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| Dungeon Siege + expansion by foolio 03/21/2005, 7:18pm PST | ||||
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| Really lightning quick review:
Dungeon Siege combines everything that is good about Diablo with everything that is bad with all of the older "square maze" Lands Of Lore-style RPGs of yore. Good: The Statbuilder (i.e., JUST KEEP CLICKING!) part of the game is excellent, though--better than Diablo II and, by extension, pretty much every other RPG out there. A+ in this category. Bad: You progress from the beginning of the game to the very last boss on a rail, with periodic pit stops for shopping. This means you can't go down to San Fransisco at the beginning of Fallout 2 and go get the power armor pretty much immediately; or that you can't ride along on caravans in Fallout 1 to wage massive firefights and (possibly) get some serious loot; it means that you can't work your way around the ENTIRE available map of Betrayal at Krondor in Chapter 1 to get the Greatsword approx. 4 chapters early; this means that you can't go into Las Vegas and hire the NPC Covenant to join your Wasteland Rangers at the beginning of the game; this means you can't fight wave after wave of enemies in the Veldt in FF3/6 to power up your characters; this means that you can't leave the red dragon in Baldur's Gate 2 alone until you're ready for him. And the inability to do any of the things mentioned above is why Dungeon Siege isn't worth your money. This game almost got it right--almost did well enough--for me to say I liked it. But there's ... there's no point to playing. If you're doing really well in the game, great! Who cares; go fight more monsters. You want to test out your (admittedly awesome) party against a big, tough, boss monster way above your skill level? Too bad, you're headed directly towards the end of the game, feat. 5000 low-level monsters. And even if you did have the ability to portal around, you just wouldn't care. I think this is the part where making a good/believeable world is important comes in--mood, characters, plot, theme/style, etc. Maybe that's a second failure of this game. Now someone make a (non-MMORPG) RPG that allows me this sort of statbuilding+freedom+style, and I'll be very happy. Incidentally, I'm playing Morrowind. PS--any RPG recommendations from the last five years? I've already covered: * all D&D-brand games * Fallouts * Dungeon Sieges * Anachronox * Diablo's |
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