Think about all the games you have played that made you think 'if only they had done it this way' and think about all the times you’ve cursed a user interface that appeared to be designed to hinder your progress in every way possible rather than making the game easier to play. Sit down a while and think about what you would really like to see in a computer role-playing title if you were designing your own game. As a 'pick up and play' online experience, it's a shallow one and there are much better ways to spend your online gaming time. The only real advantage I can see to Dungeon Siege multiplayer is having the ability to start the game from scratch and play it co-operatively all the way through with people you already know. It's not a world-changing experience, needless to say, and most people lose interest very quickly and log off to go back to the single-player game. The nature of Dungeon Siege's frenetic constant-action gameplay also dictates that people hardly talk to each other while they're playing, giving you the feeling you're on the server on your own, rather than having other real players in your party fighting alongside you. For this reason the whole thing is usually a confusing affair, and because people often start the game game in totally different locations, they end up not seeing each other most of the time. This is evident as soon as you go to the Microsoft servers and discover people who all want to start in different parts of the gameworld and go off exploring on their own, instead of starting together in one place and working as a team. How can it possibly fail?īear one thing in mind from the outset, Dungeon Siege and the world it is set in was always designed for singleplayer gameplay, so any multiplayer additions were always going to be thrown in as an extra, as opposed to a separate gaming experience. And what’s more it’s being developed by the chaps who brought us the superb Total Annihilation. It’s not based on any archaic pen-and-paper RPG system patently not designed with computer gaming in mind, yet it’s as hardcore as you want to make it. We’re talking hardcore, real-time, guts-out action in a stunning 3D world, with no ridiculous stats, no combat turns, no useless cut-scenes. Games that take an axe to their given genre, merrily hacking away all the soft, useless flab that’s accumulated over the years of indolence and self-abuse, leaving only the barest bones of gameplay on which to build a leaner and faster gaming form. You see, Dungeon Siege is one of those games that only come along once every few years. Dungeon Siege is an RPG in the grand fantasy tradition, replete with dwarves, leather jerkins and bubbling mugs of the finest mead - in other words all the things we regularly take the piss out of for being hopelessly overworked, and yet somehow we’re as excited as a bunch of breathless schoolgirls riding bareback for the very first time. Rarely have we been quite as tingly over an RPG With strong character developmeil and an epic plot, Dungeon Siege could well prove to be the thinking man’s Diablo upon its release. That loading screen which always got on your tits when you entered a new location will be a thing of the past, as will running back to a temple when your mage pops his clogs (characters go unconscious before they die and can be revived after battle, so it’s very difficult to lose them completely). Also new to the genre is a 'zoning’ system, which takes you seamlessly from outdoor environments to indoor ones and vice versa. Increasing skills according to usage is not exacdy a first, but opening up all the items in the game to every class most certainly is. A rather ingenious form of character development raises magic and combat skills depending on how often players use them, and all characters have access to all the magic and weapons in the game, so when you find the ones you feel comfortable with, using them regularly will increase your skills in your favoured weapons and spells. There will be no staring at stats for hours in this action-based RPG - everything from character generation to character development has been simplified to keep players focused on combat and plot development. Gas powered games is intent on taking a large portion of beardiness out of the RPG genre by simplifying just about everything it can feasibly get away with.
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