The obviously evil Valdis has hatched a plan for world domination.
Are you a bad enough dude to--wait, why are you working for him?

Note: This covers not only the original game and the expansion, but also touches on bits of the Aranna Legacy mod found here.

Over a thousand years ago, a great war between the Azunites and Zaramoth ended the world when the Sword of Zaramoth clashed with and destroyed the Shield of Azunai. These artifacts were once lost to history, until the Sword was recovered by Valdis, who then started a campaign to find the missing pieces of the Shield of Azunai...this starts the game, where you are a mercenary in Valdis' employ, starting the siege of Greilyn Beach where Dryads are supposedly guarding one of the pieces. Things go south for you not long after the success of the mission, and you quickly find yourself a prisoner of the Dryads and work against Valdis' dark forces.

Dungeon Siege II is pretty good as far as sequels go. It adds a number of things from the previous entry and is overall a better game. It plays almost exactly the same, though now instead of you the player having mostly passive control over your team, you directly control your hero and the AI handles the other people as per the (rather limited) AI controls. Leveling is still the same with the three stats and four classes, but now there are skill trees ala Diablo II and other games that contain nothing but passive skills that improve each of your characters in your team. The expansion builds upon this system and supports two dual-classes, while the mod adds more pseudo-classes with no skills but a number of spells that do various interesting things like making enemies explode when their health falls to a certain level, or fanning your arrows in a spread.


Pow, haha! Powers are a new feature that can be pretty damaging. And look at the body parts fly!

There would be a lot of overlap if I continued with the changes and what I liked/disliked, so I'll just jump into that now.

Things I Liked

-Ch-ch-ch-changes-
Passive skills make your army highly customizable on top of specializing them for specific roles. Take the basic warrior for example. There are three main branches of skills: Dual-wield for massive damage-per-second, two-handed for slow, heavy damage and resistance to damage with chance to stun, and one-handed plus shield, for massive defense and tanking. The expansion adds people to reset your skills, and the mod puts these people in the original campaign as well, so experimentation is encouraged.

Certain skill levels unlock Powers, which do a variety of things: Heavy direct damage, attracts the aggro of every monster in a certain range, makes everyone immune to damage for a few seconds, etc.

Monsters respawn! Though they respawn while you play which can make corpse retrieval a bit dangerous. Dying is easier to manage too. You still need methods to revive people, but items stay on corpses and if the entire party wipes, you all revive in town and 25% of your total gold remains on your bodies, whereupon you can then decide to go fetch them, or have someone in town warp the bodies to you while keeping that portion of your money.

There are now specific spellbook slots for automatically casting spells! So say you have a mage that knows a number of buffs. In Dungeon Siege, you would have to make note of the timer and recast when needed. The sequel recasts buffs, debuffs, and summons as necessary and when there's enough mana to use.

Monsters have 'Hatreds' that naturally piss them off if you do certain things in battle. Some monsters will have "Hates characters who use potions" or whatnot below their info window, and if said monster sees anyone using a potion, it will fly into a fury and target only that character while doubling its efforts to kill the character in question. This lends some strategic quality to the battles, as you can manipulate monsters into attacking your tank, keeping the heat off of your weaker allies. It also lends strategy to not anger a group of monsters when you're already weakened.

There's story. Sure, there was in the previous game, but there is a greater emphasis on it this time around, and for once your protagonist isn't entirely silent. Though there isn't much variety in the responses, some of them expedite matters and many in the expansion are pretty snarky. Characters are improved too. Not only do they have their own specific quests, but characters say things to the hero and to each other. I'm not sure to what extent this goes, but it gives some incentive to use different allies each time you go through the game, so you can see the different banters. Or, you know, just run through the old areas of the game with different team combinations.

Speaking of team, there are pets to play with. Pets expand the idea of the Pack Mule from the original game to include different species of pets that do a variety of things. Pets grow by being fed items, and their stats improve at set levels depending on what you feed them. Giving them fighter weapons improves their strength, armor improves their defense, and potions boost their HP and MP. Each specie of pet has its own unique attack, some learn spells, but all get their own Powers and learn Emanations (auras) that boost the party. They can't equip any gear or learn any skills, so their usefulness is mostly up to the player.

Teleporters back to town are sprinkled through the landscape as well as a learnable Town Portal spell, so you never need worry about running out of supplies or getting too many items on your travels.

-Difficulties-
One problem I had with the previous game was how, when you beat the game, that's it barring diving into multiplayer. The sequel handles this better by having three difficulty levels unlock as you beat the game, much like Diablo has done long beforehand. Also applying to this section is how monsters scale. The more people in your party, the more difficult monsters become. This happened in Dungeon Siege's multiplayer mode, but was largely absent in single-player, so soloing the game was pretty difficult for anyone without a ranged attack.

-Variety-
Dungeon Siege has always allowed you to build your own character, though the first game limited you to humans of varying appearance. The second game lets you use a number of races that have their own traits, though in the end, many traits (such as starting with two ranks in Fortitude and having 6 Strength to start) aren't terribly important so it's a matter of appearance the most. I can't say for sure (as I've only gone through the game once) if NPCs say different things based on your gender/race, though I think there was a small mention of the fact that my hero was a female Elf. If it was there, it was once, sadly.

-Journal-
The Journal is a pretty handy tool. Apart from telling you about quests and what to do next, it lists Key Items you've found, Chants for temporary buffs, and even has a robust Bestiary where you can see the stats of monsters as well as a description of the beast and any Hatred it has.


Ow. Soloing is hard.

Things I Didn't Like

-Expansion's Story-
Because it's on the back of the expansion's box, it's not a spoiler (technically): The world ends again during your adventure in the original game, and the expansion picks up a year after it's all said and done. The world of course looks much different, there are freakish creatures running amok, and best of all, almost everyone hates you for the apocalypse! It wasn't even your fault at that. Say what you will about heroes forging on no matter what, but it was damned hard to really care about the people I was supposedly saving when they all spat at me and wished I hadn't bothered in the first place. It was actually refreshing that your hero felt the same way in many cases, though being snarky didn't have positive results all the time.

-Expansion's Monsters-
The Bound are the expansion's featured monsters. They're...especially creepy. Long story short, they're the monsters you've gotten used to killing, now horrifically modified and mish-mashed together with other monsters. The best part is that many of the Bestiary entries imply that they were operated on while conscious, and are aware of their situation. It's odd of me to care about the things I'm going to slaughter endlessly, but this was the thing that made me care about the antagonists of the expansion as opposed to the NPCs who hated me. Weird how that works, huh?

-Ventriloquists-
When people speak, don't they tend to use their mouths? You know, open and close? In the original game and the core sequel, characters don't move their mouths at all when they're talking, which looks rather funny in the sequel when there are close-ups and the like where it's really obvious. This is something that was changed in the expansion, with characters not only getting different models, but ones that actually move their mouths.

-AI-
I really didn't like the change to the AI. There are only four patterns (mimic hero, fight separately, defense, and do nothing) and those are the only settings you have. You can't command just one person to wait, or just one person to do everything the hero does. There were also a number of times where my allies just stood around and did nothing for no reason at all. Mimic hero works best for general travel, but then only one monster gets the force of your team and if you don't change targets, they stand around even if they get hit. What? I know you're supposed to change which strategy everyone follows as you fight, but I rather liked the old system of setting everyone up in a specific way and just using Ctrl-A to move everyone at once.

The Final Verdict
Hey, you like dungeon crawlers? Dungeon Siege II and its expansion are just what you want. I like it more than its predecessor, despite the fact it runs worse on my machine. It's a very proper sequel and anyone who liked the first would like the second. Just, uh, because so much is changed in terms of hotkeys, it's difficult to go back to the first. And hey, there is a demo for you to try out. And, the next BoB will be another Dungeon Siege but it'll be the last one you'll have to read for a while! Honest! And hey, I hear if you preorder the third game on Steam, you get the first two games free...

A Tip From DF
Use the Aranna Legacy mod if you have both halves of the game, or just the Hotfix Mod for the original. They're the same thing, but they add quite a lot to the game, and still are in development to this day. The added weapon enhancement spells give even more variety to the classes your characters can become, and they're decent enough to ignore how there are no added skills to take advantage of the pseudo-classes.

The Path To Victory
This is a new section where I talk a bit about what I did in the game, mainly what builds I went with and so on. I played as a female Elf based heavily in Combat Magic eventually using Nature Magic too, Lothar was a shield tank until I got the Mythrilhorn and then I turned him into a dual-wielder that subbed in Combat Magic, the Mythrilhorn pet was my main tank/aggro sponge, Deru was a Blood Assassin sniper who used bows, Vix used throwing weapons and mainly used the spread-arrow buff at mid-range, and Taar I kept as a healing-focused Nature Mage with some Fist of Stone levels for boosts to defense/health. I didn't use anyone else for the most part. I'm currently attempting to solo the game as a male Human focused on ranged weapons and Nature Magic.

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.