The path is covered in ice and snow. The trees rustle in the breeze. Suddenly, a lightning bolt emerges from the bush by the barren rock face, melting the falling snow.
This is the essence of Dungeon Siege, a brilliant role playing game where what you do defines the character's skills. Every playable character is a blank slate, sculpted by the equipment, skills, and weapons you choose to use.
Every enemy is a quivering mimic, hiding loot and treasure like you'd never believe.
My first experience with the Dungeon Siege series was the second game, so it was a pleasure to visit the world which started it all. Released in 2002, Dungeon Siege is a basic action-RPG, with not much story, but with absolutely stellar game play mechanics.
Four skills. Combat Magic, Nature Magic, Melee, or Ranged. Lots of abilities and spells, based on how much you use the skills. Endless opportunity and synergy through the various and deep party system, which lets you control everyone's inventory.
Multiplayer. Quests. There's a bit for everything - except the story. That's the poor point in Dungeon Siege, a victim of its own success - you see - in order to let this "be anyone you want to be" trope remain believable, you start the game as a generic farmer - who quickly must grow into an adventurer and kill lots and lots of monsters.
That's really all this game is about. Get the skill you want to use, equip it, and start learning about how to fling fireballs or lightning at people. Conversely, pick up a hammer and hit things with it until you can fell a fearsome creature with a single blow.
It's high fantasy, with the Western twist - no endless exposition, just action. Hordes of foes. Be careful not to over-aggro, or you'll have a bad time. The game is so flexible, that your main character doesn't even need to survive a battle - so long as you've got someone breathing at the end of the massacre, you can keep forging a path forward through the game.
No grinding to worry about. No perfect synergies of armour or abilities. Sheer, brute force works fine.
Dungeon Siege is a mighty fine game, but it is not without flaw - as mentioned, the story is anorexic at best. There's other areas for improvement, given the game is nearly two decades old - visuals can be improved with a higher res texture mod, created recently via AI up scaling and sharpening of the existing textures.
This captures the essence of the original and also allows the game to be more tolerable on modern resolutions like 1080p. If you're feeling really crafty, you can even replay Dungeon Siege 1 in the Dungeon Siege 2 engine via a different mod.
I am going to enjoy digging my teeth into the second title of the series - as this was a game that I played for dozens of hours on end. I hope to become just as engrossed once again. There's a fair share of problems with running Dungeon Siege 2 on a modern Windows PC, but I will solve them all, as this is very much a game that I loved - even the PSP instalment!
See you all in the next one!