Why Sequels Suck: Dungeon Siege II.

Ok.
Secretly, in my browser, I have like 300 links to news stories from the last week or so, all queued up and ready to be mocked ruthlessly.
The problem?
My next day off is Saturday.
So instead, let's talk about Dungeon Siege 2.

Just got this game a while ago, and I've played it enough to notice some things about it.
For those of you who don't know, Dungeon Siege and Dungeon Siege 2, made by Gas Powered Games and published by Microsoft, are pretty stock examples of the "clickclick" genre of gaming, which features such luminaries as Diablo, Diablo 2, Sacred, The Fate, and... ummm... Oh well, you get the idea.

Dungeon Siege did do a few innovative things, though; it allowed for multi-character parties which you could control, RTS-style, in real-time. It also allowed the player to wander freely throughout the game world without loading, even once; not even so much as the in-engine animations used to disguise loading between maps used by the Legacy of Kain series. This was done through a truly innovative pre-loading method, which allowed the portions of the map the player moves toward to be loaded dynamically by the engine while still outside the rendering distance. (I know, I know. Three or four of you who know what that means but didn't already play the game are going "Cool!" while everyone else is scratching their heads.) That way, by the time a player party moved to the edge of one map area, the next map area was already loaded, which lets you make the run from one end of the game to the other without ever, ever, ever stopping to watch movies or loading screens.

Dungeon Siege also allowed greater control over the members of the player party than is common in this type of game; each controllable character (up to 8) had a set of AI scripts which allowed the player to set all the archers to attack anything in range, while the melee fighters chase things all over the board, while the mages heal, summon minons, and defend with spells. Or, if the player was nuts, or just really bored, the archers could heal, while the mages chase things... You see?

Dungeon Siege was, despite a few flaws, a great game.
But the sequel isn't.
Don't get me wrong; DS2 isn't a TERRIBLE game, but it's not GREAT, either, and it's because someone tried to reinvent the wheel.

That's never a good idea.

In the original, although you had character portraits, health and magic bars, inventory, and quick weapon and spell slots on the left side of the screen, the game camera allowed you to zoom out far enough that nothing was ever obscured, and that combined with the very free-moving, responsive camera system prevented one of the things I've noticed often being an annoyance in the sequel: monsters attacking you from off-camera, while you are unable to get them in view. I cannot even tell you how often I have sworn at this game as some monster chews my party into chunks with impunity, as I frantically swing the camera back and forth, looking for an angle from which the monster will be visible, instead of hidden by the gigantic UI in the left corner.

Adding insult to injury is the fact that the graphics haven't had an upgrade of any real significance. The original was a very pretty game, but it's been almost 6 years, and it's starting to show its age. GPG, in their infinite wisdom, didn't even add support for resolutions higher than 1024x768, despite the growing popularity of LCD monitors, most of which go up to 1600x1280.

Adding further insult to injury is the plethora of game-breaking bugs that came in the retail box. There is, of course, a patch; but if you just paid $50 for a game, and one of your quests is to rescue an old man, and you defeat all the enemies around him, and he says "Help me!" thus forcing you to reload from a savegame until he gets it straight, you will be annoyed. A huge download doesn't help, especially if you are on dialup; (which, thank God, I'm not, but still) why in God's name can't these game companies get that kind of thing ironed out before the game ships? I can understand a minor issue with a font, or a sound issue that only occurs when the player has a particular sound card and driver version, but the bugs that make this game annoying are in the event scripting system that drives the game itself. Not minor. Really.
Then, just for the purposes of innovation, GPG thought to themselves, "Hey, I've got a great idea for a sequel! Let's take out everything that made the original game good, replace it with suck, and see how much money we can rake in! We can even use the same graphics engine, if we throw in antialiasing and anisotropic filtering no-one will even know we didn't do an upgrade."

Think I'm kidding? Let's break it down:

• Party size has shrunk to 4 for the initial difficulty setting, maxes out at 6 for the highest - there are three, just like Diablo 2. Wonder where GPG got the idea, considering it uses the same procedure to check difficulty and start the game as Diablo 2 did - 6 years ago.


• The reason the party got smaller is because GPG made the UI huge and intrusive, leaving insufficient space on the left of the screen for more than 6 character portraits. Want to see what I mean by this? They traded this UI for this one.


• The party no longer has individual AI settings for party members, and the party members are no longer separable into subgroups, or mobile alone. Instead, you have two AI settings: Mirror and Rampage, and a third button: Regroup.


• Mirror is supposed to mean "everybody attack the same monster." Instead, it means "shoot every which way and miss often."


• Rampage is supposed to mean "attack everything that moves." Instead, it means "I will attack, you other guys stand around looking confused."


• Regroup is supposed to mean "everybody come back to the party leader," but instead means "hey, you! Lost dumbass! Get over here!"


• More specifically, path search nodes in DS2 are reduced to a point where your characters frequently remain behind, tragically stuck in an impenetrable blockade of quarter-inch-high grass.


• In fact, all AI scripting for player-controlled characters is astonishingly stupid in DS2. Enemies, however, are razor-sharp, with bosses ignoring multiple melee characters completely to repeatedly one-hit unarmored healing mages, using special attacks the second they're available and always seeming to hit every member of your party at once, and using spells which are much cooler than any you get to cast.


• The camera doesn't zoom out nearly as far, which contributes to the constant barrage from offscreen monsters.


• The excellent preloading routine used to provide a seamless experience and game world in the first game is used far less in this game; DS2 uses cutscenes (pre-rendered, out-of-engine movies) to disguise the loads between major landblocks. At first I had chalked this up to their attempt to make things look cooler, but as I progressed into the game I discovered cutscenes with monotonous regularity, even extending to the Stargate-esque teleports used for transportation around the world of Aranna.


• There is never enough money available to your characters in DS2. Items sell to merchants for a fraction - a very, very SMALL fraction - of their value when YOu buy them, which means that you are constantly broke, which is highly annoying. GPG addressed this, or tried to, by placing health and mana bushes around, which characters with the right skills can harvest for health and mana potions. It's not enough. You're still broke all the time, and it gets annoying if you bring in a dozen magic swords, three suits of armor, and 14 magic necklaces and rings, and can swap them for two heal potions and a helmet.


• Multiplayer features wonderful things like lag for no reason in small spaces with only two player characters present; lag in wide open spaces with dozens of monsters present, and lag in cities with fixed populations. Actually, every location we've visited so far in multiplayer has huge latency issues, which are not related to our network. If we can transfer a multi-gigabyte archive from one workstation to another in a minute or so, there shouldn't be any problems with a game, and other games have experienced no latency, but there it is. GPG scrapped the original, good network code, and substituted buggy crap written by someone who clearly thought they didn't get paid enough. Lag this bad can only be considered deliberate sabotage.


• Multiplayer also, for some reason, makes the AI scripting bugs ten times worse, both in terms of the event engine, and in terms of player characters standing around with their heads up their fourth points of contact while enemies beat their mages into mush.


• Players now have a skill system, which wasn't present in the original game - players in DS1 were archers, melee, healing, or combat mage. That was it. Now, they have a fairly standard RPG skill tree, causing my wife to whine and constantly pest me to tell her where she should put her next skill point. This causes my head to catch fire, which is never good.

Oddly, after that list of bad things, there were some good things; GPG did do some things right. Multiplayer can now save sessions, so that players like my wife and I can play after work and then pick up where we left off the next night, a welcome change. The addition of a system allowing the player to collect reagents and enchant their own magic items was also welcome, even if some of the design decisions involved were real headscratchers. The variety of spells is much smaller than the original game, which isn't good, but they're organized better and give better information in the popup tooltips. The inventory space for each character is smaller - always an annoyance - but GPG compensated, this time successfully, by placing a stationary item box in town, which was very innovative, or would have been if they hadn't stolen it from Diablo 2.

The story is a whole lot more involving this time around, which is good. That's unqualified; good story = better game. Sadly, in this case, the story merely serves to hold your interest until you are screamingly frustrated by the plethora of problems in this title.

My advice is to heed the critics. If you had been paying attention in 2000 to gaming news, the original Dungeon Siege title was all the buzz, and got attention from critics worldwide, for good reason. This time around, we didn't even know the game had gone gold, which is never a good sign. If the critics can't even be bothered to say something about the game, it sucks.

I really, really wanted this game to be good. My wife, a huge fan of the original, wanted this game to be good. It isn't. Hopefully, GPG will come to their friggin' senses when they put together the third game and try to make it actually be good, instead of relying on the title's popularity to sell endless, quality-free sequels until they've run it into the ground.

Don't buy this, unless you just WANT to be frustrated and swearing at your screen. Instead, try the original, or maybe one of the Elder Scrolls games; they're a lot of fun, and don't require the patience of the Dalai Lama to play.