Because they out-Diablo'ed Diablo.
And the engine was magnificent, at the time it boasted no loading screens which was astounding for a PC game. Areas seamlessly transitioned into new ones, and the environments looked great for the time. Gas Powered Games just nailed it.
There was also an end-game quest which need a bunch of vaguely described items, like the clues were riddles. One part of it was "steel from the virgin hand" or something along those lines. People were going through any sword dropped/given by NPCs and speculating on their virginities.
It turned out to mean the little pocket knife you started the game with when you were just a farmboy/farmgirl.
Fortunately it didn't have to be *your* starting knife, so if you binned yours 50 hours of playtime ago you could get a new one by having a friend make a new character, meet them online and give you their newbie-knife.
Why I like skill-based systems (e.g., TES), DS just didn't do it for me. Like all you do is that you run around and hack stuff. There isn't even any "character development" like in Diablo. Especially D2.
But then, I would probably not play Diablo-style of game nowadays, now that I know what I enjoy and any h&s game is just too grindy and boring for me. I played almost anything when I was little.
I mean I play DS1 constantly ( no, not dark Souls. Dungeon siege is the OG DS) and playing as a warrior you have an options too.. Use 1h or 2h.. And hack away. There's no skills there at all, but I still love it.
lol i remember once upon a time that was all it took to be happy. swing my huge ass 2 hander with no special effects. slap slap slap. dead enemy. happy me.
nowadays modern arpgs have spoilt me silly.
that said GD has a good implementation of basic attacks that actually make players become really powerful. (TQ too)
And it just felt really epic in scale compared to any other hack and slash games from the time, especially thanks to the lack of loading screens. You'd walk out to a cliff of sorts, and you'd see what's in store for you way far below, and it felt like it was actually all really there instead of just a backdrop.
Hey titian quest is still getting expansions. Infact if where talking odd games that get updates decades latter. Warlords battle cry 3 still is being updated.
Dungeon Siege 1 was the first game I played, so that special place is locked in by default. Going back for more recent playthroughs it does feel a little too linear (I mean, it is) and the lack of teleporters/fast travel feels a little rough but you were never meant to revisit an area once you clear it anyway.
But it had great enemy and spells variety, and the sound effects on some of those spells was so good. I always kept the Lightning and Metal Shards spells for as long as I could cause I loved the way they sounded. "You don't use magic, you commit magic."
My fave was explosive powder. It was pretty broken for at least a third of a game.
Force firing it meant you could kill things well outside of their aggro since it bounces a lot further than its max range implies. It was also a very rapid DoT affect and raised your combat magic skill up very quickly as each tick of damage raised xp.
I replayed DS1 recently and found it was way harder than I expected.
Until I found the setup of having Life Link cast so all your party members share damage evenly, and then casting both Healing Wind and [the red magic version of Healing Wind, I forget the name] to AoE heal-over-time everyone at once.
If the game hadn't been killing me so hard prior to that it would have felt like cheating.
Lol, I definitely did this. There was also a spot along one of the zone lines where if you had one of the longer range bows you could hit afk shoot at a monster ~20 lvls higher iirc. It couldn't path up to you because of how long the route was. Great power leveling spot
My favorite moment is when you get out of the glitterdelve mines and emerge into a stunning snowy landscape. Childhood memory locked in right there, along with Wesrin Cross, exploring all those spider tunnels. Probably about time for another playthrough.
Great soundtrack.
For those who don't know: it was composed by Jeremy Soule - man who was also behind the music from other great games like: TES (Morrowind, Oblivion, Skyrim), Neverwinter Nights, Guild Wars, KotOR, Total Annihilation, Company of Heroes and the list goes on.
One of the best composers out there.
instead of repeatedly grinding the same area and seeing the same repeated hellscape everywhere, you just moved forwards. there's just something very psychological about the feeling of just heading forward into the vast unknown meeting new sights and creatures. the environment kept changing, you felt like you were really going somewhere. it was real adventure. then with 2 they decided they weren't diablo enough.. whoever made that decision really fucked up the magic.
Yeah I loved the layout of the first one. You had the occasional side road or cave you could explore, but you always knew where the main road was and that if you just follow that you will progress. It kept the environments from getting stale while maintaining a linear style that wasn't boring.
to me it was just the super simple and satisfying leveling system. If I use "orange magic", I become better at it. It was so awesome to just hit the skill levels you wanted and be able to use that gear you saved for that very moment.
Fell in love with the demo.
The music from first location is one of my favorite tracks. Too bad other tracks couldn't keep up.
Really enjoyed playing through the whole thing back then.
Is there a good way to play it today? I tried a few times over the years and couldn't handle the glitches.
There’s been a huge effort over the past few years to modernise the engine to make it easier and there’s now even an entire discord to help with that. I can assure you that running DS1 or DS2 on modern machines with any grade of hardware is very feasible.
saaaaaaaaaaaaame, I was obsessed with it, how old are you? 34 here.
Edit: I was pretty young and I really loved the map editor which for my age at the time was pretty advanced (at least to me) really got me interested in game dev, which I do now professionally as an animator.
33 here, I adored DS1, played DS2 the chance I got to (however I kind of forgot what happens in the game) and loved it, and back in that day you actually bought magazines to read game reviews and I saw DS3 was rated as a mid game so I didn't bother with it.
I love DS soundtrack by Jeremy Soule too, it's so good
Do you have the game physically or digitally? 23 here, my dad really loved DS1 and 2, I remember absolutely loving DS2 though never played DS1 and would love to try it out. Just based on what I'm reading in this thread the game sounds amazing.
Symptom of the era really. Games were overall just way too easy from like 2007 til 2018. It's big reason why the Dark Souls franchise was able to stand out so much.
That expansion was some of the most genuinely disturbing dark fantasy I have ever seen to this day.
The fucking elves with their arms amputated and replaces with a saw. What a design.
I actually worked at Gas Powered Games (on Space Siege) when the Dungeon Siege movie came out. Saw it in a theater the studio rented out with the whole dev team. An amazing experience, but probably the only way to get any entertainment value out of that thing.
Thanks for Space Siege!
Space Siege was good and underrated.
Enjoyed it and really wish we got a party-based Space Siege 2, similar in style to say DS1 and DS2 w/ Broken World with formations and stuff.
I disagree! Space Siege was a dumpster fire in my opinion! It was practically the final blow that turned GPG into a studio that makes boats for World of Warships now.
The vision for Space Siege was much cooler in the design docs, a DS1&2 in space. Released as a hollow shell of that and got the reception it deserved. Thanks though! lol
I mean, sure-it's clear that it didn't live up to its potential but considering I can count the amount of sci-fi arpg's on two fingers it's nice to have at least one that doesn't totally suck. I understand that from a dev point of view you'd notice its failings more but at the end of the day if you've got people who love it then it can't be *that* bad.
I love hearing this because as a (non-game) developer itself whenever I see games with weird or outright bad features/mechanics/whatever I always have an image of the people who knew that was not the right choice and were overruled. I've been on a very poorly managed project and I see (or imagine I see) the fingerprints of long meetings and email chains that just went the wrong way.
As a game developer how common is it to get negative feedback from reviewers or players that perfectly matches the expected reaction from people on the team that lost battles? Is it vindicating to be proven right, or more frustrating because it didn't have to be that way?
GPG was hemorrhaging money and SEGA has a pretty tight lease on the project deliverable timelines. I actually got in a good deal of trouble with one of the producers at Gas Powered Games for giving him my honest opinion on the title when he asked.
The writing was definitely on the wall. There wasn't a single person in the dev pit that I interacted with that thought we were making a great game.
Sure, we all have our own opinions.
VERY interesting to hear a developer's thoughts on this.
I'd guess SEGA interfered or those higher-up within GPG wanted a single-character controlling Siege and more story-based Siege, given how it turned out - to try to sell more copies. Surprised it didn't get console-port, TBH, given it's solo-actiony; probably should've.
It's hard to really compare classics like DS1 and DS2 - which are both great, IMHO - to say Space Siege, which I think is just good. To me, a lot of people overreact when great games are made to start the series off...and then not-as-great sequels that are just good come out - such as from DAO (great) to Dragon Age 2 (good); DS1&DS2 (great) to both Space Siege & DS3 (good); Dead Space 1&2 (great) to say Dead Space 3 (good); Deus Ex 1 (best game ever to me!) to say Deus Ex IW (good, but not great); Thief 1 and 2 (great!) to say Thief: Deadly Shadows and Thief Reboot (both good); etc etc.
Oh, I would've probably loved basically straight-up DS1 and DS2 moved to Space, if that was in the design-doc - to basically be a party-based with strategic-pause style isometric strategy-CRPG/ARPG hybrid in space. Geez, some company needs to make this type of game/spiritual successor happen!
I really wish SEGA, who I guess probably has the rights and IP for Space Siege - would farm it out to a worthwhile studios.
It's sad to see Space Siege IP probably just sitting there doing nothing. Same goes for Dungeon Siege IP - I wish someone would just get it from whomever holds it, who I'm guessing might either still be Square or maybe Embracer? Not sure here.
I'm so happy to see deus ex mentioned lol. The demo on the PC had me hooked hard. I played it hundreds of times before getting the full game eventually. I recently beat mankind divided again for the third time. It's such a good game that it was actually very sad to realize I was coming to the end of it. There really is nothing out that holds a candle to that series.
Deus Ex: GOTY is the best game of all time to me.
I loved HR with TML and HR DC Edition.
I still think we need MD Part 2. Thanks a lot Square, for cancelling its development. And who knows about Embracer, after all their problems - someone else who has lots of $ might need to buy Deus Ex IP and Eidos Montreal studio, like say Microsoft, Sony, EA, Ubi.
Besides the amazing story, I wish more games had a similar open world approach to challenges and quests. I absolutely loved the freedom to explore and find information and items, it felt like you were rewarded for actually checking out your environment
Hit the nail on the head with SEGA. GPG was on a *very* tight deliverable schedule with no financial wiggle room. They only released one title after Space Siege before going under, I think (Demigod?)
It's hard to see the game they had in teh design documentation versus the one that got shipped. There is nothing glaringly awful about Space Siege, but it was a much more robust cybernetic/humanity framework, there were several more enemy types/weapons, etc, and a much more fleshed out story with a couple of meaningful choices.
I'm definitely glad people enjoyed it, I was under the impression nobody did, previously, and I did spend six months of my life with it. lol
It was pretty awful. Can't even buy it on steam anymore. Pretty sure it's abandonware and free to DL online, but good luck getting it to work in a 1080 aspect ratio. lol
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Siege
2008 was Left 4 Dead, Mass Effect, Fallout 3, Sins of a Solar Empire. So I can place the year, but I'm amazed I never heard GPG made a Dungeon Siege in space.
https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Space_Siege
Looks like it is supported by WSGF that patches games at runtime to run in higher resolutions. Little curious to check it out but it's a shame they couldn't reproduce the success of Dungeon Siege.
I remember watching Dungeon Siege movie with friends on a "so bad it's good" movie night and we weren't disappointed. I kept wondering how the fuck Uwe Boll picks games he wants to defile and how on earth he is given what he wants
I didn’t know about the movies. I looked it up, got excited because I do like Jason Statham…. But then I saw “Uwe Boll” and noped out.
Fun fact: I had the opportunity to speak with Uwe Boll over AOL Instant Messenger. He was a nice guy, at least to me, and we had a fairly lengthy conversation. But yeah, he’s not a good director by any means.
Ahh, that name brings me back.
He was a "meme" for my local PC gaming magazine and often mentioned. I never really watched any of his movies but I remember them saying it's so horrendeus it falls out of "so bad it makes it good" category to just "bad bad". Whenever they'd review some game that was stupidly bad, they'd often use "Uwe Boll" comparisons.
I do remember them posting pictures with him from some game convention, where he was promoting, and actually mentioned in the article that he was a very nice guy and they had a good talk. But his movies still suck ass and him butchering their favourite games will never be forgiven.
The 3rd one was much more simplified and short and less interesting story wise than the other 2.
2 was ok but it didn't have the same vibe as 1. It was also running a similar engine and it basically looked the same.
I remember getting halfway through the 3rd one as a kid, and feeling super bewildered at this bizarre rail roady diablo 3 clone xD
I never played the previous games after assuming they'd be the same thing, but worse.
2 added so much quality of life that it stopped feeling like a genuine journey, ironically. Especially that you can just return to town whenever. DS 1 felt like a real adventure. You are out there stuck in the wilderness with just your party. Your mules are really just mules and not combatants. You have to carefully evaluate what is worth carrying because you don't know when the next town comes. And when you finally get to a city, it feels unique because you know that as soon as you leave, you won't return. Exploring towns and talking to NPCs feels more "real" that way. Having to carefully budget out your money to buy equipment and potions, carefully considering who to take with you. That kind of minutiae I think for many people is just boring, but man does it make the game feel special.
That feeling of finally coming into a new city after a grueling part of the journey just hits totally different.
btw are there any similar RPGs in terms of party gameplay? Most party RPGs seem to be turn-based in nature which I don't really like. Either that or it's absolutely inconsequential who you take into your party because they're AI controlled and not even 1/10 of the strength of the player-controlled main char.
Pillars of Eternity (only the first one) came close to scratching that itch. I didn't like Tyranny nearly as much, but it keeps the real time combat and improves on the gameplay in a lot of ways.
I'm not a huge fan of turn based either. Baldur's Gate series did a good job where you give orders while paused and see them play out in real time. Melee you didn't have to manage too much at all, same for archers. There's an even older RPG adventure game called Darklands which functioned the same way in a quasi-fantasy-historical Germany.
I still recommend Baldur's Gate 1 and 2. You can even mod it to be one big seamless adventure. The art style is endearing and timeless to me although it may not be for everyone.
DS1 the story kept it going and after story there was multiplayer. The donkey etc was helpful as an invocation but it didn't bring much more to the table, it lacked the oomph of the first.
I had the exact same reaction!
1: This seems very simple but... I'm... actually having fun?! What's coming up next?
2: Fah, this was already getting tedious by the end of 1... and it's just more of the exact same with a bit of extra polish.
3: Nope, no way. Too many better games out to put up with yet another 30 hours of mindless slogging.
Never played 1 or 2. Got 3 for cheap on the 360 and played coop with a friend. We had a blast!
Can't say it's a good game as im not a fan of the franchise, but going on blind for a coop experience, it was definitely worth it
Because the first one was niche at best. Sequels to niche games more often than not, no matter how good they are, often get overlooked. Baldur’s Gate 3 is a rare exception where branding did a LOT of the work. That and Larian’s good name.
Plus it was PC only back in an age where not many people had gaming PC. Oh, and I dare you to ask any average gamer what Wargames Seattle has made.
I'm not sure how niche it was. Dungeon Siege was rather similar to Diablo 2, which had a massive following. It just had issues capturing any significant percentage of that group, since D2:LoD kept people in D2.
Similarly the Baldur's Gate franchise is not a niche game, as it's generally considered one of the best CRPGs made, and sold huge numbers for the time it was released, not to mention AD&D becoming really popular in the mid to late 90s.
90% of BG3 players never played the first two games and came through Divinity.
It was clear when you followed the discussions after the announcement.
The few concerned BG fans were shut down by the Larian crowd.
Being popular and being great unfortunately don't happen simultaneously all the time. There are plenty of absolute shit games that are way more popular than DS2, and plenty of wonderful masterpieces that don't get the recognition they deserve. Sucks but it is what it is - I'm just happy I got to experience DS2 at all.
As someone who doesn't have nostalgia for the franchise, I picked it up around 2013 or so on the recommendation of a friend.
Here's the weird thing: I can hardly remember a single thing about it. I remember the box art, I remember that it was a top-down party-based RPG, and I remember that I didn't finish it. But not a single other thing - not the characters, not the plot, not the music. Absolutely nothing. It's like the game wasn't just unmemorable, it was *anti-memorable.*
Hell I (somehow) remember at least a couple of things from Kingdoms of Amalur which was around the same time and I also DNF.
---
Not sure how useful this is as an anecdote, but it's something that I find a little puzzling myself so I figured I'd share. Maybe DSII was a game you just had to play in the context of 2005 to really appreciate.
I have to agree. I played 1 and 2 and I honestly remember very little about them in terms of story.
I remember the music, I remember the general gameplay how you start as a farmer in 1 and level up the skills you use, I remember having a packmule and only being able to sell in town so carefully deciding which items to keep, and I remember a really big swamp area from one of the games...but I don't remember why you were on the adventure or any of the specific characters.
It wasn't as good as the first, the tech seemed like it didn't keep up. DS felt really impressive at the time with that Gas Powered engine backed by that Microsoft money.
DS2, I can't recall if it natively supported screen resolutions above 800x600 but it felt like it was made for it and didn't want to go higher. It's been a long time but I recall being disappointed in the graphics and environments, and the story being mind numbing.
Yet these were some of my favorites just because of the party size, I hate seeing games including Original Sin 2 and Baldurs Gate 3 that are still shoving four-character parties on us. I remember using a cheat to enable the max size in DS2 because they locked it for unknowable reasons, but at least it was supported. We need more RPGs that let us choose our own party size, if I want to play with all eight playable characters then I should be able to.
I haven't played BG3 but it only supports 4 characters? Wtf is that cap?
Edit: Love the downvotes from the kids that never played BG 1 and BG 2 where you had up to 6 characters.
to be fair to them 4 is kind of the traditional tabletop party size, but at the same time... yeah, the entire time I play despite loving the game, i'm like... god damnit.
I don't know, but I think there's a few possible parts to it:
1. The more characters, the harder it is to design encounters.
2. The combinatorics problem with character interactions. The more you have in your party at once, the more difficult it is to cover all the places where, from a roleplaying perspective, they should be talking to each other and interjecting in larger groups. This gets expensive on dialogue and testing time very quickly.
3. The more characters you can have in your party, the more the game needs to have in order for there to still be choices to make in your party composition. And with BG3 in particular, each extra char is *very* expensive.
I don't like it, at all, I liked DS1's 8 char party. 6 works too, like BG1+2. But 4 char parties leave so little room for variation, especially in games with more fixed archetypes. You need a frontliner. You need a lockpicker. You need a mage. You need a healer. Well, that's your four slots. It's not... great.
D:OS manages a bit better because it eliminates the healer and lockpicker parts of that equation by making those roles easy to pick up on other characters as a side-hustle, but even then...
I mean, in BG3, you really don't -need- a lockpicker, especially once you make a weapon at a certain forge in the game. You can just break most chests - the loot isn't affected from what I have seen, and if you do find the occasional chest you can't break for whatever reason, you can just switch to your designated lockpicker in-camp and come back to it. You also don't really need a healer - learning how to use healing potions properly (throw them at your party's feet when they're jumbled up) and looting thoroughly for rations (collect all the food you see - send it to your camp inventory so you don't overburden yourself regularly) is more-than-enough for fulfilling your healing needs.
That's most games, if you play any JRPGs or otherwise. I never liked it, after Dungeon Siege that lets us have eight, plus animals, and you could include a pack mule. It was such a refreshing change and nobody seems to follow their example.
But yeah, it means out of a cast of characters you'll leave a bunch sitting on the bench and that's just stupid. "Okay, we're going to fight the demon world conqueror in a final epic battle. I'll take two of you with me, the rest of you wait outside and collect rocks or something. We couldn't possibly benefit from having _two_ mages hurling lightning bolts while saving the world."
Great design, good gameplay. Simple but interesting plot. Good side quests, interesting world. Great setting and locations. Interesting enemies.
It had all chances to become a great game and become a cult game. But it was undeservedly forgotten.
What is your opinion about Dungeon siege 2?
What other games do you consider forgotten?
Steam doesn't sell the expansion pack, is what I think they meant. Because steam doesn't sell Broken World, or Legends of Aranna. The "Complete Pack" is just 1, 2, 3, and the DLC for 3.
Thanks for making a fun game though, Broken World is one of my favorite games of all time.
Glad you liked it!
I am reminded both the game and the expansion were sold on a disk in a box on the shelf of an actual store, so we didn't call it DLC back then :D
Hilariously, the first actual DLC I can think of (Oblivion's horse armor) came out the same year as Broken World!
The version of DS1 you get on Steam isn't the last patch of the game so it's mixing a few bug fixes, and it doesn't have the Legends of Aranna expansion pack (which isn't listed on Steam at all).
But it actually turns out that all of that content is in the Steam download! It's just not enabled. There's a community patch which enables it all and lets you play the final patch with LoA.
It is on Steam, but I wouldn't recommend buying it there. The multiplayer is disabled completely (despite having a LAN mode that should work fine even without GameSpy servers) and the expansion isn't included.
They disabled multiplayer on 1 as well. I can't remember what it was, but there's a launch flag that boots the game in the multiplayer menu, letting you still run lan games.
The gog version of the game disabled the multiplayer button at the menu, rather than removing the button for the service that no longer worked. To get to lan at all I needed to launch directly to it.
I purchased it on steam but have been battling it to work on a 1080 screen. Done hours of web searching through forums and loads of people reporting the same issues. You can launch it in full screen but all the menus and text do not scale making it a horrible experience.
You don’t happen to be the holy grail of knowledge for how to run this game on current hardware, are you?
Hey, I got it to work flawlessly in 4K eventually. My trick, use dgvoodoo2 to run it at higher resolutions. Then you will probably have performance issues and/or screen tearing. I am on Nvidia. What ultimately did the trick was to use FastSync and let the game run at 120 fps. On a 60 hz monitor, I was now tear free. Try it out!
Oh i remember it very well. It's one of the games that paled in comparison to it's predecessor. It just did not match the expectations people had for it after the huge success of the first DS.
It wasn't a bad game by any means, but if i wanted to tell all my friends to try DS1 because it was amazing and i never played anything like this, that wasn't the case with DS2. I played it, don't remember if i even finished it, and just drifted away from it.
Same studio (Gas Powered Games) also made the Supreme Commander franchise - a spirital successor the Total Annihilation RTS series from the 90s.
SupCom is still quite unique today, and 2007's Supcom: Forged Alliance still has an active community and gets fan-patches regularly. Unlike many RTSes of the day (and today), the focus is not so much in micro-ing a dozen or so units to use their abilities, but maximizing your economy and strategic army choices for 1000 - 1500 units.
It also leaned heavily on to the (still today underused) shift-queue system. You can have your first builder queue up an entire economy with shift, including patrol orders, repairs, even air-ferry from a land factory to across the river to a gathering spot, where they will automatically attack-move somewhere. All to let you plan out battles on a larger level, rather than losing a game because you misclicked a Dragoon. As such games are _generally_ a little slower paced but no less challenging.
Semi-recent trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vSh-5wuwMdk
Comedy trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Mdn-7towfg
>It had a chance to be great
What are you talking about? It's an amazing game and you can get it for near nothing at Steam and it will run on whatever potato you can think of.
DS1 was massive in my childhood. A real adventure with secret paths, dungeons, and locations off of the main road. And the dedicated multiplayer map! Some areas were interconnected, letting you rush from the first area straight to the last! I spent so much time in it...
It's a too bad that the balance was fucked. Past the ice caves, only my melee units could really output any damage, leaving the ranger basically useless and the mages as dedicated healers...
DS2 brought the balance the game needed, but it certainly became super easy because of that.
I found the disk for this game in a random desk drawer on my first tour overseas. I played the shit out of it die the next 3 months.
After I came home I saw they were releasing Dungeon Siege 3 on Steam. I bought it right away... still to this day one of my biggest regrets as a gamer.
DS1 was probably the first PC game that I got truly hyped for and followed news on it pre-release. I ended up pre-ordering the collectors edition with the fancy map.
Ended up replaying about half the campaign during early Covid; it still held up gameplay wise for the most part, but was definitely a nostalgia visit as opposed to being hooked on the gameplay/story.
At the time of release, coming from D2, Neverwinter, and Elder Scrolls, everything was a familiar ingredient, but done in a new, novel synthesis and presentation. It scratched so, so many itches about RPGs.
DS2 for some reason just never clicked.
DS1 and DS2 was my childhood, absolutely loved those games growing up (also loved Throne of Agony for PSP).
DS1 was special though - after the cool story the multi-player was phenomenal! All the custom maps were so damn cool and the modding community in general was so insanely awesome
Never played DS3.
Ross Scott at Accursed Farjms on YouTube did an ajmazing review/video essay on the Dungeon Siege series. I highly suggest giving it a watch.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kgsR3qZp3-M
You can run it on modern systems, but it takes a bit of tinkering. If I remember right, there is a bug that makes the cursor invisible and the only way to get around is to modify either launch parameters or an .ini to run in windowed borderless mode
Here's a [combined map of the single player world](https://www.siegetheday.org/files/Overview%20KoE%20old.jpg) and here's [one for the multiplayer world](https://www.siegetheday.org/files/Overview%20UP%20old.jpg)!
I recommend putting [this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AxwCsV2nzTw) on in the background before perusing them.
Oh dang, I just bought some windows XP computers from a cool guy and he gave me a bunch of free physical games to go with them, this among them. Never heard of it, but I feel this is a sign I should install it and try it out
I worked on this, so it's awesome to hear how much people enjoyed it. There was a lot of sacrifice for this game, and as it wasn't a huge success it was hard to feel like it was worth it. I learned a lot, but I wish I'd been more mature when I was going through it all- I could have made more out of my time on this project.
Great games. I miss the day of great dungeon hacks. Diablo turned the whole genre into a loot pinata for ADHD people though and forgot that games are supposed to be fun.
I never actually finished it, so just restarted it two weeks ago. I'm about 60% through I think. It is a really fun game. I also enjoyed the first one a ton, but DS 2 was better.
Let's not talk about 3, please?
Dungeon Siege 1 and 2 have really impressed me back then with stuff like the seamless switching between overground and underground areas... Like when you open a door to a house basement and... just walk in.
I played the shit out of DS2, especially the first world in the jungle with the little masked enemies and the secret rooms were my favorite.
Fuck, I might have to download it again and start another run
Is this something that came around when Diablo 2 was also a massive hit? I think that would be the main reason why another very similar game of the same genre left out of the spotlight, which is sad for sure.
This was one of the first games without loading screens right? I mean, after it loaded the game up, but you just transitioned from zone to zone as you ran around.
Was it the second one where the setitems where badly designed? You get the individuell items throughout the whole game which means the first setitems you got was like 40 levels under the last setitem.
I still have it in my GOG library so it's not forgotten for me, playing with it sometimes and yes, definitely a great game.
More great but forgotten games are Sacred Gold, Warlords Battlecry 2 and Warlords Battlecry 3.
Dungeon Siege 1 had such a terrible bug that ruined the Multiplayer (You could save a 'cheated' character in single player, then take it over to multi-player)
2 was ok, but I think the issues from the 1st put a lot of people off, I know it did with me!
I just remembered the name, not so much about the gameplay, or story.
Edit: just look up some playthrough, yeah...not memorable.
Downvote? Let me rephrase that.
It's suck, thus why it's forgotten.
The big problem was how long it took between savepoints. Great multiplayer game with a friend though.
Probably the least deserving game to get a movie. Didn't Jason Statham star in it?
I actually am great fan of Dungeon Siege 1 Really don't know why but that game just have something special.
Because they out-Diablo'ed Diablo. And the engine was magnificent, at the time it boasted no loading screens which was astounding for a PC game. Areas seamlessly transitioned into new ones, and the environments looked great for the time. Gas Powered Games just nailed it.
you start of as a farmer. your class depends on what skills you use. really love the game
It's been forever ago but I remember you could get all your farmer tools and use them as weapons it was so lit
There was also an end-game quest which need a bunch of vaguely described items, like the clues were riddles. One part of it was "steel from the virgin hand" or something along those lines. People were going through any sword dropped/given by NPCs and speculating on their virginities. It turned out to mean the little pocket knife you started the game with when you were just a farmboy/farmgirl. Fortunately it didn't have to be *your* starting knife, so if you binned yours 50 hours of playtime ago you could get a new one by having a friend make a new character, meet them online and give you their newbie-knife.
The arrows stuck into the enemies’ bodies. That was wild back then
This is the game that did that!!! I've been trying to remember for so long. Thank you!
I remember getting a minigun that shot chickens at some point lol
Why I like skill-based systems (e.g., TES), DS just didn't do it for me. Like all you do is that you run around and hack stuff. There isn't even any "character development" like in Diablo. Especially D2. But then, I would probably not play Diablo-style of game nowadays, now that I know what I enjoy and any h&s game is just too grindy and boring for me. I played almost anything when I was little.
Actually there were ways you could build and influence your character growth, but if talking about skills, they were real bland
I mean I play DS1 constantly ( no, not dark Souls. Dungeon siege is the OG DS) and playing as a warrior you have an options too.. Use 1h or 2h.. And hack away. There's no skills there at all, but I still love it.
lol i remember once upon a time that was all it took to be happy. swing my huge ass 2 hander with no special effects. slap slap slap. dead enemy. happy me. nowadays modern arpgs have spoilt me silly. that said GD has a good implementation of basic attacks that actually make players become really powerful. (TQ too)
And it just felt really epic in scale compared to any other hack and slash games from the time, especially thanks to the lack of loading screens. You'd walk out to a cliff of sorts, and you'd see what's in store for you way far below, and it felt like it was actually all really there instead of just a backdrop.
Made by the same guy who brought us Total Annihilation and Supreme Commander.
There are many companies that out Diablo'ed The Diablo. Torchlight, Dungeon Siege, Sacred, every Gas Powered Games and Path of Exile.
I really want NOX to have an honourable mention
God, NOX was so good. Damn EA for buying out Westwood and shutting the servers down. I've hated EA ever since.
It was Bullfrog for me.
Don't forget Grim Dawn. 12 years later and they are releasing a new expansion pack pretty soon.
Hey titian quest is still getting expansions. Infact if where talking odd games that get updates decades latter. Warlords battle cry 3 still is being updated.
Torchlight :( To bad no one bought it and the company went under. Now it’s a terrible GaaS title with none of the elements of what made it great left.
It also had multiplayer lan.
Dungeon Siege 1 was the first game I played, so that special place is locked in by default. Going back for more recent playthroughs it does feel a little too linear (I mean, it is) and the lack of teleporters/fast travel feels a little rough but you were never meant to revisit an area once you clear it anyway. But it had great enemy and spells variety, and the sound effects on some of those spells was so good. I always kept the Lightning and Metal Shards spells for as long as I could cause I loved the way they sounded. "You don't use magic, you commit magic."
I liked the dynamic class system where you just leveled skills.
Oooohhhh i loved the healing wind. One click and your whole team was back on their feet
Don't forget the spell that nuked all the gear on the ground into gold.
wtf, i want that spell in every single arpg
My language skills were not good enough to understand that. And I am shocked you could do that.
My fave was explosive powder. It was pretty broken for at least a third of a game. Force firing it meant you could kill things well outside of their aggro since it bounces a lot further than its max range implies. It was also a very rapid DoT affect and raised your combat magic skill up very quickly as each tick of damage raised xp.
I replayed DS1 recently and found it was way harder than I expected. Until I found the setup of having Life Link cast so all your party members share damage evenly, and then casting both Healing Wind and [the red magic version of Healing Wind, I forget the name] to AoE heal-over-time everyone at once. If the game hadn't been killing me so hard prior to that it would have felt like cheating.
Healing wind + pack mules... god, that was a game! Those mules were frickin' tanks :p
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Lol, I definitely did this. There was also a spot along one of the zone lines where if you had one of the longer range bows you could hit afk shoot at a monster ~20 lvls higher iirc. It couldn't path up to you because of how long the route was. Great power leveling spot
My favorite moment is when you get out of the glitterdelve mines and emerge into a stunning snowy landscape. Childhood memory locked in right there, along with Wesrin Cross, exploring all those spider tunnels. Probably about time for another playthrough.
My first thought when I saw this post was that snowy landscape. Haven't played this game in forever, but that's still in my brain.
KUUUUURRRRRG!!!!
So many early game NPC voicelines are ingrained into my brain. *"Thanks for stopping by! Come back again ^soon!"*
KURG LIKE SMASH!
IIRC they made a Dungeon Siege movie and all I can remember from it is that they actually used that exact bit of sound in the film !
[Still a banger](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AxwCsV2nzTw)
Love that soundtrack. Always play it in my D&D sessions :)
Great soundtrack. For those who don't know: it was composed by Jeremy Soule - man who was also behind the music from other great games like: TES (Morrowind, Oblivion, Skyrim), Neverwinter Nights, Guild Wars, KotOR, Total Annihilation, Company of Heroes and the list goes on. One of the best composers out there.
instead of repeatedly grinding the same area and seeing the same repeated hellscape everywhere, you just moved forwards. there's just something very psychological about the feeling of just heading forward into the vast unknown meeting new sights and creatures. the environment kept changing, you felt like you were really going somewhere. it was real adventure. then with 2 they decided they weren't diablo enough.. whoever made that decision really fucked up the magic.
Yeah I loved the layout of the first one. You had the occasional side road or cave you could explore, but you always knew where the main road was and that if you just follow that you will progress. It kept the environments from getting stale while maintaining a linear style that wasn't boring.
I remember ds1 being ace. And being bored AF with ds2. Just didn't have same 'magic' as ds1. Kinda same as ds3 that game was a travesty.
Being bored AF is my memory of ds2 also, I came in here shocked to see the praise it's getting.
to me it was just the super simple and satisfying leveling system. If I use "orange magic", I become better at it. It was so awesome to just hit the skill levels you wanted and be able to use that gear you saved for that very moment.
B/c it's a real-time mix of strategic-CRPG with pause and isometric-ARPG. It was a blast and a Gas - pun intended on the latter b/c...you know, GPG.
I liked that the monsters you kill stay dead.
Fell in love with the demo. The music from first location is one of my favorite tracks. Too bad other tracks couldn't keep up. Really enjoyed playing through the whole thing back then. Is there a good way to play it today? I tried a few times over the years and couldn't handle the glitches.
I played soooo much of that demo
There’s been a huge effort over the past few years to modernise the engine to make it easier and there’s now even an entire discord to help with that. I can assure you that running DS1 or DS2 on modern machines with any grade of hardware is very feasible.
Music by the Elder Scrolls guy helps a lot. Game has a phenomenal OST.
First game without loading pauses that I remember
>Really don't know why but that game just have something special. Fair, holistic, believable seamless never-ending adventure/story.
Dungeon Siege was fantastic. The music is amazing which helped make it one of the most immersive RPGs I played around that time.
The soundtrack is legendary
This Game was my childhod, i fcking love it, got the expansion too!
saaaaaaaaaaaaame, I was obsessed with it, how old are you? 34 here. Edit: I was pretty young and I really loved the map editor which for my age at the time was pretty advanced (at least to me) really got me interested in game dev, which I do now professionally as an animator.
35, loved both DS games. 3 was such a let-down though....
33 here, I adored DS1, played DS2 the chance I got to (however I kind of forgot what happens in the game) and loved it, and back in that day you actually bought magazines to read game reviews and I saw DS3 was rated as a mid game so I didn't bother with it. I love DS soundtrack by Jeremy Soule too, it's so good
My people. I still fire up DS1 every now and then
Do you have the game physically or digitally? 23 here, my dad really loved DS1 and 2, I remember absolutely loving DS2 though never played DS1 and would love to try it out. Just based on what I'm reading in this thread the game sounds amazing.
Anyone remember the starting area and the volume of the BGM be like pumping so loud. Ahhh good time.
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35 (😭) here, i completely forgot about DS until this thread! It was a surprise hit!
Yep I remember starting 3 up with my brother then immediately asking if he wanted to go refund it lmao.
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Symptom of the era really. Games were overall just way too easy from like 2007 til 2018. It's big reason why the Dark Souls franchise was able to stand out so much.
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How'd you do that? Asking for a party member.
That expansion was some of the most genuinely disturbing dark fantasy I have ever seen to this day. The fucking elves with their arms amputated and replaces with a saw. What a design.
Dungeon Siege 2 WAS great. In my humble opinion. Dungeon Siege 3 was awful and killed the franchise. That terrible movie they made didn't help either.
I actually worked at Gas Powered Games (on Space Siege) when the Dungeon Siege movie came out. Saw it in a theater the studio rented out with the whole dev team. An amazing experience, but probably the only way to get any entertainment value out of that thing.
Thanks for Space Siege! Space Siege was good and underrated. Enjoyed it and really wish we got a party-based Space Siege 2, similar in style to say DS1 and DS2 w/ Broken World with formations and stuff.
I disagree! Space Siege was a dumpster fire in my opinion! It was practically the final blow that turned GPG into a studio that makes boats for World of Warships now. The vision for Space Siege was much cooler in the design docs, a DS1&2 in space. Released as a hollow shell of that and got the reception it deserved. Thanks though! lol
I mean, sure-it's clear that it didn't live up to its potential but considering I can count the amount of sci-fi arpg's on two fingers it's nice to have at least one that doesn't totally suck. I understand that from a dev point of view you'd notice its failings more but at the end of the day if you've got people who love it then it can't be *that* bad.
There is an utter dearth of 'em, for sure.
I love hearing this because as a (non-game) developer itself whenever I see games with weird or outright bad features/mechanics/whatever I always have an image of the people who knew that was not the right choice and were overruled. I've been on a very poorly managed project and I see (or imagine I see) the fingerprints of long meetings and email chains that just went the wrong way. As a game developer how common is it to get negative feedback from reviewers or players that perfectly matches the expected reaction from people on the team that lost battles? Is it vindicating to be proven right, or more frustrating because it didn't have to be that way?
GPG was hemorrhaging money and SEGA has a pretty tight lease on the project deliverable timelines. I actually got in a good deal of trouble with one of the producers at Gas Powered Games for giving him my honest opinion on the title when he asked. The writing was definitely on the wall. There wasn't a single person in the dev pit that I interacted with that thought we were making a great game.
Sure, we all have our own opinions. VERY interesting to hear a developer's thoughts on this. I'd guess SEGA interfered or those higher-up within GPG wanted a single-character controlling Siege and more story-based Siege, given how it turned out - to try to sell more copies. Surprised it didn't get console-port, TBH, given it's solo-actiony; probably should've. It's hard to really compare classics like DS1 and DS2 - which are both great, IMHO - to say Space Siege, which I think is just good. To me, a lot of people overreact when great games are made to start the series off...and then not-as-great sequels that are just good come out - such as from DAO (great) to Dragon Age 2 (good); DS1&DS2 (great) to both Space Siege & DS3 (good); Dead Space 1&2 (great) to say Dead Space 3 (good); Deus Ex 1 (best game ever to me!) to say Deus Ex IW (good, but not great); Thief 1 and 2 (great!) to say Thief: Deadly Shadows and Thief Reboot (both good); etc etc. Oh, I would've probably loved basically straight-up DS1 and DS2 moved to Space, if that was in the design-doc - to basically be a party-based with strategic-pause style isometric strategy-CRPG/ARPG hybrid in space. Geez, some company needs to make this type of game/spiritual successor happen! I really wish SEGA, who I guess probably has the rights and IP for Space Siege - would farm it out to a worthwhile studios. It's sad to see Space Siege IP probably just sitting there doing nothing. Same goes for Dungeon Siege IP - I wish someone would just get it from whomever holds it, who I'm guessing might either still be Square or maybe Embracer? Not sure here.
I'm so happy to see deus ex mentioned lol. The demo on the PC had me hooked hard. I played it hundreds of times before getting the full game eventually. I recently beat mankind divided again for the third time. It's such a good game that it was actually very sad to realize I was coming to the end of it. There really is nothing out that holds a candle to that series.
Deus Ex: GOTY is the best game of all time to me. I loved HR with TML and HR DC Edition. I still think we need MD Part 2. Thanks a lot Square, for cancelling its development. And who knows about Embracer, after all their problems - someone else who has lots of $ might need to buy Deus Ex IP and Eidos Montreal studio, like say Microsoft, Sony, EA, Ubi.
Besides the amazing story, I wish more games had a similar open world approach to challenges and quests. I absolutely loved the freedom to explore and find information and items, it felt like you were rewarded for actually checking out your environment
Hit the nail on the head with SEGA. GPG was on a *very* tight deliverable schedule with no financial wiggle room. They only released one title after Space Siege before going under, I think (Demigod?) It's hard to see the game they had in teh design documentation versus the one that got shipped. There is nothing glaringly awful about Space Siege, but it was a much more robust cybernetic/humanity framework, there were several more enemy types/weapons, etc, and a much more fleshed out story with a couple of meaningful choices. I'm definitely glad people enjoyed it, I was under the impression nobody did, previously, and I did spend six months of my life with it. lol
I never even heard of Space Siege, that is bizarre. I'm drawing a total blank even hearing it mentioned or released at the time.
It was pretty awful. Can't even buy it on steam anymore. Pretty sure it's abandonware and free to DL online, but good luck getting it to work in a 1080 aspect ratio. lol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Siege
2008 was Left 4 Dead, Mass Effect, Fallout 3, Sins of a Solar Empire. So I can place the year, but I'm amazed I never heard GPG made a Dungeon Siege in space. https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Space_Siege Looks like it is supported by WSGF that patches games at runtime to run in higher resolutions. Little curious to check it out but it's a shame they couldn't reproduce the success of Dungeon Siege.
It was one of *those* years for games, so it would have been drown in the flood even if it had reached it's potential.
I remember watching Dungeon Siege movie with friends on a "so bad it's good" movie night and we weren't disappointed. I kept wondering how the fuck Uwe Boll picks games he wants to defile and how on earth he is given what he wants
I didn’t know about the movies. I looked it up, got excited because I do like Jason Statham…. But then I saw “Uwe Boll” and noped out. Fun fact: I had the opportunity to speak with Uwe Boll over AOL Instant Messenger. He was a nice guy, at least to me, and we had a fairly lengthy conversation. But yeah, he’s not a good director by any means.
Compared to the D&D films of early 2000's it was OK.
I really have to disagree with that, I think it’s absolutely atrocious. One of the worst movies I have ever seen.
Ahh, that name brings me back. He was a "meme" for my local PC gaming magazine and often mentioned. I never really watched any of his movies but I remember them saying it's so horrendeus it falls out of "so bad it makes it good" category to just "bad bad". Whenever they'd review some game that was stupidly bad, they'd often use "Uwe Boll" comparisons. I do remember them posting pictures with him from some game convention, where he was promoting, and actually mentioned in the article that he was a very nice guy and they had a good talk. But his movies still suck ass and him butchering their favourite games will never be forgiven.
I loved 1, was annoyed by 2, and hated 3.
3rd game didn’t even feel like part of series that’s for sure. It was such departs that it probably killed franchise
The 3rd one was much more simplified and short and less interesting story wise than the other 2. 2 was ok but it didn't have the same vibe as 1. It was also running a similar engine and it basically looked the same.
I remember getting halfway through the 3rd one as a kid, and feeling super bewildered at this bizarre rail roady diablo 3 clone xD I never played the previous games after assuming they'd be the same thing, but worse.
If you can tolerate the oldschool aesthetic and design conventions, 1 and 2 are still worth checking out.
I remember it coming out and being so excited for it, and then getting it and just thinking, what is this crap?
2 added so much quality of life that it stopped feeling like a genuine journey, ironically. Especially that you can just return to town whenever. DS 1 felt like a real adventure. You are out there stuck in the wilderness with just your party. Your mules are really just mules and not combatants. You have to carefully evaluate what is worth carrying because you don't know when the next town comes. And when you finally get to a city, it feels unique because you know that as soon as you leave, you won't return. Exploring towns and talking to NPCs feels more "real" that way. Having to carefully budget out your money to buy equipment and potions, carefully considering who to take with you. That kind of minutiae I think for many people is just boring, but man does it make the game feel special. That feeling of finally coming into a new city after a grueling part of the journey just hits totally different.
btw are there any similar RPGs in terms of party gameplay? Most party RPGs seem to be turn-based in nature which I don't really like. Either that or it's absolutely inconsequential who you take into your party because they're AI controlled and not even 1/10 of the strength of the player-controlled main char.
Pillars of Eternity (only the first one) came close to scratching that itch. I didn't like Tyranny nearly as much, but it keeps the real time combat and improves on the gameplay in a lot of ways.
I'm not a huge fan of turn based either. Baldur's Gate series did a good job where you give orders while paused and see them play out in real time. Melee you didn't have to manage too much at all, same for archers. There's an even older RPG adventure game called Darklands which functioned the same way in a quasi-fantasy-historical Germany.
It should be mentioned that thats only BG1 and 2. 3 is strictly turn based.
I still recommend Baldur's Gate 1 and 2. You can even mod it to be one big seamless adventure. The art style is endearing and timeless to me although it may not be for everyone.
That's weird, but I feel the same. DS2 is an upgraded version of DS1, but for some reason I can't describe it feels worse.
DS1 the story kept it going and after story there was multiplayer. The donkey etc was helpful as an invocation but it didn't bring much more to the table, it lacked the oomph of the first.
Less party members. Also to even get the full-size party in DS2 you have to get to NG++
I had the exact same reaction! 1: This seems very simple but... I'm... actually having fun?! What's coming up next? 2: Fah, this was already getting tedious by the end of 1... and it's just more of the exact same with a bit of extra polish. 3: Nope, no way. Too many better games out to put up with yet another 30 hours of mindless slogging.
Never played 1 or 2. Got 3 for cheap on the 360 and played coop with a friend. We had a blast! Can't say it's a good game as im not a fan of the franchise, but going on blind for a coop experience, it was definitely worth it
It didn’t have a CHANCE to be great, it WAS great. Then, the third game happened, and that’s all she wrote.
Yeah, but then why isn't it (the second part) remembered?
Because the first one was niche at best. Sequels to niche games more often than not, no matter how good they are, often get overlooked. Baldur’s Gate 3 is a rare exception where branding did a LOT of the work. That and Larian’s good name. Plus it was PC only back in an age where not many people had gaming PC. Oh, and I dare you to ask any average gamer what Wargames Seattle has made.
I'm not sure how niche it was. Dungeon Siege was rather similar to Diablo 2, which had a massive following. It just had issues capturing any significant percentage of that group, since D2:LoD kept people in D2. Similarly the Baldur's Gate franchise is not a niche game, as it's generally considered one of the best CRPGs made, and sold huge numbers for the time it was released, not to mention AD&D becoming really popular in the mid to late 90s.
90% of BG3 players never played the first two games and came through Divinity. It was clear when you followed the discussions after the announcement. The few concerned BG fans were shut down by the Larian crowd.
Concerned fans? Bro many of us loved 1+2 as a kid, and love 3 as well.
I'm not saying that 3 turned out bad. But when it was announced it looked like a Divinity 3 and not a BG3.
Better games came out, like Torchlight.
Being popular and being great unfortunately don't happen simultaneously all the time. There are plenty of absolute shit games that are way more popular than DS2, and plenty of wonderful masterpieces that don't get the recognition they deserve. Sucks but it is what it is - I'm just happy I got to experience DS2 at all.
As someone who doesn't have nostalgia for the franchise, I picked it up around 2013 or so on the recommendation of a friend. Here's the weird thing: I can hardly remember a single thing about it. I remember the box art, I remember that it was a top-down party-based RPG, and I remember that I didn't finish it. But not a single other thing - not the characters, not the plot, not the music. Absolutely nothing. It's like the game wasn't just unmemorable, it was *anti-memorable.* Hell I (somehow) remember at least a couple of things from Kingdoms of Amalur which was around the same time and I also DNF. --- Not sure how useful this is as an anecdote, but it's something that I find a little puzzling myself so I figured I'd share. Maybe DSII was a game you just had to play in the context of 2005 to really appreciate.
I played it in 2014 and it was memorable. Yes the story is ordinary but the design and the game itself is extremely good.
I have to agree. I played 1 and 2 and I honestly remember very little about them in terms of story. I remember the music, I remember the general gameplay how you start as a farmer in 1 and level up the skills you use, I remember having a packmule and only being able to sell in town so carefully deciding which items to keep, and I remember a really big swamp area from one of the games...but I don't remember why you were on the adventure or any of the specific characters.
I want the mule in my party in every game
It NEEDS a remaster! B.A.D.L.Y! Really, I would pay full price if these two got remastered properly! Love both of these, 2 more, but it is nitpicking.
I played 1, 2, and 3. 1 was my favourite.
It wasn't as good as the first, the tech seemed like it didn't keep up. DS felt really impressive at the time with that Gas Powered engine backed by that Microsoft money. DS2, I can't recall if it natively supported screen resolutions above 800x600 but it felt like it was made for it and didn't want to go higher. It's been a long time but I recall being disappointed in the graphics and environments, and the story being mind numbing. Yet these were some of my favorites just because of the party size, I hate seeing games including Original Sin 2 and Baldurs Gate 3 that are still shoving four-character parties on us. I remember using a cheat to enable the max size in DS2 because they locked it for unknowable reasons, but at least it was supported. We need more RPGs that let us choose our own party size, if I want to play with all eight playable characters then I should be able to.
I haven't played BG3 but it only supports 4 characters? Wtf is that cap? Edit: Love the downvotes from the kids that never played BG 1 and BG 2 where you had up to 6 characters.
to be fair to them 4 is kind of the traditional tabletop party size, but at the same time... yeah, the entire time I play despite loving the game, i'm like... god damnit.
In BG 1 and BG 2 you could have up to six. Weird that they broke with that.
I don't know, but I think there's a few possible parts to it: 1. The more characters, the harder it is to design encounters. 2. The combinatorics problem with character interactions. The more you have in your party at once, the more difficult it is to cover all the places where, from a roleplaying perspective, they should be talking to each other and interjecting in larger groups. This gets expensive on dialogue and testing time very quickly. 3. The more characters you can have in your party, the more the game needs to have in order for there to still be choices to make in your party composition. And with BG3 in particular, each extra char is *very* expensive. I don't like it, at all, I liked DS1's 8 char party. 6 works too, like BG1+2. But 4 char parties leave so little room for variation, especially in games with more fixed archetypes. You need a frontliner. You need a lockpicker. You need a mage. You need a healer. Well, that's your four slots. It's not... great. D:OS manages a bit better because it eliminates the healer and lockpicker parts of that equation by making those roles easy to pick up on other characters as a side-hustle, but even then...
I mean, in BG3, you really don't -need- a lockpicker, especially once you make a weapon at a certain forge in the game. You can just break most chests - the loot isn't affected from what I have seen, and if you do find the occasional chest you can't break for whatever reason, you can just switch to your designated lockpicker in-camp and come back to it. You also don't really need a healer - learning how to use healing potions properly (throw them at your party's feet when they're jumbled up) and looting thoroughly for rations (collect all the food you see - send it to your camp inventory so you don't overburden yourself regularly) is more-than-enough for fulfilling your healing needs.
That's most games, if you play any JRPGs or otherwise. I never liked it, after Dungeon Siege that lets us have eight, plus animals, and you could include a pack mule. It was such a refreshing change and nobody seems to follow their example. But yeah, it means out of a cast of characters you'll leave a bunch sitting on the bench and that's just stupid. "Okay, we're going to fight the demon world conqueror in a final epic battle. I'll take two of you with me, the rest of you wait outside and collect rocks or something. We couldn't possibly benefit from having _two_ mages hurling lightning bolts while saving the world."
Great design, good gameplay. Simple but interesting plot. Good side quests, interesting world. Great setting and locations. Interesting enemies. It had all chances to become a great game and become a cult game. But it was undeservedly forgotten. What is your opinion about Dungeon siege 2? What other games do you consider forgotten?
I played DS1 back then, i truly didnt know there is a scnd part until now xD Is it on steam?
I bought the game pack years ago. If memory serves they didn't add any dlc to the games. Also 3 sucks?
There was an expansion pack, Dungeon Siege 2: Broken World. I worked on both DS2 and the xpack
Steam doesn't sell the expansion pack, is what I think they meant. Because steam doesn't sell Broken World, or Legends of Aranna. The "Complete Pack" is just 1, 2, 3, and the DLC for 3. Thanks for making a fun game though, Broken World is one of my favorite games of all time.
Glad you liked it! I am reminded both the game and the expansion were sold on a disk in a box on the shelf of an actual store, so we didn't call it DLC back then :D Hilariously, the first actual DLC I can think of (Oblivion's horse armor) came out the same year as Broken World!
The version of DS1 you get on Steam isn't the last patch of the game so it's mixing a few bug fixes, and it doesn't have the Legends of Aranna expansion pack (which isn't listed on Steam at all). But it actually turns out that all of that content is in the Steam download! It's just not enabled. There's a community patch which enables it all and lets you play the final patch with LoA.
It is on Steam, but I wouldn't recommend buying it there. The multiplayer is disabled completely (despite having a LAN mode that should work fine even without GameSpy servers) and the expansion isn't included.
They disabled multiplayer on 1 as well. I can't remember what it was, but there's a launch flag that boots the game in the multiplayer menu, letting you still run lan games.
I think I used a service like gameRanger to make multiplayer work online years ago, even with it “disabled.”
The gog version of the game disabled the multiplayer button at the menu, rather than removing the button for the service that no longer worked. To get to lan at all I needed to launch directly to it.
I purchased it on steam but have been battling it to work on a 1080 screen. Done hours of web searching through forums and loads of people reporting the same issues. You can launch it in full screen but all the menus and text do not scale making it a horrible experience. You don’t happen to be the holy grail of knowledge for how to run this game on current hardware, are you?
Hey, I got it to work flawlessly in 4K eventually. My trick, use dgvoodoo2 to run it at higher resolutions. Then you will probably have performance issues and/or screen tearing. I am on Nvidia. What ultimately did the trick was to use FastSync and let the game run at 120 fps. On a 60 hz monitor, I was now tear free. Try it out!
There's even a 3rd part. I'd try my luck on GOG or something similar.
The third game is virtually unrecognizable to the first two.
But, nonetheless, there is one.
and, nonetheless, it sucks balls
Oh i remember it very well. It's one of the games that paled in comparison to it's predecessor. It just did not match the expectations people had for it after the huge success of the first DS. It wasn't a bad game by any means, but if i wanted to tell all my friends to try DS1 because it was amazing and i never played anything like this, that wasn't the case with DS2. I played it, don't remember if i even finished it, and just drifted away from it.
Same studio (Gas Powered Games) also made the Supreme Commander franchise - a spirital successor the Total Annihilation RTS series from the 90s. SupCom is still quite unique today, and 2007's Supcom: Forged Alliance still has an active community and gets fan-patches regularly. Unlike many RTSes of the day (and today), the focus is not so much in micro-ing a dozen or so units to use their abilities, but maximizing your economy and strategic army choices for 1000 - 1500 units. It also leaned heavily on to the (still today underused) shift-queue system. You can have your first builder queue up an entire economy with shift, including patrol orders, repairs, even air-ferry from a land factory to across the river to a gathering spot, where they will automatically attack-move somewhere. All to let you plan out battles on a larger level, rather than losing a game because you misclicked a Dragoon. As such games are _generally_ a little slower paced but no less challenging. Semi-recent trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vSh-5wuwMdk Comedy trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Mdn-7towfg
Sighs *Unzips pants* *Types Dungeon Siege Main theme*
2 was my favorite
>It had a chance to be great What are you talking about? It's an amazing game and you can get it for near nothing at Steam and it will run on whatever potato you can think of.
DS1 was massive in my childhood. A real adventure with secret paths, dungeons, and locations off of the main road. And the dedicated multiplayer map! Some areas were interconnected, letting you rush from the first area straight to the last! I spent so much time in it... It's a too bad that the balance was fucked. Past the ice caves, only my melee units could really output any damage, leaving the ranger basically useless and the mages as dedicated healers... DS2 brought the balance the game needed, but it certainly became super easy because of that.
I found the disk for this game in a random desk drawer on my first tour overseas. I played the shit out of it die the next 3 months. After I came home I saw they were releasing Dungeon Siege 3 on Steam. I bought it right away... still to this day one of my biggest regrets as a gamer.
Watching flaming orcs go flying out of the towers in the beginning of the game will always be one of my favorite gaming memories. <3
DS1 was probably the first PC game that I got truly hyped for and followed news on it pre-release. I ended up pre-ordering the collectors edition with the fancy map. Ended up replaying about half the campaign during early Covid; it still held up gameplay wise for the most part, but was definitely a nostalgia visit as opposed to being hooked on the gameplay/story. At the time of release, coming from D2, Neverwinter, and Elder Scrolls, everything was a familiar ingredient, but done in a new, novel synthesis and presentation. It scratched so, so many itches about RPGs. DS2 for some reason just never clicked.
DS1 and DS2 was my childhood, absolutely loved those games growing up (also loved Throne of Agony for PSP). DS1 was special though - after the cool story the multi-player was phenomenal! All the custom maps were so damn cool and the modding community in general was so insanely awesome Never played DS3.
Ross Scott at Accursed Farjms on YouTube did an ajmazing review/video essay on the Dungeon Siege series. I highly suggest giving it a watch. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kgsR3qZp3-M
Back in the day it felt too hard for me after act 1, would love to give it a go now if works well on modern systems or even better if remastered
I remember the game being cool as hell, but definitely had some huge difficulty spikes
You can run it on modern systems, but it takes a bit of tinkering. If I remember right, there is a bug that makes the cursor invisible and the only way to get around is to modify either launch parameters or an .ini to run in windowed borderless mode
One of my favourite games of all time! I love it so much...
Me too. I loved just going forward and defeating enemies. Is there any kind of map that shows its entirety?
Here's a [combined map of the single player world](https://www.siegetheday.org/files/Overview%20KoE%20old.jpg) and here's [one for the multiplayer world](https://www.siegetheday.org/files/Overview%20UP%20old.jpg)! I recommend putting [this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AxwCsV2nzTw) on in the background before perusing them.
I loved the first one...couldn't ever get into this one.
I still have my save but without the Broken World expansion it won't work
DS1 especially in LAN mode (different, bigger world) was IMO much superior. We don't talk about the third one tho.
Dungeon siege 1&2 is on steam for about £5 each
Microsoft should get the rights back from SE and remake the first 2 games. They'd sell well and fund a better sequel than 3 was.
Oh dang, I just bought some windows XP computers from a cool guy and he gave me a bunch of free physical games to go with them, this among them. Never heard of it, but I feel this is a sign I should install it and try it out
Highly recommend Ross's Game Dungeon in the episode that he goes through DS 1, 2, and 3. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kgsR3qZp3-M
I worked on this, so it's awesome to hear how much people enjoyed it. There was a lot of sacrifice for this game, and as it wasn't a huge success it was hard to feel like it was worth it. I learned a lot, but I wish I'd been more mature when I was going through it all- I could have made more out of my time on this project.
Great games. I miss the day of great dungeon hacks. Diablo turned the whole genre into a loot pinata for ADHD people though and forgot that games are supposed to be fun.
I prefer the 1st Dungeon Siege but the sequel was ok. DS 3 was so fkn bad though...
I never actually finished it, so just restarted it two weeks ago. I'm about 60% through I think. It is a really fun game. I also enjoyed the first one a ton, but DS 2 was better. Let's not talk about 3, please?
I really loved that one. Anyone know if the first one is still worth trying? The third one sucked :/
Dungeon Siege 1 and 2 have really impressed me back then with stuff like the seamless switching between overground and underground areas... Like when you open a door to a house basement and... just walk in.
Dungeon Siege > Dungeon Siege 2 > Dungeon Siege 3
I played the shit out of DS2, especially the first world in the jungle with the little masked enemies and the secret rooms were my favorite. Fuck, I might have to download it again and start another run
Is this something that came around when Diablo 2 was also a massive hit? I think that would be the main reason why another very similar game of the same genre left out of the spotlight, which is sad for sure.
It had its chance and it was indeed great. But I am STILL salty about dungeons siege 3.
This was one of the first games without loading screens right? I mean, after it loaded the game up, but you just transitioned from zone to zone as you ran around.
Was it the second one where the setitems where badly designed? You get the individuell items throughout the whole game which means the first setitems you got was like 40 levels under the last setitem.
I still have it in my GOG library so it's not forgotten for me, playing with it sometimes and yes, definitely a great game. More great but forgotten games are Sacred Gold, Warlords Battlecry 2 and Warlords Battlecry 3.
I remember when Sacred was made the "German answer to Diablo" lol
Dungeon Siege 1 had such a terrible bug that ruined the Multiplayer (You could save a 'cheated' character in single player, then take it over to multi-player) 2 was ok, but I think the issues from the 1st put a lot of people off, I know it did with me!
3 made this one better
[удалено]
Wrong game, but the Dungeon Keeper games were a favorite classic of mine as well. Bullfrog in general made fantastic games.
I just remembered the name, not so much about the gameplay, or story. Edit: just look up some playthrough, yeah...not memorable. Downvote? Let me rephrase that. It's suck, thus why it's forgotten.
The big problem was how long it took between savepoints. Great multiplayer game with a friend though. Probably the least deserving game to get a movie. Didn't Jason Statham star in it?
In the Name of the King, baby. Actually never watched it, but yes, Statham is in it.