Polite Dissent

I’ve been spending several hours a day for the last week playing Dungeon Siege II. The original Dungeon Siege was one of my favorite hack-and-slash style RPGs, and it had some innovative concepts, especially in regards to skills and character progression. The new game logically extends some of these concepts into a more comprehensive skill and bonus system.

Overall, this game is a slightly prettier version of the original Dungeon Siege. That’s not necessarily a bad thing: the same could be said about Diablo II, another favorite game. The underlying storyline is incrementally better as well.

Dungeon Siege II is an enjoyable game, but it’s also one of the most frustrating games I’ve played recently. I’d like to recommend it unreservedly, but I can’t. There are too many poorly thought out gameplay elements. In fact, there are several areas where Dungeon Siege II has actually taken a step backwards from the original game:

1. Saves. Unlike the original game, players are only allowed a single save game in Dungeon Siege II. And while you can save anywhere, you always start over in the nearest city, not the spot where you saved. This leads to a lot of needless trudging throughout the game. If this were a console game — or even a console port — I could understand this; but this is a PC game and there’s no need for this frustrating save system, especially since the first game did it right. (There’s also no easy way to load the saved game. You have to go back to the main menu and load it from there, you can’t load it in game).
2. Pathfinding. I’m having more problems with pathfinding AI in this game. The members of my party routinely get stuck behind walls and rocks.
3. The screen real estate is too cluttered. There are character portraits and status displays in the upper left, a large information panel in the top center (that all too often obscures other menus), and a large “order bar” at the bottom with a map. There are no hot keys that will hide/reveal this information as in the first game. You can resize the character information (to a point), but you have to click and drag each portrait separately. Increasing the resolution helps with this cluttering to some degree, but it also makes the map (the one useful item on the order bar) significantly harder to read (especially when trying to find those important “blue dots.”)
4. Shopping is an annoyingly inefficient. If I want to stock up on potions, I have to drag and drop each potion individually. If I’m buying 10 potions for each member of my party, this means I’ll need to do this 40 or 60 times. In the original version, there was a hot key you could click to buy an item instead of having to drag and drop.
5. The game has limits in the original setting (”Mercenary”). Your party can’t be any larger than four, including pets and pack mules. The more powerful enemies and better treasures are not encountered. You can only get a larger party, stronger foes, and better treasures by playing the games at the higher levels — but you can’t play thses levels until you “unlock” them by finishing the Mercenary setting. This forces repetition if you want to get your money’s worth. It seems to me that players should want to play the game again, not be forced to.

While most of these are annoyances, the save game situation is a real distraction. What is so frustrating is that the original game got all these right. The cynic in me suspects the programmers were trying to lengthen a short game, or focused too much on multiplayer to the detriment of the single player.

Unless these issues can be fixed, I’d recommend waiting to pick up Dungeon Siege II in the bargain bin in a few months.