| Fantasm |
February 7th, 2011 23:41 |
Man, tough crowd. The gameplay is definitely an action-RPG, and if that isn't your cup of tea, then by all means stay away. But I actually see quite a bit to like in this video.
I twice tried to play the first Dungeon Siege, with each attempt separated by a few years, and both times lost interest right around the time I filled out my party of 6 (or was it 8?).
But about a year ago, my wife came across a boxed copy of Dungeon Siege 2 in a thrift store for the princely sum of two dollars. She picked it up for me, and it never failed to compel me to play it through to it's completion, and I had quite a bit of fun doing so. It was quite well done.
One thing that always bugged me about it though was how hard it was to manage the mayem around you. Often when I had multiple monsters swarming me, I became overwhelmed with keeping track of what was going on, managing the health of me and my party, all our buffs, which powers were recharged, etc. My best tactic was usually to backtrack and run away, and fight the enemies in an organized front, taking out one or two at a time in a methodical manner, because that's the only way I could manage the action (granted, it was still fast-paced, but on my terms). But in this video, all the lights and flashes that everyone is complaining about actually looks to serve a useful purpose to my eyes. You can very clearly see who is taking damage and how much, and you can also very clearly see who has buffs and where their radius extends to.
If they can build on the fun factor from DS2, I'll keep an eye on this one.
A few notes about the party control in DS2 for those who didn't play it. This will really be the key for DS3, IMO, because I feel that DS2 got party control in an action RPG almost perfect. If DS3 veers too far off from the DS2 conventions, it could have a big uphill climb.
When thinking party control in DS2, think Dragon Age. In DS2, you could assume control of any of your characters, and all the others would get picked up by the AI (including your own). You also had the option to toggle between a focused attack where everybody follows your mouse clicks, or a divided attack where each character would follow its AI directive (the AI choices weren't very deep, but seemed adequate for the task).
One thing that worked really well is that you had 1-click access to the active spells of every party member (4 active spells per member). Furthermore, you had hot-key access to every character's active mega-power, and you could change each character's active power with, again, only 1 mouseclick. So even though you're directing the movement and individual attacks of one character, you could very quickly and easily unleash a barrage of abilities from your entire party. Add to this a special slot in all spellbooks for two auto-cast spells, and you could ensure that your support characters would keep buffs and healing going at all times (and if that sounds too auto-playish to you, which was a big problem in DS1, keep in mind that only having 2 per character was very limiting, because there were a LOT of different kinds of buffing/healing/summoning spells that you could utilize, and part of the challenge was figuring out what to have auto-cast and what to manage yourself).
I will say that the interface in this DS3 video worries me a great deal, because it's certainly alot more simplified. Who knows, though, what it will look like once you get companions. Perhaps the buttons in the corner will be duplicated up along the side of the screen, and you can have similar instant access to other party members. The fact that they're making this for the console too, however, makes me very worried that party management will likely take a step back in DS3. I'll be looking to see if they release more gameplay videos that illustrate party combat….
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