At a certain point in Dungeon Siege 3, you come across a dead mule. Tired, beaten and worn, it finally collapsed under the weight of heavy armor and weapons loaded onto it by cruel adventurers. In Dungeon Siege, earning the gold to buy a mule was a game-changer, allowing you to finally carry enough junk back to a merchant to earn gold for the good stuff. In Dungeon Siege 2, the mule could become a full member of your party, gaining levels and putting up as good a fight as any elf or human.
In Dungeon Siege 3, the mule is dead. There’s no room for him in your party, which can only comprise two people, your character and one of the other three children of the Legion – the Fighting Tenth Legion, that is. (In multiplayer, you can have up to three friends join in your game).
It’s thirty years after Jane Jayne Kassynder, certain the powerful 10th Legion had betrayed and killed the old High King, rebelled against the crown and the legion, leaving the legion all but destroyed and the land decimated. After decades building an army in the East, she has returned to finish the last remnants of the Legion – that’s you – and usurp the throne to set herself up as queen of all the lands.
You are one of the children of the 10th Legion – Katarina, a halfbreed gunslinger; Lucas, a sturdy warrior; Anjari, a foundling archon (supernatural race); or Reinhard, a steampunk mage. Summoned to a clandestine meeting of the other children of the Legion, you arrive to find that it was an ambush, the only survivor being the last survivor of the Legion, Odo. The attacks have left you and Odo no choice – you must rebuild the Legion, unite the land and defeat Jayne Kassynder before she tears reality itself apart in her pain.
It’s a cool story, a real page turner, and I played right through the game as Katarina in three long sessions (Steam says 17 hours, but I did replay the parts near the end with each companion to see how things changed).
I played on Normal difficulty, which was a decent challenge until one of the helpful tooltips reminded me that I couldn’t be hurt while tumbling. After that, I’d kite stuff around invulnerably while my companion did damage, stopping when the companion got aggro to lay down some withering covering fire. Boss fights may have gotten long – the fight against the Dapper Old Gent seemed to go on and on – but there was never any doubt I’d win. I even trained up an ability to do damage to creatures while tumbling around. The final battle saw me just rolling around the entire battlefield, bulldozing through enemies (and killing them!) like some sort of deadly armadillo.
In Dungeon Siege 2, you’d need certain NPCs in your party at times to do things only they could do. In DS3, there’s no fight you can’t do with the companion of your choice, but it quickly becomes clear that there’s a secondary plot that revolves around one of the character choices – Anjari, the archon. Since I wasn’t playing her, that meant potentially missing some plot development centered on her unless she was in my party. The resolution of the plot is significantly expanded if Anjari is present.
I found Dungeon Siege, the first, fairly difficult only because I found it impossible, at times, to know where I was or where I was going. In Dungeon Siege 3, an optional glowing trail leads you, MMO-like, to your next quest objective, so that is never an issue.
Both DS1 and DS2 let you build a four person party (or three person and a mule) that could be set to largely fight on their own. You could also take control of any character at any time in order to do things manually. In DS3, your main character always is under your manual control, and your single companion always fights automatically. They do fight fairly well, and will even rez you if you fall, but I would have liked to have taken the reigns at times.
I haven’t tried multiplayer, but the multiplayer achievements on Steam give a sense for what’s possible. NPC interaction is done with every character, who appear to vote on the party response. There’s achievement for all agreeing and all disagreeing, and another one for finishing the game in a four person party. Each person takes on the role of one of the four companions, no dupes. As Penny Arcade pointed out, only the person whose game this is is getting loot and xp, everyone else is just part of their world.
That’s not necessarily a problem if everyone is on board with playing together.
The epilogue hints at future adventurers for the children of the Legion – now the heart of a rejuvenated 10th Legion, heroes or terrors of the post-Jayne world, depending on the choices you made during the game (but, like Dragon Age 2, the same events happen regardless of your choices, however, the context is different). This will doubtless take the form of DLC.
The Good
Good plot, wide variety of training options lets you craft a fairly unique hero, though your role depends strongly on the character chosen. Some of the boss battles are very well crafted. The decisions you make color the interactions of NPCs in the future to some extent.
The Bad
Camera often made it hard or even impossible to follow the action. Would have liked the vanity cam from DS2 to get a decent look at my party. The dodge mechanic took a lot of the challenge out of the battles (of course, I could have just not dodged, I know). All the armor and weapons that drop can only be used by a certain character, a la Dragon Age 2. Didn’t like it there, don’t like it now. The game seems designed around playing Anjari as your main character. The decisions you make can influence NPC behavior, but not the plot – you can free some NPCs who will then join your army, or you can force them to do your bidding, and join your army anyway. Etc.
The Ugly
The game was really short. The party dynamics and armor and weapon sharing that made DS1 and DS2 fun are absent here. DS2 let you start the game over with your leveled up character in a higher level of difficulty, but DS3 just ends, presumably until you buy DLC to continue the story. I hated not being able to get a good look at my character’s awesome gear.
I need to mention the controls. DS3 is tuned for use with a controller, even on the PC (the version I played). I have an XBox controller hooked up to my PC, so it was no problem for me, but it could be an issue for keyboard heroes. Square Enix is said to be working on a better control scheme for keyboards.
Verdict
I had fun with Dungeon Siege 3 and I really did love the setting and the story, but it doesn’t measure up to its predecessor’s party dynamics, the real defining feature of the series. Both Dungeon Siege 3 and Dragon Age 2 have removed a lot of the choices they’d given players in earlier games, and it does neither of the games credit. Wait for Steam to have it on sale; at $20, it’d be a heck of a value.