Dungeon Siege

A number of people I have spoken to have expressed their opinion that Dungeon Siege is boring and the problems with Multiplayer drag it down enough to give up on it.

I think DS has given action RPG'ers an engine to play out their fantasies. It's only been out over here a couple of days. Give it time to develop some community. I think the single player game rocks big time. It's already kept me busy for over 20+ hours. It's beautiful to play, its got an interesting character development system (albeit limited to 4 specialisations, melee, ranged, combat and nature magic), its much more a immersive world "graphics wise" than Diablo II. It falls down on a number of issues, but I don't think they as a whole warrant total dismissal.

The Multiplayer is poor, in terms of arranging, joining and connecting to online games - the lack of save ability in the multiplayer world - your character and its stats are saved, just the state of the areas you've sweeped through isn't. This is no worse than PSO. You log on, you face the forest monsters again, if you want.

The single player game gives you too much too soon. In an hour or two you can have a fully functioning party of 4 or 5 characters - and if you specialise correctly they can pretty much hold their own in most combat situations - setting the combat AI on the characters can leave you without much to do. Point them in the right direction and they'll do their respective jobs and hopefully you'll win. However, if you experiment with the games development system, and come up with interesting party combinations - it can be a much more involving experience. Revealing more subtle ways to play it.

On the whole, DS is an engine for fantasy battles, and as such it does a wonderful job. I guess gamers shouldn't have to twiddle and tweak too much with the single player game to get a level of enjoyment out of it - but it is worth the effort - and its more about exploring the games dynamics - than following 'lead me by the hand' story.

Basically, dismissing it on a few problems with multiplayer and its inherent clickety-click wave after wave battling mechanism is a bit unfair - at such an early stage in the products development.

Perhaps your money won't have been wasted when the modding community gets some decent player built add-ons together? Even without the editor, there are mods emerging day by day that address gold and inventory limitations - and I saw a post on how to convert the multiplayer game to a single player game that can then have its progress saved, and converted back when you want to play it.

I too am hoping for a patch to address the multiplayer problems - but as a single player game I think its just what us Action RPG'ers wanted. And I think my moneys been well spent on just the 20 hours I've played it. And I plan to play it a whole lot more.