I personally don't think that counts because they weren't Obsidian yet. Just because some of the staff from Obsidian were a part of B.I.S. doesn't mean that Obsidian should be credited with those games; after all, Obsidian didn't exist yet and should be viewed (in my opinion) as a separate entity.

I find myself disappointed that Obsidian took on this project in the first place. It's such an absolute waste of their creative talent to make a shallow game of this nature. I suppose they wanted to try something a bit easier to make as a result of all of their previous efforts being just a bit off in terms of design execution and stability. However, their games were still enjoyable despite the (at times significant) flaws because of some wonderful ideas. Ironically, DS3 is far less ambitious compared to previous Obsidian efforts and yet it still doesn't appear to come together successfully. Without the charm and creative ambition that negated the flaws of their previous games, I believe that DS3 will be a complete flop with no redeemable qualities.

My Demo Rant
 

Just finished demo…the controls are so bad, SO BAD. But this is an easy fix mostly if we could just rebind our controls…sadly, the super tedious and difficult item and loot pickup won't be easily fixed. This game was just a chore to play. You move to slow, you can't move where you want without great effort, opening chests takes way too much effort.

And the UI…too many clicks and idiotic controls…PC players do NOT use the "ENTER" key to navigate menus!!

And the combat…it appears you can't pick your target? My character kept attacking the wrong target…very annoying.

Man…I was hoping this would be good…but it was just painful to play…contrast this with Hunted: Demon's Forge, which despite being a console port like DS3, was very fun to play…and I'll take flawed but VERY fun over "rich, complex, epic, TEDIOUS" any day…

Kinda like how having "Duke" on a box was enough to get a lot of people excited :)

Man, that sounds so good.
If Santa exists, I wish that for next Xmas.

You can control your character using awsd and the mouse work in the menus. Using that make the PC version much more controllable.

My worst fears confirmed!

I nearly jumped out of my chair when I heard they were making Dungeon Siege 3 (I loved the first two games) but then my heart dropped when I learned it was being made for the console (with a half-arsed PC port). I just knew the controls would be bad.

If only they'd stuck to their roots and made this for the PC with modding tools like the first two games, then I'd have been all over it like a rash. Now, I'm not even going to bother trying the demo.

Thanks to everybody who reviewed this game, you've saved me some bandwidth :-)

…… another bad thing.
This kind of game should improve the looting system as one of its strong points, right?
Why your character wears always the same armor if you change it in the inventory?

Small detail: They simply reviewed the demo, not the game.

A demo represents the game. Im tired of hearing how it cant be used to judge the game. Thats the point of a demo to try the game and see if its worth your money.

It can be used up to a point yes. However, one should also consider that the demo is basically the tutorial plus one of the first quests. For comparison, I'd advise to look back on other RPGs and see how the beginning compares to later parts in the game.

A demo is an excellent way to get a feel for the gameplay and see if it's for you or not. But you can't review an entire game based on it (though it wouldn't surprise me if there are reviewers who write based only on the first few hours of games).

Nah… The DS games were never anything special to begin with. The Duke has a much greater legacy. ;)

Plays great on the 360. Picking up items is one click. Hell, Witcher has a far more complicated item pickup system. Heck, the item float and the game makes it very obvious. Gold is auto-pickup. Demo is the tutorial of the game. I'd love to go back to the release of Baldur's Gate and see people review Candlekeep as the totality of BG. What a joke. Andthe sad thing is, you guys are serious! Your only real complaint is the controls(which can easily be fixed/patched) yet bawww is all I hear. I loved how you can check bodies and notes on the ground for flavour text. Who does flavour text anymore? I'm sure once you hit the game proper, the optional content will kick in. And the graphics are pretty nice.

Do I have to repeat the meaning of what a demo is to people. No one is reviewing the game were just saying after playing the demo we dont care about the full game. To many flaws and you can tell this game is better played on a console. I swear some people get nitpicky about people expressing there views on a demo that represents the full game.

Its Obsidian's fault for releasing this shitty demo. It was the same with DA2 everybody said the full game would be different but guess what it wasn't.

Long List of Problems
 

I shall now list a large list of problems along with a few good points.

You have hit E to open a chest, then wait for the item to fall to ground, then hit E again over the item, often requiring you to reposition your character to be close enough to it. Tedious. Just let me pick it up directly from the chest!

Also, no stats preview before pickup, so you have to go into the menu each time you pick up an item to see if it’s better. They should have included a stats comparison window and ability to instantly equip it if better. See the recent Hunted: Demon’s Forge as an example.

Gold is hard to spot and requires you to precisely move over it to pick up. Tedious. Just give me the gold automatically…it adds nothing to my enjoyment to have to pace back and forth to pick up all the gold.

You can’t pick what enemy you target, so often your character flails about and wasted his/her power attack on a single enemy instead of the group. This is the single largest game-breaking element. Combat is just cumbersome and imprecise with the current auto-target/lock-on system.

Your character moves slowly and can’t run but rather leisurely jogs even in great danger. Tedious. At least in Diablo 2 we had stamina for running and a fast movement speed by default.

The funny German/Russian accents for characters. Mostly just funny, but not very fitting for a fantasy game. Sounds like the hired the Alpha Protocol actors.

Forcing us to use “Esc” and “Enter” in the menus. Simply making right-click close the menu would make life so much easier. At least they let F or X or C close each respective menu, so that’s some good news.

“Plays great on the 360.” Yeah, and it plays like rubbish on the PC. Forcing me to use a controller to have an ok experience is not ok.

The huge floating yellow exclamation marks over quest givers. Am I playing some MMO? Is it too much to ask for something actually immersive, like him calling for help as I walk by?

Holding down block makes you immune to all damage. I understand why they did this since the AI are quite cheap…but the solution would be to make proper AI and combat. Combat just doesn’t feel right, hard to explain but easy to feel for most of us.

Um, where’s my map screen? Maybe I missed this? And where’s my North marker on my compass/map?

Poor story telling: Anjali or whatever her name is becomes trapped in that wooden cage…then the designers remembered she’s this flame archon who can burn things at will, how do we explain this? I know…the wooden cage has unspecified, invisible magic protecting it. Wow, that was the best they could do? How about just putting her in a special metal cage, and even having her say she burned through the first wooden one, much to the surprise of her captors. Man, I’m such a genius.

Another story issue: when your Legion friend gets “wounded” right before entering the keep… He sure didn’t appear to have gotten wounded…in fact he and I totally murdered that boss guy. But again, his “wound” was only so you’d have to adventure by yourself. Why not just have him stay at the keep to help guard it? Don’t give me this fake “wounded” stuff, or actually show a cutscene with him being gravely wounded. I mean shoot, I got “wounded” a lot but the green orbs of unwounding fixed me up real good!

The graphics are great, at least the world graphics. The menu UI graphics are an artistic nightmare, large and rainbow colored icons, very jarring compared to the quite stylized and “dark” world art.

The talking scenes are pretty good. Although only being able to hear dialogue lines once is very annoying. Note how Mass Effect nearly always allowed repeating the info dialogues in case you missed some of it the first time…

The extra “lore” bits from books is nice…although the text is too small and quite often is inconsequential info like “Looks like he died…” (at least in the demo). Plus most annoyingly, they FORCE me to hit “Close” when I read this stuff. Just let me WALK AWAY or right-click, or hit any key. Don’t force me to move my mouse to center screen to hit “Close”. Again, this is a consolitis issue.

And FYI, Candlekeep is a fine representation of the gameplay mechanics of BG. If I played Candlekeep and hated it, I’d also hate the rest of the game! I remember playing Candlekeep and being anxious to go explore the rest of the world! Likewise, the DS3 demo is a fine representation of how low-quality and ill-though-out DS3 is.

…But I’ll grant you they could fix all the main issues with a gigantic patch…sort of like the “Enhanced Edition” of Witcher. However, no way that will ever happen. Obsidian barely patches their games, except for New Vegas, which Bethesda helped/forced to patch.

I'm tired of hearing how a demo can be used to judge a game.
Because it is a small PART of a game and can't be used to JUDGE a WHOLE game.

A demo obviously serves to people see if they have interest in buying the WHOLE game. And that's it. Just like the trailer for a movie, or some free chapter of a book. It serves to attract (or not) people to it.

But you can't JUDGE a WHOLE product (be it a game, movie or book) just by experimenting a small part of it.

Bethesda also forced (helped? ha ha) Obsidian to use Gamebyro on FO New Vegas (obviously, since it was used on Fo3), because for some reason Beth had an undying love of that crap engine. The least they could do is to give Obsid money/time to work on the paches, since it also seems kinda obvious Beth forced Obsidian to rush NV through the doors.

Plus Obdisian is a company for hire, so, if the publisher don't give them money to keep updating / polishing a game, I wonder how they will survive.

And Irenicus dungeon was a very poor demonstration / introduction to BG II.
I played and hated the opening part of BG II. I almost gave up the game before beeing free to do as I wished in Amn.

I liked Duke a lot in my teens, but I'd take one Obsidian game over ten Dukes :)

Before Alpha Protocol was released, that is, but a lot of people still have faith in Obsidian…

So it was more about Obsidian than Dungeon Siege. Though, it must be said, I really liked Dungeon Siege 2 - and I didn't expect DS3 to be this bland.

I'm still hoping the demo was a bad demonstration, much like I imagine you hope the Duke demo was a bad demonstration?

It is the publishers that'll decide whether or not a patch is coming or not. In the case of Alpha Protocol, Sega? didn't want to pay Obsidian for making a patch. In the cae of Fallout: New Vegas, Bethesda decided that the game needed a patch and paid Obsidian accordingly. The same goes for Storm of Zehir and Mask of the Betrayer. Atari? paid for the development of patches for these expansion to NWN2.

As I played, the demo, I found the same issues with the demo (and the full game, probably) as Brumbek did.

Um, i thought the demo was great. I played it with an Xbox360 controller though.

Would be nice to hear a little more about other opinions. I was kind of hoping to pick this up as a lightweight game for those occasions where I just have half an hour before bed. What did you like about it? I don't own a controller, though.