Dungeon Siege III

I played the demo and came away very underwhelmed.

The interface is really unintuitive. The camera controls are wonky and it has that annoying downwards-angle TPS, which means zooming in is pointless (you still can't see far ahead). You have to be right over objects to pick them up. The character equip screen is a mess. Using abilities and switching between stances is easy enough but takes a bit of getting used to.

And combat? Only focusing on one enemy and the game seems to determine who it is. Maybe I missed something but I didn't see any instruction on switching enemies. It's kind of a mess, with HP going down too fast and MP regenerating too fast. I think that'll probably change in later levels though.

The engine is great and the game looks neat but bland, right up to a huge-cleavage'd bimbo with freckles and a foreign accent. Armor comes with nipples too, for Anjali. Groan-inducing stuff.
 
Yep the engine is nice, pretty much the only good thing I could say about this.

Generic Western fantasy setting, so so bored with this.

Save points, okay that's a no sale for me from the start, it's 2011 my console has a larger HD than my first pc did. Why do designers still insist on such archaic practices. The first game had save where you want, 2 & 3 have backslid. It's just an artificial means of inflating the length of a game, I'm fed up with it.

Preset characters and what looks like a linear story that's half the fun, of playing an rpg, gone straight away.

I will definitely be giving this one a miss.
 
I liked it. For the first hour of an Obsidian game I thought it to be excellent. Then again, I played with an XBOX360 controller.

Enjoyed story and dialouge too. Especially the lorebooks (Always found the Empire of the Stars and Ehbs founding interesting. Yes, even for "generic" fantasy). And I'm glad they still kept the concept of the Causeway. A fast travel system that is accomplished by wandering thorugh a different dimension/world sounds very cool) Can't tell much beyond that.

Edit: Oh yes, I loved the shelf story with the war in complete chaos because everyone used fast travel and they would fight each other all over without any real territory. :lol:

What I also liked were the progressive quests. Get influence in town/gain new quests. I also hope they do something with gathering as much support for the legion as possible.

Combat was challenging and already shown some depth. Never made it on Hardcore to the ending without dying several times so thats encouraging to learn the system better.


Again, I have seen worse Obsidian beginnings and quite like what I saw in this one. After reading (german) reviews and them calling the first hour to be the slowest/worst of the game I can safely say that I'll buy the game.
 
Keith Daniels has a Interview with Nathaniel Chapman up on Sucide Girls (So NSFW). They also discuss things that are later in the game.

http://suicidegirls.com/interviews/Nathaniel+Chapman:+Dungeon+Siege+3/


The example I was thinking of in particular was my favorite boss fight: the
in Stonebridge -- [a fight involving waves of mobs along with environmental targets that have to be destroyed and environmental hazards that have to be avoided simultaneously]. That was the only fight where I really noticed the AI struggling, and I was wondering if there weren’t more fights like that because of some limitation.
It was a challenge. Have you finished the game yet?



Oh yeah.

The
fight. The
will do an attack which, unless you’re standing behind a barrier, will nuke everyone in the area. We actually got the AI to run behind those [barriers] and avoid them. The trick really became how much specific AI scripting we did on a specific fight. We didn’t want to make it feel like the AI was cheating. It’s a tricky line. If the AI dodges the enemy’s attacks perfectly every single time, but you were not dodging them, it feels unfair. Like..


“He’s better than me!”

[Laughs] We didn’t want to make the player feel bad that he couldn’t perform to the level of the AI. It is a tricky balancing act, and it’s not perfect all the time. But we didn’t feel like we had to really pull back on our boss mechanics because of that.
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I really enjoyed the way the motivations for Odo, Jeyne Kassynder, and the Queen were all complex and understandable in some way. Is it more interesting to you if a villain is relatable?

Absolutely. Something that I joke with Josh Sawyer [Project Director on Fallout: New Vegas] about is the mustache twirling, scheming villain who is doing everything that they’re doing just because they’re evil. You don’t encounter someone walking down the street and go, “That guy’s evil!” People generally feel like they’re doing the right thing even when they do something that everyone else thinks is terrible. Because our games place a lot of emphasis on choice and consequence, we intentionally try to make the villain a bit more relatable because we often like to let the player choose, “Do you think that what the villain did was acceptable?” We set up the story to put the villain in the place of someone that you have to fight, someone that is constantly working against you and whom you’re working against, but at the end of the game we question the assumption that the player makes throughout the game. Were you doing the right thing? Was this person that you’re fighting against really hunting you for no reason? Is there something more deep behind it? I think it makes the characters feel a lot more real and the player’s choices a lot more meaningful.
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One thing that concerned me... The first time I play through a game I usually play the good guy, the ‘paragon’. The second time through I usually play like an asshole. [Laughs] In this game when I was playing like an asshole there were times when I felt like I was missing out on certain things. For example, not destroying the
in
. Are those missed opportunities paid off later if you play that way?
There are some. One example is if you choose to spare
or kill
. If you choose to kill
you get her spear as a weapon that you can equip, and it’s a really cool, very powerful spear. Whereas, if you don’t kill her you don’t get it, but you get to talk to her and she takes a role in the story later -- which I’m sure if you spared her on your first play-through you saw. In a lot of games you play the good guy and get a great reward, and if you play the bad guy you don’t get anything; it’s very easy to be good. I think it’s a lot more interesting where if you’re good it’s actually harder. Being a jerk is the easy way to get what you want, and being good is a lot harder. So if you choose to spare someone, sure you might get more story, but you might not get as much loot; there might be some other consequence.
Click to expand...
 
This almost sounds like you think that Obsidian asked the Suicide Girls folks to do an interview with them.
 
This isn't the first game I would have expected SG to do an interview about but it's hardly out of character for the site. Besides, I'm skeptical that Obsidian or SquareEnix approached them so I'd guess that someone on staff was simply a Dungeon Siege fan.
 
Whats offensive about them getting an interview with the Suicide Girls? they interview a whole lot of people of diferent mediums so stop whinning about stupid shit.
 
Tried the demo. Didn't last 5 minutes before uninstalling.


Graphics : Decent... 5 years ago. Way behind the times, and the performance is unacceptable for such low quality.

Controls : Clearly not designed with the Mouse and Keyboard in mind. The controls are as clunky as trying to play a (modern) first person shooter using nothing but a keyboard.

Interface : Absolutely terrible, even by console standards. There's actually a load time when switching between menus to look at items/etc.



Honestly, I'm not at all surprised with how bad the game turned out to be. This just reinforces the fact that Obsidian can do great things when given another studio's assets and told to go crazy; but they suck when it comes to building something from the ground up.
 
German magazines gave pretty good scores so far (around 80 to 85).

I think I can live with the controls, but it really needs more customization possibilities. The graphic is pretty good, imo. At least for a game like that. I don't get eye cancer as well, which is the most important part in it for me. The demo is running super smooth on my machine. No stuttering, not a bit regardless of what I see on the screen.

It's said that the demo isn't really showing the games qualities. How much that is true... No clue, but after playing (and finishing) the demo 3 times, I can see that they tried to put as much different things into it as it was possible for the demo.

Still don't know if I should buy the game, as I am generally not much a fan of such games. Especially because I think I would only play it in coop anyway. It would need a longer demo for me to decide if I should spend 40+ euro on it or not.
 
I have a gamepad for platform games and other simple games. I do not want to play more complex PC games on anything other than mouse+keyboard, that's asinine.
 
Played the demo and thought it was decent, I had some fun with it and it doesn't seem so bad but I'm not sure if I want to buy it or not. Though that steam pre-purchase bonus is looking pretty good. £29.99 for Dungeon Siege 1, 2 and 3.
 
Watched some more streams and impressions and, while this may sound weird, you guys should really look out for moral ambiguity in this game. If I understand some of the stuff right the games story is materfully constructed and there is nobody thats really in the "right" or a moustache-twirler in the games backstory.

Downside: I have already shitloads of the game spoilered for me. But there seems to be a decent amount of C&C that has at least (if not even ingame) influence on ending slides.
 
knowing Obsidian it is still better to way till 2 or 3 patches have been released. Might as well be that they will rework the controls somewhat so it works better with keyboard+maus.
 
Same who did the Interview for SG did a review

http://suicidegirlsblog.com/blog/dungeon-siege-3-in-review/#more-10875

While this game may not have the open-ended freedom of their previous titles, it does possess some interesting characters and meaningful choices to be made throughout that affect the later course of the game in surprising ways, and this time Obsidian has wedded it to a game that’s as technically well crafted as its story.
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The review also has two pics that should reassure people regarding the quality of the writing.

2011-05-20_00046.jpg
 
^ Well this one you posted is nothing special, but the second one towards the end of the interview is brilliant :lol:
 
Ausdoerrt said:
^ Well this one you posted is nothing special, but the second one towards the end of the interview is brilliant :lol:
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"Her words become lies and ours become truth" isn't special? Manipulation of the masses.

Second one is funny though, true.^^
 
Well, my anti-virus program smacks the site down everytime it tries to open, so post that second picture for me, please.
 
OakTable said:
Well, my anti-virus program smacks the site down everytime it tries to open, so post that second picture for me, please.
Click to expand...
2011-05-19_00035.jpg


If anyones wondering why he is instructed to do so:

[spoiler:f81d575b51]Stonebridge had mob killings of legionnares. They are now full of guilt and scared of consequences[/spoiler:f81d575b51]
 
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