A whole horde of Krug are stirring up trouble in nearby Stonebridge.
Are you a bad enough dude to go kick Krug ass across the country?

Note: This covers the original game and the Legends of Aranna expansion.

Dungeon Siege is, as you can probably guess by the name, an action-RPG dungeon crawler. The game starts with you, a lowly farmer, having a friend come into your farm badly wounded from an attack by the invading Krug force, and he promptly dies in your arms. Weapon in hand, you start killing foes on the way to nearby town Stonebridge to get help. In terms of story, Dungeon Siege isn't really robust. Most of the game is "Go from Point A to Point B, kill foes, get items, gain allies, buy/sell gear, repeat." That's pretty much how most dungeon crawler games go, so Dungeon Siege is pretty par for the course. It was touted to be a "Diablo-killer" in the press, but did it succeed? No, but the only thing that can kill such a juggernaut series like Diablo is Diablo itself, or perhaps Activision-Blizzard...


Eight characters' inventories plus the various formation types and AI controls.

The gameplay is surprisingly like what you'd find in some RTS titles. Take creep mode from Warcraft III for example. You have a small band of units, you go around a map killing enemies and you don't really have to do much since everyone is set to move-to-attack. Dungeon Siege works roughly the same way, as you and your allies will target and begin to attack any foe that comes within range as per your AI settings per character. The only clicking you need to do is to move your team through the map, rearrange inventories, equip items, and manually targeting enemies/destroyable objects. I had no problem with being a passive player to the events in the game, since it was a welcome change from other click-happy fests I had grown accustomed to. There are four "classes" in the game, each based upon which weapon you or other characters use the most to fight (Melee, Ranged, Combat Magic, and Nature Magic), and there are three stats that increase automatically depending again on what weapon you use most (Melee raises Strength and HP fastest, Ranged does Dexterity and Defense, and both Magics raise Intelligence and MP the most), though your other two stats increase at a slower rate. There is little incentive to completely dual- or multi-class, as there are only a limited number of monsters in the world and the way the stats work makes focusing on more than one class inefficient for everyone but the mages, since either type of magic uses the same Intelligence stat. It still is handy to at least work everyone into having everyone get enough Nature Magic to learn Healing Hands, as your fighters and archers aren't going to use their MP at all. Also, Real Time With Pause is the core system of the game. Pause the game, turn the camera, change gear, target enemies, drink potions, and it all happens when you unpause. Pretty neat feature that I unfortunately have tried to invoke in other games to no effect. You can also set the game speed to 20% of normal speed or 20% faster than normal, though just pausing works better.


Behold the aptly-named mega-map. You can actually play the entire game like this, though it would be kinda difficult to see much of anything.

In terms of allies, you can have up to eight characters in your party at one time, though there are many more than that available to hire. These characters often specialize in a single class, though you're certainly free to try to sway them to another class. You are also able to hire pack mules in towns. Mules aren't very capable of fighting (barring the expansion-exclusive Trarg that can fight but carry less than mules), can't equip anything, but they can hold several times more items than your other characters can. Mules are necessary because once you leave town, there is no fast way to return barring running all the way back, or trudging forward with hope the next shop isn't far off (at least until the expansion-only campaign as that introduces a couple of warps). This would be a problem were it not for the low-level Nature Magic spell Transmute that turns items on the ground into gold at a fraction of their real value, or its cousin spells that turn items into Health or Mana Potions. It sounds daunting at first, but weaning myself away from the necessity of Town Portal was actually a pretty neat experience.

This next section's going to be a bit unbalanced, so I apologize.

Things I Liked

-Z-
The Z key is the greatest key of all time. Press it and you/your allies go pick up nearby items. Diablo has trained me to eventually just stop picking up regular items or those of no value, instead getting just magic or set items since they're valuable/powerful. With the Transmute spell, I can pick up absolutely everything I find and with a bit of work, be all the richer for it. There is even an auto-sort feature to get the most out of your bag space, though at times I have no idea how it actually puts things in any order if any at all.

-Potions-
How many RPGs have I played where using a potion or other healing item of some type uses up the entire thing? I can't readily recall any where this wasn't the norm, but Dungeon Siege does something a little different: When you command your characters to drink, they'll only use what they need. So for example, say your hero is down 50HP and you happen to have a potion with 73 points of healing in it. Your hero downs the potion and 23 points are left on it, ready for use later. You can even combine partially-filled potions of the same type together to save space, though this is limited by the size of the bottles used (if you get a bigger potion size, you can just drink from that and refill it with the smaller ones you find). Rejuvenation Potions restore HP and MP but are all-at-once use, so this isn't completely turned on its head. The expansion even adds a button/key to redistribute potions between everyone, so fighters and rangers get more health-restoring ones while mages get most of the mana-restorers.

-Aranna Is Huge-
Well no, the Kingdom of Ehb (setting of the original game) is huge. Inability to just teleport to town at-will tends to make the world as a whole big, but considering the entire game is one long game of "go to Point A, now go to Point B, now go to Point C," you start to appreciate just how big the kingdom in which everyone lives is. Mainly when you want to trek back to town for some arbitrary reason. But no, it's nice to have such a big world to explore and a number of hostiles to slay and treasures to hoard and...There is some variety with the places you go. I can't say for certain whether you spend more of your time above ground or below, but you will go through forested areas, a mine, a snowy mountainside, ice caves, a castle, etc. The expansion gives more reason to explore with the set items dropping from specific chests tucked away off the beaten path. The expansion gives you a type of teleporter, though they only really link a couple of places at a time, so it's not at all like the waypoint system in Diablo II.

-Old Games Rock-
Personal bias here, but this game ran exceptionally well on my poor old laptop. Being an older game, it doesn't require much for power, and can probably run on most computers though I cannot speak for top-of-the-line hardware or Windows 7. The game does show its age, but for a 3D title, it does pretty well. Apart from the few cutscenes, you'll likely have the camera panned back as far as possible to see the enemies (or you'll use the mega-map), so the ugliness of the models won't really bother you. At least, it didn't bother me, but I'm not someone hung up on graphics to begin with.


It's ugly (by today's standards), but it'll do.

Things I Didn't Like

-The Expansion-
Good news! If you buy Legends of Aranna, you get the original Dungeon Siege for free! Bad news. Hey, remember that save you made partway into the game when you decided to install the expansion? Well guess what--you have to start all over. For some strange reason, any single-player saves cannot be used in the expansion, even on the 'Kingdom of Ehb' map that the original game uses. I don't know why this is, like...did they change how the stats were calculated and this made the old saves incompatible? The expansion retroactively added new items and spells and that couldn't have caused a problem. Thankfully, if you buy Legends of Aranna you won't run into this as it already comes with the original right in the box. It just kinda burned me to have a save of the original partway into the game and not be able to do anything with it except import it into Multiplayer mode.

-The Expansion, Again-
Tell me, what does 'expansion' mean? To me, it's...you know, the addition of content. The expansion does this with items and spells and a new campaign, but that campaign is something that I didn't like. So you beat the original game and save the world blah blah blah, so you move onto the expansion campaign. But wait, it's asking you to make a new character? What gives? The expansion's campaign isn't really an 'expansion' but is more of a self-contained experience. You have new characters to recruit and it's a new part of Aranna, and you have to start a new character. All of your previous efforts and accomplishments are reduced to nothing. I dunno, I admit to being new to this genre, so does this happen a lot? I just kinda figured that since the expansion comes with the original game already, then having higher-level expansion content come after the original content would be...you know, pretty smart?

-Anti-Grinding/Now What?-
Aranna is a persistent world. If you save your game, you'll load back at that very same spot and all the baddies you killed will still be dead. I actually liked this, but the problem I had is the fact that there's no way to reset the world. The first Diablo had this kind of system, except at any time you could restart the world with your same character and all of your quests, monsters, items, etc. would reset for more dungeon-plundering. It's bad to slight any game with customizable characters for the fact that you can potentially screw them up, but grinding is always at least a decent way to make your screw-ups less bad. I love grinding as long as the option is there and it's not required, you know? The other thing partially related to this is that you have no hope to reach the max level unless you do Multiplayer. You beat the game, and after the credits you're told to import your character into Multiplayer if you want to keep playing. That wouldn't be a problem except you can only import one character at a time and you can only use that one character when you do Multi. Say you play through either campaign and you talk to your former allies--no recruit option. The world does (somewhat) reset in terms of quests, drops, and mobs this way, but without your allies it becomes kinda bland. But then, you get on Multiplayer to play with others, so...yeah. I just wish there was a solution for people who'd rather play alone.

-Characters-
Oh look, it's this again. Your characters lose all personality once they join your troupe. They become extensions of your already mute and essentially featureless hero, and the only way to get them to really say anything is to drop them from your team. Then they say something joining back up, and that's roughly it. There's no interaction or anything, they're just...there. The expansion has your allies give affirmations or whatnot when you order them about, which strangely furthers the parallels with RTS games.

The Final Verdict
If you're looking to buy the game, get Legends of Aranna since it includes the original. I think I've mentioned this enough already, but it'll save you some potential headaches and some money too. Need a good dungeon-crawler that can last you around 30 hours (20 for the original, 10 for the expansion by my clock), then Dungeon Siege is a pretty cheap solution, and it's pretty fun despite the hands-off approach the game takes. Despite my complaints, I think anyone who has some interest in a dungeon-crawler would like this game. It's fun and while the story is pretty thin and it's not really too difficult, it's a great addition to my library.

A Tip From DF
Get used to moving your team all at once with CTRL-A, since the regular follow mode isn't as effective. Moving all-at-once allows you to take advantage of your formation more effectively and keeps the random straggler from getting lost and unable to follow your commands. And another tip (two for one, aren't you lucky?): Carry Resurrection Scrolls and have someone know the spell. Death sucks and revivals have to be performed on-the-spot or you're always going to have literal dead weight on your team until you go back to the corpse in question.

Score:
10/10
The best of the best of the best, Game of the Year material, Best Game Ever candidate, instant Gaming Hall of Fame inductee, God Among Games winner, #1 on the "Games You Must Play Before You Die" list, Best Game Ever winner, approved by four out of five dentists, part of a complete breakfast.