 By Brad Cook MacSoft’s Dungeon Siege takes the classic fantasy archetypes you’re familiar with — gruesome monsters, dank dungeons, a kingdom in disarray and, of course, a nondescript farmer who becomes a hero (straight from Joseph Campbell’s Hero with a Thousand Faces) — and throws them into a game that moves at a brisk pace, with plenty of quests and battles. |
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 Fairy Dust. Defeating dragons is never easy. |
The Gang’s All Here. Don’t forget to take a pack mule with you.
Now Departing…
“If I had to pick one game that was an inspiration [for this one], it would be Diablo,” explains Chris Taylor, president and co-founder of developer Gas Powered Games. “It was simple to play and had great graphics. Before that, RPGs were complicated and light on action, so we knew Diablo was a turning point for the genre.”
Dungeon Siege also departs from other RPGs by not requiring you to choose a specific role for your character, such as fighter or wizard. When you start the game, you begin with a generic character whose name and appearance you create. Your character also comes equipped with simple weapons and abilities, but he (or she) can improve those during the adventure by picking up items that lie scattered around the world map.
Diverse Locales. Investigate a variety of strange places.
All characters can use hand-to-hand and ranged weapons as well as two types of magic (combat and nature), so you decide what area your character will focus on. If you have your character stick primarily with a bow, for example, he increases his skill with that weapon as well as improves his dexterity rating. Both allow him to cause more damage as he gets better at it.
Of NPCs and Pack Mules
As you journey through Ehb, you meet various non-player characters (NPCs). You can invite up to seven of them to join you, although some will require a payment of gold before you can use their services. Some of the NPCs already specialize in a certain area, but others are jacks-of-all-trades whose skills you can also define. (See “It’s Good to Have Friends,”) They’re vital for helping you navigate the tougher dungeons.
Something to Talk About. Interact with a variety of NPCs, from ordinary townspeople to high-level warriors.
We should point out that you also need at least one of the pack mules you find for sale in the various towns in Ehb. They can carry as much loot as three characters combined, which comes in handy when you want to load up on health and manna potions as well as spare weapons and armor. Taylor says that his team came up with the idea because they were frustrated with the small inventories available in most RPGs.
Adds GPG production coordinator Bert Bingham: “The pack mule is a significant character in Neal Hallford’s history that would never have surfaced had we not insisted on a beast of burden as a logical gameplay mechanic for a fantasy party.”
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Enter the Writer
Hallford is a renowned game designer who came on board after Taylor and his team created Ehb and the storyline. He says that “the basic ‘box’ was well-defined, [so] my job was to make sure that everything in that box worked, and that it all made some kind of narrative sense.”
To that end, Hallford looked at everything that had been created for the game and fleshed out the characters and their conflicts so that every person, place and thing made sense within the larger context of the storyline, which takes the player through a series of quests that culminate in the ultimate story goal.
“When your character says ‘By the shield of Azunai!’,” he explains, “you make sure that you have a clue about who Azunai really is and why someone would swear by his shield. It isn’t just a saying. It’s a religion that has very solid story roots, and that religion affects the world and how things develop.”
Bridge Over Troubled Lands. You can arrange the members of your party in a variety of formations.
More to Discover
While Taylor admits that you can ignore Dungeon Siege’s backstory and focus on the action if you want, there’s plenty of Hallford’s work to uncover. History books lie scattered throughout Ehb, and many NPCs relate bits and pieces of the story if you talk to them. And occasionally a cutscene briefly plays to establish a plot point.
“We chose to illuminate only the most important elements with non-interactive sequences that are rendered in real time during gameplay,” explains Bingham. “Overall, I think it was more difficult to convey story to the players in this fashion, especially in dealing with nuance.
By the Power Of… Use health stones to repair your damaged characters.
“Hopefully we made some headway for in-line emergent storytelling in future games, as the next logical step toward seamless storyplay,” he adds. (“Storyplay” is a word that comes up a lot when people discuss RPGs; according to LoreGaming.com, “you become a part of an ongoing adventure, a constantly evolving universe,” when you engage in storyplaying.)
When you complete the single-player quest, you can import your character into the multiplayer gaming world, known as the Utrean Peninsula, and invite others to join you on quests or engage in player-versus-player battles.
The game also comes with a map called Yesterhaven that the Gas Powered team created, and the company promises more Dungeon Siege tales to come. Your adventures have just begun.
If you liked this game, check out:
Baldur’s Gate II Diablo II EverQuest Icewind Dale Lineage|
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