Dungeon Siege III

@Shadow Scythe: I take it that you didn't play the first two games as Death Claws were already scary in those games. And with scary, I mean "Oh crap, that kills me fast and takes a lot of hits" way.

But yeah, I didn't say that Kreia wasn't awesome villain =P Like I said, I don't like Avellone, but his writing is awesome even when he is doing Author Tracts.

And I do acknowledge that talking deathclaws are little bit silly, but like I said, there wasn't any need to attempt to retcon possibility of them reappearing, he could have just said that they don't ever manage to breed again. Besides, again super mutants. I don't say they aren't dangerous or scary, but still.

edited 16th Apr '11 1:38:55 AM by SpookyMask

I'm really tempted to pick up Steam's pre-order, but... well, I'm a college student and stingy with my money. Anyone got a website that could tell me more about the series, or any personal recomendations? (The tvtropes page looks a little spoilery.)

Also, are the expansions included in the Steam copies? It doesn't say...

Nah, I preordered Dungeon Siege 3 and it appears to just have the vanilla games for DS 1 and 2, no multiplayer (although apparently there's a workaround for that if you look it up) and no expansion packs.

Haha, nah ofc it's not a bad thing- just clarifying it for Nick Nacks, you should see the rage going on in the steam forums about the lack of MP and expansion packs though.

edited 16th Apr '11 6:30:52 PM by ShadowScythe

You say that like it's a bad thing. It's FREE.

1 hour footage of some co-op combat on the 360 here

It's probably the clearest idea of the combat we'll get and I really like how it's turning out. The combat still feels tactical (stuff like Reinhart kiting the enemies away from his fallen companion to then teleporting back to her to revive her or just dropping an Ao E that slows opponents so he can get back to her) but it also manages to do tactics while still feeling really actiony and intense- at least that's how I found it. I do hope single player will give us a better control of the camera (I know we have a top down view and a vanity view but often something in between looked like it'd be really useful) so that we can see some enemies better. It was also nice to see that even on casual the game was still something of a challenge that still made you have to dodge, think etc rather than just mash buttons to win.

Yep, not regretting my preorder one bit.

You think this game will do well on PC? I mean, is it a PC game ported to consoles or a console game ported to PC?

About Alpha Protocol's timed dialogue: I thought it was brilliant. One of the things Mass Effect suffers from is clunky, jarring dialogue, but with the timed dialogue in AP it flowed really well.

So, Square Enix are in this too ? REALLY?

What is so surprising about Square Enix? They owned the Dungeon Siege franchise now. Square Enix have also acquired Eidos which mean they will also publish future Tomb Raider, Hitman, Thief, Deus Ex and Legacy Of Kain games. They have been diversifying for quite a while now.

I can take that, I dont see the difference anyways, but I wonder how the fans will take this

It's not like it's going to turn into Final Fantasy with strategic camera.

There's apparently a lot of issues with the PC controls and camera...dunno what to make of that, I guess the 1 hour giant bomb vid didn't seem to show much camera issues but that was on local co-op.

On the other hand this preview seems to suggest that DS 3 is apparently more or less bugfree. Take that Bugsidian legacy!

Awesome, really looking forward to this, have been a big fan of DS 2.

Demo coming in two weeks.

Demo on Xbox Live Marketplace right now.

Somebody tell me how it is.

I've seen some pretty positive impressions on the game thus far. On the other hand I've also seen people bitching about the multiplayer content- apparently online MP has the same shared camera of local which is pretty surprising to me (could just be the demo build though and I do have to ask how the demo actually has online mp, the guy who said that might not know the difference between online and local) and I've also seen one person say they kept respawning at full health with no penalty when they died- not sure if that's in the game or it was just a demo thing cause it was even on hard difficulty and if that's true that's a bit of an issue for me.

However aside from those two issues the game apparently looks really nice visually and the combat is fluid and challenging.

EDIT: Scratch that, the respawning at full health thing is definitely a demo thing to compensate for lack of save points and checkpoints.

EDIT 2: live stream and youtube preview

edited 31st May '11 4:32:51 PM by ShadowScythe

Just clarifying a few things: The camera is NOT shared during multiplayer online co-op, you can adjust the camera however you want for each individual system, it's just that the group is tethered and you can't run away too far from each other (judging from the previews I've seen for local co-op, I'm guessing what happens is that if someone lags too far behind the host they get teleported to a location near the host).

So...no major problems so far I guess.

Herp Derp triple posting now it seems.

The PC demo is finally out on Steam. I've played it once as Lucas so far. I heard a lot of complaints about camera so I turned off the auto orient feature and it wasn't a problem- what I did have a problem with was a serious lack of strafing. Pressing A and D simply makes the character turn towards the right/left rather than actually strafe right or left- it was seriously annoying and incredibly frustrating to move around the map and fight enemies.

The game was pretty challenging- even on normal but I'm not sure if that was the difficulty or just the really irritating controls. I seriously hope that issue was fixed in the final build because the game otherwise looked like a really fun and actually tactical (can't just spam- the difficulty forced me to constantly dodge and switch stances to stun some annoying opponents before running back and taking out the trash, it would've been heaps fun if it weren't for the controls)

The Onyx engine isn't that impressive on a technical level- but the art direction makes up for it. Everything is quite stylistic and it looks very pretty and colourful even if there aren't many polygons. While armour loot didn't seem to change much in terms of how it looked (presumably they'll start changing at the higher tiers) the weapon loot changes a lot and the weapons look quite nice. At the end of the demo I got a green flaming sword which looks as awesome as it sounds.

The soundtrack sounds great and in terms of writing...well I didn't get to see much of it but it was surprisingly pretty funny. And the dialogue wheel actually came pretty close to paraphrase matching what's said compared to other games.

So overall...dunno...if they fix that keyboard issue and the story is the usual Obsidian level of writing then this game will be great. But that controls issue really stopped me from having more fun.

I played it, but it just didn't feel like dungeon siege. It felt like Dragon Age 2, which I don't like.

I hope there's actual undead mules in the real game.

I enjoyed that.

Also, that forest that all that optional lore's going on about? So not the final dungeon. Calling it!

Other thoughts: Suprising ammount of minot characters that managed to survive in the Legion. At least five mentioned or seen with explicit ties to the group who aren't even playable. Cool.

Also, this was hard. I was dieing all over the place and I was on casual.

edited 8th Jun '11 5:18:45 PM by Nicknacks

Yeah it is pretty challenging, it was heaps fun though cause I found myself using all sorts of abilities just to give myself a bit more edge and survive a little longer. That fight with the witch at the end was heaps hard and the lead designer says that's more of an indication of the typical difficulty in the game. But I'm still not sure how much of that difficulty came from the encounters and how much was due to the controls and (occasionally) the camera working against me.

Also I redid the demo with Anjali and the game was instantly far more fun, love her fire Ao E and the Jackal. She'll probably be my second favourite character after Reinhart.

I found it difficult to target — I often found myself attacking a space four feet behind the boss while it was wailing on my back — but I think that might have just been me playing badly.

The only fight with Anjali that gave me trouble was the frogfishman thing, mostly because I didn't know what I was doing yet. Once I mastered the arts of "sit inside your field of fire blocking while the melee all die then chuck fireballs at everything else" in fire form to deal witht he masses and "hit hit guard" in humans form for the single big guys, it got a lot easier. Have yet to try it with the other dude.

although more than the lack of strafing, I found the fact that hitting the S key made your character actually turn around and walk towards the camera instead of backpedaling to be really blarg.

edited 8th Jun '11 7:34:23 PM by Blissey1

PS. Demo just came out on PC and PS 3.