Dungeon Siege 2 Review

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An interesting game buried beneath old age and mediocrity. It is a forgotten series which people can only go back for nostalgia. Even besides questionable quality of a game itself, game simply does not work well on modern systems. It needs a huge remaster even to be considered worthy of someone’s time.

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Full review and discussions are here:
Calicifer’s Reviews

Dungeon Siege I&II are unique games. There isn’t any other major party based, action RPG game. Instead of typical one character gameplay like in Diablo, player has party of 4-6 characters to manage and how they work together in a team. It is an interesting concept and it almost feels like having whole WoW party going through the dungeon at an accelerated pace. It is unique game with its ideas never properly explored past the series.

Game itself feels like it is done by people who loved what they were doing, tried their best, but simply lacked skill and/or time to fulfil their vision. There is surprisingly a lot of effort put into this game, not seen from lazy modern developers. However, at the same time it features complete lack of play testing, in game systems ranging from boring to broken/pointless and most stereotypical chosen one story, with our hero having as much personality as a clone or a wooden plank.

 

        The Journey

• This game has an unique charm where it manages to create an impression of long and epic quest. One where you travel from jungles to deserts, through the highest peaks and deepest dungeons into the den of evil. Consistent journey forwards, regions unlocking as you go, being able to see where are you in the world in the map. It all adds a certain charm to the game. What this game does well is creating a believable journey as other games do not have maps designed as a long road. It is something which modern games often miss with their disjointed areas. Only in Diablo I we had seen this before.
  
  Production Values
• Game has surprisingly huge production values. Which is probably are to be expected from its huge development team. Characters are fully voiced, there are conversations between your party. NPCs have their own dialogue. Everyone in cinematics do talk. What is surprising is that there are quite a huge number of various cinematics showing what you will have to do next. It is a nice touch which too many games are too lazy to do nowadays.
  
  There are also some truly outstanding moments. British Morden. Quest with some goblins and tree ladies and their power struggle. There are flashes of brilliance burred beneath sea of mediocrity. I luckily saved the British Morden encounter and I will share it on youtube with everyone to enjoy.
  
  Gear
• A little small thing what I liked is how many of the gear has well made models. Each piece of a set is sufficiently unique and you want to take a second look how your character looks with new piece of armor or a new weapon. It reminds me of WoW, but with actual good gear going from rare to epic. Still, there are no intricate and over the top sets like in that game, but I do like grounded aesthetic like heavy linen clothes which your mages will be wearing (grey coat with red symbols and high fire resist stats). Wood elves have fitting armor made from metal plates and leafs which looks light and agile.

I had started writing my reviews, because I saw no one writing reviews like I wanted to. Everyone were either raving about games, being nostalgia blinded or solely focused on positive aspects of an experience thus twisting reality and heavily over-hyping games. Dungeon Siege 2 is a prime example of that, there is no critique which you could readily find online and people who are still playing or talking about it are as bias as they can get. This is why I took it upon myself to inform others what is actually wrong with these games like this one.

 

        Surprisingly Difficult

• Game has a poor difficulty curve. At the start of a game, difficulty is something which you would expect. However, during mid-game, game becomes quite difficult. Bosses instant-kill you, simple enemies become massive sponges. However at the end game, you do get quite a power boost which comes from getting very powerful late game items and due to how activatable abilities scale. Your abilities not only become far more powerful, but also they charge far faster. Slow charging ability which would take ages to charge in early game, takes just one pack of mobs to refresh its cooldown.
  
  Pointless Restrictions
• Game designers for no apparent reason gutted its best feature – party management by restricting it to only 4 players. Playing with 4 players game is immensely more difficult and requires a lot more kiting. However, if you complete game once, you can unlock 1 additional character. If you complete game for a third time, you can have full roster of 6 characters. This is a game which puts its best feature behind a grind wall, a game which actively makes itself a lot easier with each successive play through.
  
  Broken Systems
• Game has quite a bit of content, however, it is mostly broken. Enchanting is completely useless up until very end when game starts dropping enchantable items with enough slots to allow you crafting something possibly useful. However, that is right before the end game, game does not warn you that previously useless system is now might be useful.
  
  Crafting is also equally busted. It requires very specific items which you cannot obtain from merchants. I never were able to craft anything in a game and I even put some effort in trying to. Recipes are also hidden under obtuse UI, you do not know what you are crafting and you need items which you cannot actively seek and have to store a lot of crap in your inventory in order to take advantage of it.
  
  There are Rampage and Mirror modes. Rampage mode is supposed to be this mode where each party member picks its own fight and your party fights against enemy group while you are controlling only your own character. In reality, enemies are always too hard and would wipe the party this way.
  
  Cliche Story
• Story is so bad that it turns around to be good in a bad way. It is so cliche. Bad guys cannot help, but be bad guys. They constantly talk how bad they are. Your hero is a bread stick, always talking how he is supposed to save the world, how he changed and how he must now fix the world. There is interesting banter from various characters. Most interesting is half-giant, Spartanus, but only because of his aggressive sexual flirting with females. All the other characters are just strange.
  
  The whole game like this. It is like developers tried and succeeded in making the most generic fantasy story. It isn’t even bad. It is so average, so unremarkable, that only remarkable feature of it is how generic it is.

There are a lot of charm to Dungeon Siege 2. However, what is there is overshadowed by mediocre systems, grindy gameplay, cringy story. That puts nail in the coffin is that this game does not run well on modern systems. I had to play this game at 10-15 FPS, modify it to enable expansion for which I still did not got expansion’s campaign. Multiplayer is dead, resolution needs to be fixed manually. There are ton of issues and even when going through all of them, you are still left with game which is barely running.

Sadly, the overall experience which this game provided is not worthy of trying out for anyone else other than just for nostalgia fix. Even with modern remaster, game remains deeply flawed design wise and offers little what you could not find in other games.