Siege to space and so confident that they had the right technology and experience necessary to do so that they forgot to give the project the development time needed to become truly great at the end of the day however most fans agreed that for all its problems space siege was still far easier to stomach than what had happened to Dungeon Siege while it was in development for during the previous year German filmmaker voova bull had released the series first cinematic adaptation in the name of the king a dungeon siege tale featuring a high profile cast that included Jason Statham Ron Perlman and Ray Liotta yet extremely lackluster production values and writing in the name of the king had proved a complete and utter flop upon its release outside of Taylor who would later express that for all his problems witnessing his series get adapted for the silver screen was still incredibly thrilling to watch almost everyone agreed that it made for an abysmal movie watching experience bull would later follow up in the name of the king with two direct-to-video sequels the first subtitled two worlds would swap out Statham for Dolph Lundgren while the second the last mission would exchange Lundgren for Dominic Purcell yet by the time two worlds had released the attention of most Dungeon Siege fans had already shifted away from Bowles filmography towards dungeon siege 3 excuse me is there an important meeting going on here absolutely originally Taylor had revealed that plans were in motion to produce a third Dungeon Siege title in 2008 stating briefly in an interview with Eurogamer Germany that while it would follow in its predecessors footsteps he wanted it to offer a more simplified experience over what had come before it but it would only be in 2010 when Square Enix announced to the surprise of many fans that it had both acquired the rights to the series and had entrusted obsidian entertainment with developing dungeon siege 3 for the PlayStation 3 Xbox 360 and PC that the threequel became a certain reality for Square Enix Dungeon Siege three represented a prime opportunity for it to strengthen its influence in the Western games market speaking with Silicon era in 2011 squares David Hoffman would explain how much like what it had done with Deus Ex the company was looking for inactive PC centric series that it could reintroduce to modern consumers through the consoles and Dungeon Siege which had been inactive for some time and belonged to a genre rarely seen on Microsoft or Sony's consoles seemed a perfect fit for its ambitions on the other hand for obsidian the project represented another opportunity for it to flex its old-school design sensibilities and show that its knack for making role-playing games was as sharp as ever unlike gas powered games whose founders had cut their teeth on the realm of real-time strategy obsidians founders had earned their stripes in the late 90s developing role-playing classics like Fallout and I Swindell before striking out on their own and had spent the previous decade continuing to work with titles of similar nature of all the developers that Square could have chosen to work on the threequel and gas powered games place obsidian was more than a solid choice but in order to expertly continue a series like Dungeon Siege on both PCs and home consoles a large degree of reinvention was necessary and the reinventions that obsidian would choose to go with would be rather dramatic instead of allowing players to control a large party of companion characters the studio decided to take a page out of throne of agony and make it so that Dungeon Siege three featured a more visceral action-oriented combat system underscored by a heavily zoomed in camera view and allowed players to choose from just one of four predefined characters with them only being able to have one other character accompanying them during its single-player campaign from obsidians perspective these changes were about more than just making things welcoming for players who didn't have a mouse and keyboard they were also heartfelt attempts to try and make a better more involved experience than gas powered games had been able to accomplish with its own titles and allow it's designed to be more conducive to telling a richer story by only allowing players to control a small predefined set of characters for example the studio argued that it would be able to make the world around them react to their actions in a far more personal manner that if players built up their characters however they wanted nonetheless as news of all these changes trickled out to the public fans were left tormented they wanted Dungeon Siege three to deliver and trusted in obsidians judgment but everything that they were presented with made it seem as if the series was being dramatically dumbed down so it could appeal to the two consoles wider audience unfortunately when the game eventually launched in June of 2011 many found these fears to have been well placed while few deemed it to be outright terrible and some even praised its combat system as being well-designed for what it was most agreed that the host of changes of sitting had brought to the game ultimately made for a worse experience than what gas powered games had offered before it changes aside many also found its quests and world to be frustratingly bland its story disappointingly thin and its multiplayer mode needlessly restrictive with the latter forcing players to use a character whose progress would only be tracked within its confines instead of allowing them to import and continue using whatever character they chose to play as in the game single-player campaign in an interview with games industry in 2016 obsidians Fergus hearts would express regret over this particular aspect of the game explaining that they were limited in what they could do with it due to their limited budget at the time and that had they possessed little more financially way he would have pushed for a more rewarding and feature-rich multiplayer experience it was a heartbreaking conclusion to a series that had previously been able to provide his fanbase with such tremendous joy yet even more heartbreak was on the way and this time it was coming solely for gas powered games oil people to play a card game with their livelihoods is not smart a few months after Dungeon Siege three speculation briefly mounted that obsidian was developing another entry in the series after the studio began teasing a new project using a splash screen emblazoned with the number four within a matter of days however it was revealed that this project was actually a new role-playing game called pillars of eternity and that obsidian in lieu of seeking support from a publisher was launching a Kickstarter campaign to help fund its development the campaign proved immensely successful launching obsidian into an era of creative and financial prosperity the likes of which had had never known before and convincing even more Studios to take advantage of crowdfunding including gas powered games following the release of Supreme Commander 2 the studio had struggled to keep itself afloat the recession had hit its finances hard and outside of a two-year stint working on Age of Empires Online for Microsoft seemingly every project in embarked on either ended up being cancelled by its publisher or indefinitely delayed once it became clear it was going to be too costly sensing that it needed to engineer a miracle if it wanted to survive gas powered games announced in January of 2013 that it would be kick-starting an original video game concept titled wild man described by the studio as an evolutionary role-playing game in which the player would alternate between dungeon crawler s gameplay and real-time strategy s gameplay wild men represented all of gas powered games hopes and creative endeavors wrapped into a single project it was to be the studio's final triumphant affirmation of his greatest abilities as a game developer in an industry that no longer seemed to favor it yet the moment wild man's Kickstarter campaign went live it immediately became clear that its fans weren't about to make up for this slack while they contributed earnestly to the project their donations paled in both size and number two what the likes of pillars of eternity had received after going for years without another Supreme Commander or a proper Dungeon Siege they simply wanted more from the former two series rather than something completely new as a result with a heavy heart gas powered games decided to layoff 40 of its staff within the first few days of the Kickstarter's launch and canceled the campaign outright just as it was about to end [Music] in an unexpected twist gas powered games would go on to be purchased by wargaming shortly after wild man's cancellation and was rebranded to wargaming Seattle while this move single-handedly saved the studio from what would have likely been certain death and provided its staff with a long-awaited sense of financial security it also ended its life as a purveyor of new and original role-playing games with his staff spending the next several years working exclusively on internal projects for their new owner that ended up never coming to fruition finally after operating in this manner for over half a decade the studio would be shut down by wargaming in 2018 while in the midst of working on an unannounced MMO it was a less than glamorous end to the house that made Dungeon Siege and Supreme Commander and while both of these properties can still flourish without their original developer it's unlikely that they will anytime soon both of their rights are still tied up with Square Enix but even though the Japanese publisher continues to produce a variety of Western centric video games it's not nearly as passionate about them now as it was at the turn of the decade or shown much moxie to return to ones that last left their fan base is deeply divided like so many other extinct series dungeon sieges legacy after it fades from the public consciousness will be defined by how its design influenced the direction of its genre and how its creators apply the lessons they learn developing it on their subsequent endeavors it's not an especially flattering fate but for a series like Dungeon Siege which focused on the ingrained joys of pillaging the kingdom of ebbs most treacherous territories over narrative and pizzazz it's undoubtedly the most appropriate you [Music] thank you for watching our video our documentaries are crowdfunded and made possible by your continued support for us we'd like to thank by name the generous patrons who have pledged to our highest rewards here aundrea Sabin art Caleb cheese kovitch jefferson dos santos Olivera kai titus kyle pole anton Maktoum saeed al maktoum mohammad Khayat Petric bolio timur to to speak off if you enjoy our content please consider subscribing to our channel and joining us on patreon thank you [Music] you [Music] [Music] you

Channel: GVMERS

Views: 354,263

Rating: 4.9374299 out of 5

Keywords: Dungeon Siege, Legends of Aranna, Dungeon Siege 2, Broken World, Dungeon Siege Throne of Agony, Dungeon Siege 3, Dungeon Siege 4, Gas Powered Games, Chris Taylor, Documentary, History, The Rise and Fall, Space Siege

Id: FmGhIRqq4VQ

Length: 34min 4sec (2044 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 20 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/[deleted]]

[removed]

[u/captaincrunchey]

Dungeon Siege II was my shit as a kid. Like Dragon Age meets Diablo. I wish the Steam version worked properly, I'd love to play through it again.

[u/[deleted]]

Weird I was just thinking about this game today.

I thought Dungeon Siege was awesome for 1 play through but I tried playing it again like 20 times but couldn't get very far because it would get boring too quickly since you've seen everything, there's no choice, and the game basically plays itself.

That first play through in that seamlessly loading world though...fucking awesome.

Oh and the soundtrack is phenomenal.

[u/Methedless]

TIL there's a Dungeon Seige movie, with Gimli, Shaggy, Rob Perlmon Jason Statham, Ray Liotta, and Burt Reynolds

[u/Fatal1ty_93_RUS]

These guys always produce an incredibly high quality documentary style material and it's a huge shame the channel doesn't even have 500k subscribers despite existing for years

I feel like the channel name hurts their discoverability so maybe they should rebrand into something like Game Documentaries? (I'm not good with names, just throwing out an idea)

[u/[deleted]]

Whoa Space Siege? Never knew about that one. Wish it was available.