Though he should probably consider keeping this sort of thing to himself, Chris Taylor, designer and project lead on Dungeon Siege (and old RTS hit Total Annihilation), is fond of telling the tale of how Bill Gates (that’s
Mr. Microsoft to you, pal) came to give Dungeon Siege the initial go-ahead. You see, Mr. Bill always examines prospective titles before giving them the green light for funding. In this case, Chris and his team had a terrific “idea” for a game, but nary a line of code to back it up.

What to do? The mandate came down from Chris to throw together every pretty canned effect and animation they had at their disposal in the hopes that they’d be able to wow Uncle Bill with smoke and mirrors and fancy talk — dazzling him with words like “colossal,” “amazing,” and “Diablo.” Thankfully, Gates liked what he saw, and as soon as the door closed behind him, Gas Powered set about tearing down its false front in favor of building the real game.

Still, it’s impossible to discuss Dungeon Siege without mentioning Diablo (or even “colossal” and “amazing”). So let me begin by telling you how the games are similar. Both are on the lighter end of the RPG scale, and eschew traditional elements like deep plot and character depth in favor heart-pounding, mouse-clicking combat. Both games are filled to the brim with weapons and armor (normal, magic, rare, and unique), spells, and potions — colored red and blue, of course. What drives you to play repeatedly is the seemingly never-ending quest to find the best of these items (strewn randomly throughout the land every time you start a new game).

Both games present the action via a top-down isometric view, and both games have been likened to illegal addictive substances. Well, gamers have said it about Diablo, and now I’m saying it about Dungeon Siege: Yes, watch out kiddies — this game is some of the purest cybercrack I’ve ever scored!

You start out as a humble farmer (boy or girl — you get to pick your sex as well as your character’s face, hair, skin color, and clothing style). One day, in the midst of plowing your field, a longtime friend crawls up and plops down at your feet, dying from wounds inflicted by the usually non-violent Krug (a troll-like breed of baddie). Your job is to find out what’s got the Krug so pissy. Arguably, there’s less plot here than in either of the two Diablo games. What little story exists comes across through in-game cutscenes and conversations with NPCs. If you’re dying to know more about the world you’re inhabiting, you’ll find books that shed additional light on the situation — should you care to read them.

The magical Kingdom of Ehb is overflowing with lush forests, icy tundra, molten lava, and oodles of ghastly beasties cast from the Dungeons & Dragons mold. Visually and viscerally, the world and the action within it are stunning. I’m not exaggerating when I say that Dungeon Siege is one of the best-looking games I’ve played. You can stand on cliffs and gaze for hours at the expanses below, or zoom in and see exquisite detail in everything from your characters to their spell effects to the very grass on the ground.

Siege’s mega-powerful game engine offers awesome pathfinding as well — so much so that you can even plot a path up or down building stairways that spiral hundreds of feet into the air, without getting your party members stuck along the way. Wherever you wander, you’ll bask in absolutely superb sound, especially when EAX is enabled via a Sound Blaster Live! or Audigy card. In addition, the dynamic music changes depending on the setting and events, and it has an epic quality that fits this game perfectly.

Too few 3D games give adequate control over how you view the world, and when we do get the level of control we want (as in Topware Interactive’s excellent Earth 2150 or Lionhead Studios’ Black & White), the controls are often complex and unintuitive.

Enter Dungeon Siege, the game with the best camera system ever. It’s simplicity incarnate, and so intuitive that it makes playing the game extra fun by nature of its unobtrusiveness. Push your mouse up to the top of your screen and the game world tilts down so you can see the road ahead. Drag your mouse to the bottom and the world tilts back up. Bring it to the left or right and the Kingdom of Ehb spins like a top in that direction. Roll your mouse wheel back and forth to zoom way into or out of the action. The camera controls continue to work when the game is paused, too, allowing you to manually create some sweet Matrix-style spinning sequences for that all-important “wow” factor, while also helping you get a better view of your surroundings.

The game itself has four primary player types for you to mold: fighter, archer, nature mage, and combat mage. Creating one character at the start, you build your party by hiring or inviting stragglers met along the journey (including the super-handy pack mule, which helps carry your loot around should you choose to bring one along). You can play your party members so that each is one of the four base archetypes and focuses exclusively on one skill, or you can vary your weapon and spell use and generate more complex, multi-skilled heroes.

You see, instead of giving you points to distribute as your adventurers level up, Dungeon Siege offers characters whose skills and stats improve simply by using the tools they’re given. For example, “TheVede,” my starting character, ended the game as a “Champion,” a title given to him by the game because of my play style, which was to equip him with nothing but melee weapons like swords, hammers, and axes. Throughout the game, the more I used melee weapons, the more proficient I got with them, and the more I could use higher-level equipment in my area of expertise. My tactics also improved my strength consistently, my dexterity slowly, and my intelligence not at all.

The game’s “hands-off” approach to character advancement may frustrate gamers who like nothing more than to tweak away at stats and options. To be honest, this system was even a little difficult for me to adjust to at the start, but then I realized that this ISN’T Diablo — it’s something different, and in a lot of ways, better. Once I got my head around that, I was off to joy-joy land.

While you can play through the game using a single adventurer (it’ll be tough and slow-going, but it is do-able), that’s not what I recommend — that’s Diablo. Dungeon Siege is about large parties and tactical combat. You can play this element of the game as deep or as shallow as you like. You can pause the game and set formations and unit behavior between every battle, giving orders to individual party members that they’ll execute as soon as you unpause, or you can throw everyone in your group at monsters and let chaos ensue in real time. Either option is viable and fun, depending on how you like to play. But because there are really only four character classes to choose from, and because none of the four is as robust as any one individual character class in Diablo II, gamers who jump into Dungeon Siege expecting it to be like Diablo II with a prettier face are in for a bit of a shock. A pleasant one, I think, but a shock nonetheless.

I’m very happy to report that I found no bugs throughout my adventures. I never crashed or locked up on either system I played on, and every feature worked as expected. I changed difficulty settings on the fly between easy, normal, and hard, and the game instantly ramped up or down accordingly. I was also able to bring save games back and forth between computers without any problem.

My only serious complaint is that I completed Dungeon Siege wishing I could have done more with my party members than the game allows. I wanted to dual-wield: I couldn’t. I wanted to be able to attack multiple enemies without depending on a spell: you can’t. These constraints bugged me a bit.

Despite my gripes, Dungeon Siege is an amazing thrill ride, filled with a huge cast of gnarly-looking and impressively animated monsters and environments. It kept me engaged right through to the end (25 hours for me and up to 50 hours for you, depending on how you play and how much you explore), and I’m ready to dive right back in!

— Greg Vederman