Dungeon Siege - How the hell was this ever popular?

[Reinhardt]

I've been wondering the exact same thing, since its release. The game has always been one of the worst Diablo clones TBH, with stuff like Sacred or Titan Quest out there, it really eludes me how this crud ever got this much attention and appreciation by fans and shills alike. Its sequels are also pretty rank, with DS3 being vaguely better in realization but nonetheless dull like an old tin knife.

Sacred > DS, but DS 2 > Sacred 2 and even DS 3 > Sacred 3.

 

[Zetor]

I haven't played Dungeon Siege outside Lazarus, but Demigod was pretty dire: a shitty dota ripoff that didn't even have functional multiplayer for a while (and was eventually abandoned). It definitely felt like a game aimed at the mass market, ie. what League of Legends eventually succeeded at.

 

[felipepepe]

His studio got bought by the world of tanks, so he is in business.

Looking at his wikipedia it seems he basically worked on Total Annihilation, Dungeon Siege and Supreme Commander. Some Space Siege and Demigod shit in between. That's not really portfolio of some horrible sellout who betrayed hardcore gamers. "Siege" games aside (and even those have some fans) those are some beloved strategy games. Need I remind that before KS our savior Fargo was producing such hits as Hunted Demon Forge and Choplifter HD?

I am pretty sure his kickstarter failed not because of some shitty games he made in the past but instead of tapping into nostalgia he tried to do something weird and his pitch was shit. I bet if he said "NEW TOTAL ANNIHILATION FROM THE CREATOR OF TOTAL ANNIHILATION!!!!!1", he would get his money. In fact, that's more or less what some other guys did and they got funded.

Look at Schafer, even after being exposed as a fraud in his 1st Kickstarter he still got funded, because Le Psychonauts 2.

He sold his studio after failing to keep it open, so you get what I'm saying - he failed to "entertain millions". And Fargo is no savior of mine, W2 made it clear what to expect from him.

Thing is, people remember & enjoy Schafer's game today - en masse. Who the hell talks about Dungeon Siege nowadays? Do you see it in any Top RPG list? Cries for an HD remaster?

So when Chris goes to KS and says "Imma make another RTS/RPG hybrid!" who the hell should be backing this? His TA and SC fans would definitely prefer a full RTS, and the audience for the Siege games isn't a hardcore one, that will follow & fund him wherever he goes.

 

[Perkel]

This and NWN1OC is reason why i would nuke half people on earth liking this.

At time of release game was good like for 3-4 hours and then you realized that there isn't anything new later on because everything is copy paste and boring shit boring shit.

I guess people hava rosetineted glasses because they didn't play Diablo2 at that time or this was their first game into Hack and Slash genre.

But music was fucking good. Based Jasper. Still remember that opening theme when you pick up your hoe to kill that goblin/krugwhateveritwas.

 

[Jools]

Ok, DS had one more thing to its credit. The toolset. The toolset was pretty cool, flexible and easy-to-grasp. But still vastly outshadowed by the Aurora Toolset.

 

[likaq]

Trokia somehow was able to fund a fully TB, full party creation game that was pure awesome. Did people appreciate it or him? No, they just whinned and bitched that it wasn't RTwP and had some bugs and didn't have rotating cameras

Toee was pure awesome crpg, check.
Toee was criticised by the mainstream for the lack of rotating camera, check.
This is the key to understanding combatfags.

 

[Dyspaire]

I wrote a mini-review of Dungeon Siege in comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.rpg back when it was first released:

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!s...sys.ibm.pc.games.rpg/Ql9PWRGGo94/kbQlyB35QiIJ

Same as it ever was.

(Yes, I had only just started playing Wiz 8 when I wrote that, and changed my mind about the combat soon after.)

Funny to read the replies to my post after all this time and think that some people find teh Codex to be a harsh place to express an opinion.

Cheers.

 

[Infinitron]

I wrote a mini-review of Dungeon Siege in comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.rpg back when it was first released:

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!s...sys.ibm.pc.games.rpg/Ql9PWRGGo94/kbQlyB35QiIJ

Same as it ever was.

(Yes, I had only just started playing Wiz 8 when I wrote that, and changed my mind about the combat soon after.)

Funny to read the replies to my post and think that some people find teh Codex to be a harsh place to express an opinion.

Cheers.

Heh, Usenet was already starting to go out of fashion in 2002, wasn't it? Not that surprised to see that it had an RPGWatch-like clientele.

 

[Dyspaire]

As a place for discussion, yes, Usenet was long past its prime by 2002 (remember, remember, Eternal September...), but alt.binaries groups were pretty handy for a good while there until bittorrent came along.

Hard to even imagine a pre-torrent internet now, really.

Cheers.

 

[adrix89]

People misunderstand what DS 1 is.
What it is is a mob with pitchforks simulator. If you role play by imagining the monsters to be various aspects of then you just have to sick the
on them.

 

[felipepepe]

Also, Space Siege is one of the worst games I ever played, so fuck Chris Taylor.

 

[Melan]

It is actually worse than Dungeon Siege?

 

[Siveon]

Not that surprised to see that it had an RPGWatch-like clientele.

No kidding. I'm getting traces of deja-vu here.

> c. For combat, exactly copy the phased/turnbased system from Wiz8.
> Peace

Have never played DS nor Wiz8, but the perfect combat system to me is the BG
/ PS:T version. Semi-realtime with Pause.
have always hated turnbased combat.

/S

> Have a great day. If you have a brain, avoid Dungeon Siege. Pretty
> colors do not a compelling game make.

If you liked Diablo, Diablo2 and Darkstone. Then you should enjoy DS
but don't listen to anyone else, try it for yourself and form your own
opinion

> c. For combat, exactly copy the phased/turnbased system from Wiz8.

Good heavens, what have we done to deserve such a fate? There are far
better turn based systems than Wiz8. At least in my opinion. Oh, right,
this isn't about opinions, you've stated this as if it were some sort of
"fact".

 

[felipepepe]

It is actually worse than Dungeon Siege?

They discarded everything that made DS unique - it's now a single character Diablo-clone set IN SPACE and WITH GUNS!

But seriously, it's a game designed by people that have no idea of why Diablo works:

1 - THERE'S NO LOOT! You just collect "parts" you use to add "+5 damage" upgrades to your stuff. DA FUCK? DO YOU EVEN GAME DEV?
2 - NO CLASSES! You are random SPESS MEHREM guy, with a "Combat" and a "Tech" skills tree.
3 - Every single area looks exactly the same - a boring spaceship corridor. Linear as hell too.
4 - In the first hour you battle exactly THREE different enemy types.
5 - Controls are still Diablo-like - left click to move, right click to shoot. That means you can't move while shooting, so most of the time gameplay is you standing still like a turret while right clicking hordes of dull enemies walking towards you.
6 - The story and characters have the personality of a mud puddle, and the story has almost the same depth.

Yet this shit had tons of hype - including 16 newspost here on the Codex!

 

[FeelTheRads]

Space Siege lol

It has Cloud's Howitzer, avoid at all costs.

 

[Azrael the cat]

Trokia somehow was able to fund a fully TB, full party creation game that was pure awesome. Did people appreciate it or him? No, they just whinned and bitched that it wasn't RTwP and had some bugs and didn't have rotating cameras

Toee was pure awesome crpg, check.
Toee was criticised by the mainstream for the lack of rotating camera, check.
This is the key to understanding combatfags.

Let's not pretend ToEE didn't sell well due to people not liking its combat engine. It failed because people expected a full and traditional crpg world, and instead they got exactly what was advertised - a DnD module.

And it didn't even fail that badly. All of Troika's games made their money back - they went under because they were around at the worst possible time for relying on external publishing, where you could make your budget back and still be forced to close shop because you couldn't get funding for your next project. They didn't help things with their release bugs, and some less-than-stellar market thinking (who was ToEE supposed to appeal to? surely it should have been obvious that a DnD module wouldn't be sufficient to bring out the depth of the system/engine? was it really wise to make 3 very different games with completely different engines/tech, instead of each project building upon the last?), but 10 years earlier or later they would have had enough margin for error to get away with it.

 

[pippin]

And it didn't even fail that badly. All of Obsidian's games made their money back - they went under because they were around at the worst possible time for relying on external publishing, where you could make your budget back and still be forced to close shop because you couldn't get funding for your next project. They didn't help things with their release bugs, and some less-than-stellar market thinking (who was PoE supposed to appeal to? surely it should have been obvious that a DnD module wouldn't be sufficient to bring out the depth of the system/engine? was it really wise to make 3 very different games with completely different engines/tech, instead of each project building upon the last?), but 10 years earlier or later they would have had enough margin for error to get away with it.

 

[Neanderthal]

If Kickstarter'd been around i'd a thrown some right fucking wonga at Troika, pity.

 

[Ladonna]

I don't even put Troika and Obsidian in the same room. With Obsidian, I managed to finish one of their games, and that was heavily flawed (KotOR 2). The rest, not unlike Dungeon Siege actually, I found too boring to continue and abandoned them probably halfway through.

Troikas games however, I have finished multiple times, all three of them. There are some flaws, but ultimately the strong points of each game were enough for me to love the experience and head back for more.

 

[Daemongar]

Odd story. My best friend was playing some pretty crappy games at the time, and I was trying to get him into RPG's. So we both went out and purchased Dungeon Siege as a Day-One Purchse (something I never do, and this is one of the reasons.) I thought it would give me a chance to win him back to the light. To get him off of shit RTS games like Warcraft 3, and into RPG's. Hey, he played Ultima IV and Archon in the 80's, he's gotta have some taste buried in their somewhere!

We started playing DS in a small LAN that I set up. Within a half hour he was REALLY FUCKING ENJOYING THE GAME while I started getting depressed. I wasn't even doing anything: just clicking on the ground. This was the dullest game I've ever clicked halfheartedly through. This went on for hours. After hitting level 10, I just kind of looked up like Rowdy Roddy Piper putting on the glasses in "They Live!" and looked at my friend and I realized I couldn't do anything. He was lost.

In the months following, I still spoke like I was playing the game and followed his progress, but I never touched it again. The joke was on him, as about 95% into the game, some "missing King" bug or whatever hit him and it was impossible for him to finish the game.

 

[Invictus]

The only thing I felt qfter finishing this game was relief that it was over, I mean it was even worse than clickfest because tou only had to focus on using your health or magic buttons, the loot was lousy, companions interchengable and setting as generic as wonderbread, the only thing I cared about was that nobody tried to kill my donkey
I loathe games like Diablo but this was easily worse; and the fact it was circlejerked in the same breath as other very decent to awesome games of 2002 like Freedom Force, Morrowind, Neverwinter and Icewind dale 2 was even more Surprising
I got ny first decent PC in almost a decade in 2002 and went to buy Morrowind, Freedom Force, Warcraft 3 and Neverwinter... The store owner offered another game at half prize and I had between Planescape Torment and Dungeon Siegue, my girlfriend gifted me DS and I picked Torment, so I had to play that piece of shit before Torment as to not hurt her feelings

 

[T. Reich]

DS1 was pretty cool for its time (and at my age back then).

It was very atmospheric, had great music and visuals, it was pretty dumb, but it wasn't ostructively dumb, so it had that sort of flow to it when you just kept going forward without any thought, even though you weren't doing anything much in particular.
Great time-killer it was, and that's why it was good in terms of overal feels, even though it's objectively a bad game.
I wouldn't replay it these days, because there are so many more good games to choose from, but it will always hold a special place in my heart.

DS2 wasn't as good for some reason. My guess is because it decided to complicate things a lot with all the extra active skills and passive skill trees and prestige classes and all that bullshit, and it made it so that you would have to play the NG+ to get to the higher tier abilities etc.
By doing that, it made the player think, and DS was not a thinking player's game in the first place. that made its flaws and generally dull gameplay stand out, to its detriment.

DS3 is not to be discussed in polite societies, so here's that.

 

[Baron Dupek]

Space Siege, yuck.
Removing body parts for mechanical replacements, all this to give +5% boost in something. And these human nature question? They're not here, pfffff....

 

[FeelTheRads]

Would you replace your dick with a mechanical one for 5% extra length?

 

[Baron Dupek]

Nah, I rather leave it.
Money saved for surgery would do the job better.