This is a two in one review for all you lucky readers! Dungeon Siege and the Legends of Aranna expansion!
Release Date: April 5, 2002 / Aranna was November 12, 2003
Developer(s): Wargaming Seattle (aka Gas Powered Games) / Wargaming Seattle, Rockstar New England
Publisher(s): Microsoft, Destineer / Ubisoft, Xbox Game Studios
System Requirements:
- OS: Windows 98
- CPU: 333MHz processor
- GPU: 8MB 3D card
- RAM: 128MB
- Storage: 1GB
- Other: DirectX 8.0 and 56k modem for online play
Graphics:
You get what you get from a game released in 2002, large pixels, blocks and questionable looking character models. The environments are okay looking and that’s about all you can say for the graphics. They’re better than the original Diablo II, but not by much.
It’s an old game that hasn’t aged well graphic-wise. There you have it. It’s an okay, kind of, looking game when it comes to visuals. They won’t knock your socks off, but at least you can tell what you’re looking at.
Audio:
Award winning composer Jeremy Soule conducted the music score for Dungeon Siege. Those that play a lot of games have probably heard his music and not even realized it. After looking through a list of games he’s made music for two other game I recently played through – Company of Heroes and Prey – he composed for. He’s also done the music for a lot of The Elder Scrolls games from Morrowind to the Skyrim entries. If this means anything to you, sweet! If it doesn’t, then I guess you wouldn’t really care in the end, kind of like me. I think the music score is decent, it fits the atmosphere well.
Audio cues and sound effects are all pretty well done and what voice acting there is has been pretty good throughout most of the games.
There are times when the on screen combat get hectic with your group and a large group of enemies that some of the sound effects cut out.
Gameplay:
This is an Action Role Playing Game, a.k.a ARPG. Anyone familiar with the Diablo games knows these type of games all too well. A lot of ARPGs that I have played require you to constantly point your mouse cursor at the target you wish to attack and you can certainly do that in this game, it is way easier letting your party do the attacking automatically. Start off the interaction by clicking on one target to attack and let your party members go from there based on how you have their combat AI setup (lightly covered under the Controls section below).
As you fight with your character you want to focus on one form of combat for each character:
Both magic circles have similar type spells, combat, healing, summoning and so on. Combat tends to have a few better attack spells whereas Nature has a few better support spells, but that’s about the only difference between the two. Just be sure to focus on one over the other. The more you use one of these combat styles, the higher the level you will get it. With magic you need a certain level to use stronger spells and also the higher your nature or combat magic level is, the more powerful each spell becomes for you to cast (but it does also mean the spell costs a little more mana to cast). Melee and Ranged combat styles, it doesn’t matter what level you have them at you can use any melee/ranged weapon as long as you have the proper Strength and Dexterity requirements.
There are 3 stats that you can increase during gameplay and that is only done through fighting. These three stats are:
- Strength – increases your base damage
- Dexterity – boosts your weapon accuracy and armor
- Intelligence – boosts your mana pool
As you fight using Melee combat you will build your Strength stat fastest and your Dexterity stat slow and Intelligence stat at a snail’s pace. If you’re focusing on ranged combat you will build your Dexterity the fastest, Strength slow and Intelligence very slow. If you’re focused on using magic your Intelligence grows the fastest, followed by Dexterity and then Strength slowly trailing the pack.
The game design is clunky when it comes to magic spells and being able to easily access them. You get a spellbook and you can house a good number of spells in them, but only two spells can be active at once. Learning how to set weapon loadouts and swapping between spells/weapons that work best for all your party members is tedious. This is why I tend to find one or two spells I can use for combat and support and just dance between them as needed to keep things as easy as possible.
Once you get the hang of combat with multiple characters nothing else really changes for game play. Kill, loot, buy, sell and make your way through the game. That pretty much sums it all up. As you kill bad guys you will find that they never respawn, once they are dead they stay dead. So you can’t just go about farming an area over and over again for drops or to help build up your stats/skills.
After you learn how the game plays, the ins and outs of shortcuts and how the enemy reacts to you in the original game, everything is the exact same in Legends of Aranna (LoA) expansion.
Finding items, they come in a range of specialties based on their color:
- White – your basic item
- Blue – magical items, they may have up to two bonuses
- Purple – rare items with multiple bonuses
- Gold/Yellow – unique items, specialty named items with rare qualities/bonuses
- Orange – rare items that seem to give a bonus and subtract a bonus, such as +1 to Strength, -1 to Dexterity
- Green– set items (LoA). The more collect the more you save! That’s not right….the more you collect the better bonus you get!
- Set items are not dropped from kills, they are found in special chests so be sure to explore if you want to collect all set pieces
The main camera view is essentially an isometric view, you can rotate the camera up, down and all around while zooming in and out. However, you could play the game as a top-down if you really wanted to. You can enter into the map view with the “TAB” key, this puts you into a top-down view. From here you can zoom way out and right down to just about the top of your head. In this view not only do you get a bird’s eye view of things, but you can also spot treasure, bad guys, NPCs, interact with objects (such as door) and conduct combat from this view.
Time to complete main game, 27 hours.
There are two nice quality of life features in LoA:
- Backpacks. These are not worn, but held in your inventory. Inside each backpack is space to hold more stuff. You basically get extra inventory space, which is a nice thing.
- Teleportation platforms. These platforms only take you to preset destinations. While you may not use them much, they are there and are helpful from time to time.
Other than that there are no differences in gameplay in the expansion versus the original game.
Time to complete LoA, about 15 hours. LoA is pretty much a brand new game because you don’t get to use any character from the original game. You start all over from the beginning.
Controls:
Click to move. Point to the spot on the ground you want your character(s) to move and just click the left mouse button. To go along with moving your character around you may need to manipulate the camera and that is just as easy by holding the MMB as you rotate and tilt the camera angel. You will find yourself fighting with the camera in tight areas, mostly when you move from an open type area into a small building or doorway. It does get annoying, but the camera is easy to manipulate so it shouldn’t cause too many issues.
You set your Combat AI in the lower right corner and this pretty much takes care of how each character will behave during combat. There are three different options, one that determines how or if you attack, who they target and how far they move during combat. You’ll have to test things out to see what suits your needs best.
Each individual character you control you can set up specific AI combinations for if you feel the need. For example maybe you have 2 ranged characters in your group, you have one target the strongest and one target the weakest, this way your ranged characters are both not trying to possibly shoot the same target at once.
You can use keyboard shortcuts for changing and setting a lot of options. You would do this while using the Ctrl or Alt key + a slew of other keys. All key binding options are in the setup menu, you can view them there or change things around to your liking.
Looting, sadly, is not automatically done for you for anything. If you want to see what is on the ground you can toggle names to show up by just pressing the “Alt” key. The closest thing to auto looting is you can click and drag the mouse to choose multiple items on the ground (their name will turn a redish color) and then you only need to click on one item in that group and the closest character(s) will run over to collect the selected items. This is a handy trick over clicking on each individual item strewn across the ground in multiple directions after a big fight takes place. The other option is to use the collect loot key, “Z”. Press “Z” and your characters will pick up all loot in the immediate area.
Speaking of loot there will be times when there is a lot of it. Early in the game much of the loot is just basic items and when it’s just you in the party with no other characters you can quickly run out of inventory space. Each character can carry quite a bit of stuff, but even with 4, 5, 6+ (max is 8) characters your inventories can fill up quickly. In lieu of a combat based character you can find and hire pack mules. A pack mule can carry 3x what a single character can, so you may want to think about having 1 or maybe even 2 pack mules in your party, but you don’t have to so the choice is entirely up to you.
As for party members, you may find ones that are looking for adventure and want to join you and others that offer their services for a fee. Already mentioned is that you can have up to 8 characters in your party and controlling that many can be a bit of a learning curve. How you set up your formation, how you assign spells/weapons and so on. Learn and set shortcut keys how you like and practice kiting bad guys because you’re going to need it.
Learn to make use of the pause button (Spacebar), it will be your best friend throughout the game. This allows you to work on making changes, assess your situation and hopefully alter the encounter to your favor so you’re not just trying to run or kite all the time.
Story:
Your world in the Kingdom of Ehb, as a farmer, is drastically shattered one day as Krug descend upon your farm and the surrounding area. You set off on a journey to the local town of Stonebridge to see what is going on. As you travel you meet companions and hire mercenaries to help you battle the ever growing evil overcoming the lands.
LoA takes place shortly after the events of the original game end. Word comes from town that you’re help is needed – here you are at your home and the last memory you have of your parents is that they left when you were young and never returned, but the story is they were heroes and you have what it takes to follow their footsteps. You are now set forth on a mission to find the Shadowjumper that stole the Staff of Stars and reclaim the staff and perhaps learn about your parent’s final days in your travels.
Replay Value:
Low, perhaps none.
The way the game is designed is you have to heavily focus on one form of combat. If you try to be a jack of all trades you’re going to suffer because you won’t be able to use more powerful weapons, armor and spells to help you progress. So if you want to really try out other builds you’re going to have to play through multiple times (unless you’re okay with controlling one of the NPC party members that has a different combat style than your avatar).
Otherwise there is a lot of loot that drops and you get lots of storage space for it all, but it’s not really as satisfying faming loot on other ARPGs such as Diablo II or Grim Dawn. But maybe it’s enough for you to want to play through again to see what you can collect.
Technical Info/Issues/Bugs:
Camera angles and fighting with it at times becomes annoying. Nothing earth shattering or game breaking, but it does begin to grate on your nerves over time. In a few situations such as this I can just utilize the map mode (TAB key) and play in a top-down camera angle for a few moments until I can find a good spot to switch back to the normal camera mode.
Controls – with taking some time to learn how to set up weapon loadouts and spells the controls are okay, but overall still a bit clunky because you cannot setup just one character’s weapon loadout. All characters share weapon load out saves. Learning how to manipulate them to suit your combat needs can be an adventure all in its own.
Mana, you will constantly be sucking down mana potions to offset the fact that you get so little mana to cast the better spells you come across. Want to cast a powerful attack spell? Nice! But that mana pool you have drains within a few seconds or a couple of casts. You’re left trying to juggle spells, use low mana spells or suck down potion after potion. I found that a lot of the more exotic sounding spells never got used because of how much mana they can cost, some spells will wipe our your entire mana pool for just one cast....is it worth it? Well, that would be a personal decision for you to decide on your own.
Gold; at first you can’t seem to get enough of it because even though you pick up everything you can carry that’s worth value and sell it to a shop, the items you want to buy in return drain your gold level quick. Eventually when you get around 2/3 of the way through the game you have so much gold and nothing worthwhile to spend it on.
Loot; same as gold. Once you get about 2/3 of the way through the game you’re not finding much in terms of new weapons/armor that will really improve your combat prowess. The really good items towards the end of the game require very high Strength, Dexterity or Intelligence that even with your hard work at focusing on using just one combat skill (melee, ranged or magic) to advance a single stat as much as possible, you probably still won’t be able to wield these items without the aid of spells, rings and amulets that you
might find (have to find them in the vanilla version, whereas you could probably buy some at vendors in LoA) that boosts these stats.
Lack of rings and amulets in the vanilla version. Out of all the vendors I’ve found none of them have sold any rings or amulets. Either I’m just extremely unlucky in this aspect or it’s a bug. Every character can wear 1 amulet and up to 4 rings, but the time I finished the game I had at least some amulet for every character and I had 1-2 rings for every character. Thankfully in LoA this isn’t an issue, vendors do offer to sell some amulets and rings.
One game crash – pop-up showed up saying “This may take a minute or two. Collecting exception data.” After about 20 seconds the game crashed to desktop. I was attempting to do a quick save (“F9” key) when this error popped up. My game did not save, lost about 20 minutes between saves and the kicker of it all was I just got done buying/selling and spelling up on buffs.
Availability:
If physical media is your thing you can locate copies of the game for PC on sites such as Ebay or Amazon. If you’re more into digital copies you can find a copy on
GoG – this is a Dungeon Siege Collection so you will get Dungeon Siege 1, 2 and 3 games, but I am unsure if the original game comes with the expansion Legend of Aranna (it doesn’t specify in the information listed). You can get the first game on its own off
Steam, but I do not know if the expansion is included with it because it doesn’t list it on the store page. If you want you can get the collection, just like you find on GoG, on
Steam if you wish to go that route.
Glancing at a Steam review of Dungeon Siege the author lists that all multiplayer components were removed from the game. That means if you want to play this game with someone else it can only be done if you own your own physical copy (each will need their own physical key) so you can directly join via IP or play a LAN game.
Rating/Score:
- Graphics: 2
- Audio: 4
- Gameplay: 3
- Controls: 3
- Story: 2.5
- Replay Value: 1.5
- Technical Issues/Info: 3
Average Rating: 2.71
Conclusion:
Once you get used to the game mechanics and if you can find a good way to setup spell use with your character(s) there isn’t much more to the game. The combat gets hectic, but not generally in a way that makes it feel difficult, just tedious. Enemies are kind of the same throughout the game, not in terms of visual, but in terms of how to engage them.
- Focus on ranged bad guys first, they tend to do the most damage
- Keep lots of potions in your inventory and drink away!
- Lure and kite bad guys when needed.
The game feels a bit long. It’ll take you a good 24+ hours to get through the original game, especially if you’re running around trying to find all the nooks and crannies to see if you can find secrets or hidden areas. It'll take you a good 12+ hours to get through LoA expansion. You'll get lots of game time if you play them both. In the end, though a couple of areas could have been condensed a bit and shaved maybe a good 4 hours off the original game time to really bring the game into a much more enjoyable time frame.
Visually, it’s not very exciting. Don’t get me wrong, there are a few areas that are kind of neat to venture through, but in the end the game is 22 years old. You won’t have any breath taking moments here while you’re exploring and sightseeing. And speaking of visuals, the camera is probably going to be one of the biggest irritating factors of this game. If you find the camera making things difficult just remember it’s only a game and it’s pushing a quarter of century.
I didn’t really have any technical issues with the game, but I did feel like some quality of life things could have really helped out. At one point my ranged characters had better armor and armor ratings over my melee guys because none of the late game vendors sold any armors that required high strength. I had to rely on finding better armor and it wasn’t something that came easily, I guess you could just chalk this up to bad luck with the drops.
Jumping right into LoA is simple after playing the main game, easy transition since nothing changed when it comes to gameplay. One gripe I do have with LoA is the difficulty ramps up quick with combat, I find myself doing more kiting and being unable to just fully engage a group of bad guys – they take my health down so fast that I’m having troubles keeping my health up with potions and healing spells at times.
You’re not going to be super satisfied in terms of loot and there is no way to to grind for it since once a bad guy is killed they never respawn. You’ll find great items as you play through and vendors do sell great items (most of the time). Eventually you’ll be fully decked out on all your characters with very little to look forward to in terms of collecting loot. At least in LoA vendors do offer to sell amulets and rings, something the vanilla version doesn’t seem to offer.
Even though I do feel the biggest letdown with LoA is that you don’t get to just pickup from where you left off with your character from the original game. It would have been nice to continue on and build up your character to use better weapons/spells. Even with all that I would recommend this game to anyone that enjoys ARPGs, just remember it isn’t going to be the most amazing ARPG you've played, but it’s just good enough to give you something enjoyable to play around in and it will run on any system without a hitch.
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