Dungeon Siege III review

To truly appreciate what Obsidian Entertainment brings to Dungeon Siege III, you need to speak to the automaton standing watch at the mechanical gates to the city of Stonebridge. His animation is limited, his character model is lacking in detail and, to tell the truth, the location he guards isn’t a particularly rewarding place to explore. Yet, if you ask him to tell you a little about his home town, along with the usual fantasy shtick about goblins and men forging alliances, he’ll also admit that Stonebridge is home to hundreds of feral house cats. You could call it the Obsidian touch: the studio can’t match Bethesda or BioWare – two developers it has stood in for in the last decade – at budget or spectacle, but it can surpass them both, and often with ease, when it comes to incidentals and charm. Let the big kids pile on the apocalyptic set-pieces and galaxy- spanning overworld maps – this team has the house-cat angle covered.

Dungeon Siege III is not an especially comedic game, but its landscapes and characters are enlivened by dozens of warm human touches. Busting open every barrel you come across is encouraged not just by the loot you could find inside, but because of the economic boost it apparently provides to the ailing barrel-making industry, while the ludicrous buyback schemes of the game’s shops are explained away by the fact that local merchants fundamentally misunderstand the relationship between supply and demand. Elsewhere, the striking Cyclops miners you encounter towards  the adventure’s second half will not return to their toil unless they’re provided with shorter working days and monocles for the elderly. This is a developer that’s smart enough to poke fun at a roleplaying game’s mechanics and traditions, but it’s perhaps smarter still in that it then finds ways to incorporate most of them too.

And so, beyond the same old story about leading a rebellion and reuniting a nation, Obsidian has built a likeable and enormously tidy RPG. Party size is kept to a snug and co-op-friendly two, while team members level up automatically whenever you do, and can be swapped in and out during any lulls in combat. The four classes are straightforward but smartly varied – alongside a standard warrior and a mage there’s a ranged fighter and a middle-ground shapeshifter, who can switch between distanced attacks and close-up melee – and the game’s upgrades are split neatly between abilities, proficiencies and talents, which translate to powers, modifiers and perks. It’s a clear-headed system that turns a handful of basic attacks into a wealth of tweaking opportunities, and allows for a sizeable array of specific character builds.

Granted, the abilities you’ll unlock tend to be modest – you’ll get the likes of ground pounds and fireballs, along with the opportunity to summon a hellish dog – but they all provide sly variations on either dealing damage or healing. The sense throughout is of a serene order always guiding your character progression, while the storyline itself advances in polite hops.

As adventures go, Dungeon Siege III is constructed with a thrifty craftsmanship, only occasionally dropping into bouts of noble shabbiness. Moderately dazzling sights include the jellied halls of the Causeway fast-travel network, a decent run at imagining a city of cogs and escapements, and plenty of eerily pretty bogs riddled with fireflies and poisonous slugs. Clever use of particle effects and a dreamy colour palette make up for cutscene cameras that appear to have been placed by people more used to working on infomercials than fantasy epics, while the am-dram vocal performances will distract from the worrying realisation that there are clearly not quite enough faces to go around. Energy – and budget – has ultimately been invested where it’s important.

The lore always opts for human motivations over arcane mysticism, while the AI teammates who will drop into your party whenever your co-op partner ups and leaves aren’t as dismally stupid as you may have learned to fear. They’ll heal you, race you to loot and change attacks with a convincing human swiftness; you can enter a fight knowing they’re more likely to save your skin than get stuck on a door frame.

Not all of Obsidian’s rough edges are delightful, however: the framerate is stuttery and unreliable, and a depth-of-field effect has been so overzealously applied that it can occasionally feel like you’re watching an action movie filmed in a matchstick model, overseen by a director who brought all the wrong lenses along. The breadcrumb hints, meanwhile, are optional but dangerously compulsive, and can lead you past a lot of the more interesting detail. Not all of its systems are perfect, either. This is that rare co-op RPG in which it’s much more fun to be the sidekick, able to drop in and out of the ally role at will and explore all of the game’s classes and builds, while the main protagonist is stuck with their first choice. Even stranger, given the series’ dungeon crawling roots, is the fact that the loot is largely unexciting. You can spend a few minutes juggling the stats on a choice of boots, but Obsidian’s workmanlike treasure never truly enchants.

It’s a game built from pluck and resourcefulness, in other words: thoughtful when it can afford to be and stoically reliable – for the most part – when it can’t. With handsome landscapes and a clutter of personable NPCs, Dungeon Siege III makes up for the absence of BioWare’s gleaming polish or Bethesda’s knotty intricacy with a little more soul, and perhaps a broader, more human, imagination. [7]

PS3 version tested. See our next issue, out July 5, for an interview Post Script with project director Rich Taylor on the challenge of developing the game's companion AI.