Dungeon Siege II Busts Out Trailer

Thanks to RPGDot for pointing out there's a trailer for Microsoft/Gas Powered Games' Dungeon Siege II available from the official DSII site, as well as via Gamers Hell, showcasing a lush cinematic-style teaser (using the in-game engine) for this PC RPG sequel, which is simply listed as "coming 2004". The original Dungeon Siege was largely well-received, but sparked some complaints about repetitiveness/linearity, so it'll be interesting to see how the sequel develops the gameplay.

Original Dungeon Siege

[kryptoknight]

Dungeon Siege was a fun game... for about three days. I hope Gas Powered Games makes DS II funner.

Some things I liked about the original Dungeon Siege:
- No load time between levels!
- the pack mule is very convenient for hording loot from the dungeons.
- cool variety of weapons and spells like the goblin flamethrower or railgun.
- the group/party feature

Some things I didn't like:
- repetitiveness of a hack and slash type game
- not enough unique items
- multiplayer online was laggy at times and wasn't fun

Re:Original Dungeon Siege

[Shrubber]

It was a fun game. I know many didn't like it, but it had a good few weeks of enjoymenet for me, and then another couple weeks of playing with the editor/mod tools. Only a month or so enjoyment out of a game? Yeah, sounds about right to me. I think the repetitiveness felt worse because the levels were so long. They could have broken it up a litttle more so you weren't travelling through the same area for hours and it would have helped immensely. If nothing else I hope they learned from the level desig

Re:Original Dungeon Siege

[forwhomthebelltrolls]

I thought the game was fantastic, probably my favorite game of all time, but my gripe was with the restrive camera angles. I hated the fact that you couldn't see far enough ahead. Maybe this was by design, but it annoyed the hell out of me.

Before you shout RTFA, I'm in the land of 56k and downloading the trailer as I type. Hopefully I will be pleasantly surprised.

The popular downloadable backpack mod for the original Dungeon Siege made the game much more playable, hopefully GPG/Microsoft will have recogn

DS1 was okay, I hope DS2 is better!!

[LordYUK]

I got DS the day it came out, and got a little bit past the Dwarf Mines (for those of you who have never played it, thats maybe 2-3 hours into the game, IIRC).

The graphics were outstanding, you really feel like you're in a fantasy setting.

However, as PA put it around the time of the games release, you dont really play the game. Your character pretty much auto attacks whatever is in sight (handy for multiple character parties, but since you can (IIRC) pause a la baldurs gate to issue orders somewhat unneccesary), and it seemed to me that experience was only given to the character who got the deathblow. I know for a fact that my swordsman advanced hella fast compared to the mage (guess who usually killed stuff...) who was getting almost 0 Xp. The real killer was the lack of character depth. At least Diablo 2 your character was sorta different (unless you're the same class, and even then, they COULD still be different, not so with DS)...

I will probably take a look into DS 2, if they fix the XP system to be more DnDish (ie, equal shares of XP, with maybe a small *kill* bonus), because DS 1 was a good idea, just needs some polish. :)

Problems with DS experience system

[ThePyro]

Actually you don't need to kill a monster in DS to get experience. Just hitting the monster or casting a spell was enough to get some experience. In fact, I don't think there was any bonus at all for delivering a death blow.

Yet, in my experience, melee characters always advanced far more quickly than all my other characters. I tried going through the single-player campaign multiple times with various party configurations and strategies, but nothing seemed to help (exception: if you can get everyone in

Re:Problems with DS experience system

[PainKilleR-CE]

I saw the reverse when I played the game. My long-range characters (especially those wielding the bow) advanced more quickly than my melee characters. Of course, this might be simply because I tend to reign in the characters a bit to keep them from wandering away from the core of the group, and used the melee characters mostly as a defensive force for the center. The long-range characters would usually get at least a hit on every enemy in the area, while the melee characters only really got experience from

Will I have to actually play this one.

[darkmayo]

Dungeon Siege was pretty fricking boring.. looked great ran well, easy to play... wait no I didn't really have to play it.. the toons played the game itself. Other than a few special abilites it felt like the game was on auto pilot.

Way to linear as well, follow the path kill monsters get stronger follow path monsters get harder kill monsters..

Lets hope the 2nd incarnation will add some meat to this potato.

Multiplayer...

[Sylver Dragon]

I just hope they fix the multiplayer features a bit. To start with, the multiplyer campaign in the first one really seemed like an afterthought. Basically no story, you just fight your way from place to place. To make matters worse the game scaled horribly for multiplayer. All it did was give the eneimies more hit points, and a rather lot of them at that. My group had a couple of LAN parties where DS was the game we played, but we quickly lost interest in it. Why? Well, it got kinda boring just running around, and then spending 20 minutes hacking down 2 or 3 creatures, and with the non-interactive combat system it was like watching someone chop down a tree, not exactly fun. It got so bad a one point that one of the players, playing a fighter type character, got up in the middle of a battle, got sodas for everyone, and then watched over my sholder as I blasted off spells in a vain attempt to kill something. Which brings up the other problem I had with it, since the monsters HP went up dramatically, but the mage's ability to do damage stayed the same, the mage was pretty worthless, you would have to expend all of your mana to bring down one creature, the whole time running around like a bitch hopping it didn't squish you. At least it was interactive, but it sucked never getting to actually be of much use in the battles.
For me, if a game is going to have multiplyer in it, it had better be good. I hate forking out the money for a game, to use at a LAN party, only to have the multiplayer suck. And these days, that's about the only way I like to play RPG/Adventure games.

Re:Multiplayer...

[CrisDias]

Multiplay was fun! I would click on my friend's character, which would put mine in "guard" mode. Sit back and relax. Nothing to do. My char would auto-attack anyone attacking him and heal him any time necessary. I did NOTHING for a whole hour.

A DM-module, a-la-NWN would be very welcome on DS2 tho. ;-)

The Return of the Mule based combat system?!?

[JANYAtty.]

Best thing about DS was the mule. Setup you party with the ranged weapons and hit stop. Then send in the mule! Monsters chase the mule, so just run it back to your charachters and watch the monsters get mowed. Other then that it was boring as crap, and despite the many interesting names the magic items had each seemed completely interchangeable. Other great parts: spending an hour at the stores trying to optimize your charachters, and having two charachters die at a time so you then had to figure out who ha

Trailer = No gameplay

[antdude]

Just a note. The trailer only shows rendered scenes. I am sure the gameplay isn't like that. ;)

OK, how do i play this thing

[hrbrmstr]

Mac OS X, quickime, VLC (latest), Windows Media Player (latest). Sound on VLC. Blank widescreen on WMP and nothing doing with quicktime.

Guess they aren't planning a dual release in 2004.

Nice movie....

[kreyg]

So, what is the GAME like?

TA2

[Omestes]

Boycott this, force Mr. Taylor to make Total Annihilation 2. This is what most gamers want.

I think that most people only bought this game because of who made it, and was dreadfully disapointed. Boring as hell.

I want mr. Taylor to develop a new RTS, thats what he is good at, and he should stick with it. Otherwise it's like Blizzard moving out of the Action and RTS's that their good at, and making something lame like, say a MMORPG.

he is.

[Recoil_42]

he is. i cant tell you much more; but i CAN tell you he is making it. now, i mean.

trust an anonymous coward from the inside...

Re:he is.

[Omestes]

Bit OT here;

Wow, TAU is still up and running? My gawd, I'm actually kinda happy at that. Stop posting on the forum and reading it years ago, glad the community is still ticking, and hopefully your board is just as... esoteric as before (fears the old God thread).

Looks great but....

[failedlogic]

It looks like most of the video shows in-game cinematics rendered by the games engine. I hope they actually show some game-play video to give a good idea of what the new UI and features are.

I liked DS 1 but, I also found it too repetitive. There was too much hacking and slashing. The "first" character in the game should have been built up a bit better as well as any others you hire. The fact he didn't have to survive until the end tells me the plot development wasn't well thought out.

>> To get the v

Experience

[tprime]

I agree with everyone above when they say that the mage is almost worthless. My hack-and-slash type chars leveled up far faster than the rest of my party. Why? They are the ones that actually killed everything, so their stats go up more quickly. An experience system similar to the Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance would suit this well. In Dark Alliance, the character that killed the beast got 60% of the experience while the teammate got 40%. I know this would have to be modified to fit a party of 6 or so,

DS 1 had promise, but...

[dcr]

as the others have said, it did get a bit repetitive. I, too, found that the spells in no way scaled as well as the weapons did (and thanks to the non-existant manual, there was no way to know what was going to be a useful spell until you found it and tried it out). I got every one of followers trained up in ranged weapons as soon as I found the nifty toys in the Goblin Caves (flamethrowers and grenade launchers - woo-hoo!). I kept a couple of these sufficiently trained in Nature Magic to do healing spells