Dungeon Siege 3 - Obsidian's action RPG (NSF 56k)

C2B

surrealitycheck wrote: »

To be honest, I'm amazed anybody enjoyed DS1 at all. DS2 on the other hand is a much more interesting beast.

There's a thread on the offical forum which talks about how awesome 1 was and how much 2 sucked and Obsidian should learn from it.

http://forums.obsidian.net/index.php?showtopic=56122

It's reaaaaaaaly weird.

surrealitycheck

Is DS2 available through any digital distribution service? I've wanted to grab it, but it's rather expensive online (e.g. at Amazon).

I have the CDs from 2005, but I have literally no idea where to get it beyond the obvious piracy option :l

captaink

DS1 had some good innovations, but it ended up being too automated and repetitive. DS2 mixed things up a little bit gameplay-wise.

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I remember there was more than one person who had the idea of turning Dungeon Siege 1 into a screensaver. All you'd have to do was set up the party at the start of the game and give the AI infinite aggro range. They would level automatically, pick up and drink pots, pick up and use better equipment, and just keep going forever.

subedii

DS1 was a little dull until they updated the companion AI. Then it became more of a "group management" dynamic as your team traversed dungeons, dispatching foes.

Admittedly not very ARPG, but there was something satisfying about taking managerial control of your entire group as opposed to fighting to control each member manually when the situation called for it.

Page-

What colours my memories of Dungeon Siege is that when it was released my friends and I wanted to go through it like we had with Diablo and DarkStone. Everything is fine at first, but by the time we'd reached the big goblin fortress place it was obvious that the game was meant for a full party of 5 or 6, not 2 or 3 individual characters. And controlling just one character in Dungeon Siege 1 was really boring anyway.

Things were a little better in Dungeon Siege 2, but it has the same problem by the half way point. I don't play arpgs for party management, I play them so that I can build a character and collect loot. Every time the game forced me to take on another character, none of which I could create, I got that much less interested in continuing. I've never made it all the way through even though I've started new games at least a dozen times.

surrealitycheck

Things were a little better in Dungeon Siege 2, but it has the same problem by the half way point. I don't play arpgs for party management, I play them so that I can build a character and collect loot. Every time the game forced me to take on another character, none of which I could create, I got that much less interested in continuing. I've never made it all the way through even though I've started new games at least a dozen times.

I play DS2 as just me and a pet, it's not too bad.

Xagar

Solo or duo dungeon siege 1 was actually pretty fun...

Lanrutcon

But but...DS1 had miniguns

Fats

It's been eons since I played either, but I think I preferred the first one as well. I never got through 2, despite trying a couple different times.

Owning the first one also gets you the Ultima V remake mod, which is fantastic.

C2B

From Alvin Nelsons Facebook

Operative21

Gameplay-wise I didn't mind DS2 but story-wise DS2 was rather awful. The ending in particular was positively terrible. I remember walking away after completing the game, thinking "that's it? I jumped through all those goddamn hoops and that was fucking it?".

At least with DS1 there was a sense of completion when you finished the game. At the end of DS2 I really didn't feel like I had accomplished anything worthwhile.

Alfred J. Kwak

Dashui wrote: »

Now I feel like re-installing Dungeon Siege 2 again. I never did beat it. I always got to the desert and then stopped.

The desert in chapter 1 yes? (I don't know if there are any other deserts)

My advise - the game isn't really worth pouring so many hours into it. It just goes on and on and on while the gameplay already became stale halfway through the jungle on the first island. Titan Quest is a much better game in the same vein, but even that one gets boring rather quickly. Try to play together with some buddies to extend the lifetime of these games a little.

surrealitycheck

IMO DS2 is much more fun if you just don't play a melee or ranged character - just play the mages and stack up pets. The game gets much more interactive as you go on.

C2B

PC Gamer Preview

Call it the new nerdcore: RPGs are big business. Dungeon Siege 3 is entering the cave-complex that Diablo, Dragon Age and Torchlight have called their own. What can it bring to the ornately carved game-table? A hefty weight of physical violence. Drop-in, drop-out cooperative dungeon crawling. Gorgeous new technology. And intricate business manoeuvring.
Dungeon Siege III gameplay trailer

The private demo I saw was little more than a proof of concept. A dungeon, two heroes (a warrior and a wizard) and a steady stream of ugly baddies. The bads got knocked about like toys – the warrior slamming his shield into entire groups. It’s simple bash bash bash entertainment. The wizard fights by the warrior’s side – one is controlled with a gamepad, the other with a mouse and keyboard. Their abilities are complementary, the wizard slowing or freezing bigger enemies in place while the warrior carves a safe path through them.

The technology is impressive. The dungeon they’re fighting through is miles deep. You can see it spiralling down into the depths. Each little goblin that gets knocked off the ledge can be seen pinwheeling into the river below. This isn’t an off-the-shelf tech solution like the Unreal engine: this is developer Obsidian finally flexing their technical muscles.

And that’s the other weird surprise. Hold tight, this is complicated financial stuff. The original Dungeon Siege was developed and created by Gas Powered Games, led by Chris Taylor. The Dungeon Siege games and intellectual property were sold to Square Enix. The same Square Enix that created the Final Fantasy games, and then merged with UK publisher Eidos (themselves the owners of Deus Ex and Tomb Raider). Square Enix, in turn, have contracted out development of Dungeon Siege 3 to Obsidian, the team behind Knights of the Old Republic 2, Neverwinter Nights 2, and in their former iteration, Planescape: Torment and Fallout.

Why is that surprising? Because Obsidian are all about story and lore and detailed moral consequences. The Dungeon Siege games were mostly about turning orcs into piles of guts, and overloading your pet donkey with loot.

Which is why when lead designer Nathan Chapman talked about “paying respect to the Dungeon Siege lore,” I had to stifle a giggle. The Dungeon Siege lore is what director Uwe Boll used to make a four hour epic. It’s not exactly Shakespeare. Expect slick cutscenes with Mass Effect style dialogue – they’re not going to hang about making you read pages of quest text. Unless they’re daft.

Being grumbly at this stage seems churlish. Obsidian have great tech, smart dynamics, and an ambition to create a fleshed out RPG. Success isn’t assured – but they’re already on the right track.

C2B

Chapman quote. I can't really say how glad I am that Obsidian finally has guys like Chapman and Sawyer working in the lead combined with writers like Avellone or Ziets. (Though Chapman has been there since 2004. Just not in the role he deserved)

From the offical forums about how worldbuilding is related to the engine used:

Nathaniel Chapman wrote:

mkreku wrote:

The only reason would be uninspired world builders and/or too strictly hierarchical personnel management. As an example: Piranha Bytes (admittedly a much smaller team) seems to leave their world builders/designers with fairly free hands in regards to what they are allowed to build and implement. Therefore their worlds are chock-full of cool details, hidden loot, special encounters, secret passages, easter eggs, you name it. All this on top of already supremely well designed game worlds.

We don't know anything about Obsidian when it comes to this so it'll be interesting to see what they have done with Dungeon Siege 3 (and, first, Fallout: New Vegas).

There are at least three additional factors besides the two you mention (which I partly agree with); technology, tools and time. Maybe I should start calling them the three T's!

What do I mean? Most of the things you are talking about are not things that designers always think of in their first pass on a level. You try to get the big brushstrokes in, and as you are working away at those, or playtesting them, thoughts like these occur to you - "Man, a secret door would be really cool here", or, "I should turn that bookshelf that an artist put in here into an examinable lore object", or ,"Hmm, this would be a great place for a special ambush encounter". A surprising amount of this stuff just isn't even something that designers consider in their first pass on an area. It's like writing - your first draft usually doesn't have the same level of detail and polish when it comes to individual sentence structure - you're more trying to get the big ideas down and organized, and you go back and clean up the details later.

How does this relate to tech, tools and time?

In some engines, iterating on content is slower or faster than others due to the pipelines and processes used. So, if you want to make a change, it might take you 5 seconds, 5 minutes, an hour, to a full day depending on how you have to implement and test your change based on your tech and tools. This is especially relevant if you're trying to get an area feeling just right - imagine if, when writing a document, you had to wait for 5 minutes every time you made a change before you could read it again!

Also, in some engines, making changes to a level is more or less risky based on how the engine handles memory management/visibility and how much leeway designers have to add or remove sections of levels without dramatically affecting the performance of levels. So, imagine if half the time you edited a document, you had to make sure your word count per line remained under a certain amount, or your word count per page, or your average word length... or else when you tried to read the document it would crash. Obviously making changes would be much more difficult, because they would have to adhere to a very strict set of rules in order to function.

Finally, obviously, time is the ultimate variable in all of these cases. The more of it you have, the more you're able to playtest and identify things that will flesh out your levels. Additionally, the more time you have the more you're able to buy your way out of disadvantages that you may have due to tech or tools.

Obviously this kind of thinking is part of what has gone into Onyx and is why we love working with an engine that's designed to make our type of games. But I want to say that it's a little premature to blame the area designers in any case where you play a game and it doesn't have that attention to detail. You'd be surprised how much of an effect these very non-design driven factors play in the quality of area design.

C2B

RPS Chris Taylor interview:

RPS: So, what’s happening with Dungeon Siege 3?

Chris Taylor: Well, my position on the project is like a, Creative Consultant, given my role in the creation of the franchise. Square Enix asked how we’d like to work in collaboration with another studio that they’d found, and I said “That’s terrific, who have you got in mind,” and they said Obsidian! And I said “That’s perfect! Look no further. You’ve found the best studio for the job. The guys are so talented, and they totally get it, and their working story is right on the money.” So I was pretty happy with that.

The next step was that they went through all of our lore, even the stuff that people never hear about- the reason why there’s a Stonebridge, or what have you, who’s the 10th Legion, who’s The Empire of Stars- and then they create their own extension on that fiction, building their own story off of that.

So what I do is I read through all of their material, and I turn it around 180 degrees, and then I provide some editorial feedback for them.

RPS: Are you also involved in the actual design, the mechanics?

CT: No. I look at their design, their mechanics, and then I provide feedback on that.

RPS: You say Obsidian “get” Dungeon Siege. What would you say is the core of Dungeon Siege?

CT: It’s an action-RPG gameplay mechanic with lots of loot.

RPS: Tons of loot.

CT: Yeah. Really. And a progression through a world. But while historically we’ve been light on story, they’re going heavy on story. We’re trying to pull up our story-pants, and we’ve made positive steps with each iteration. Our company is very mechanical and technological, so [Gas Powered Games] tend to start with a technological innovation, and then design the game around that. The way Obsidian works, they do a better job of balancing all the various elements. They have a beautiful engine called the Onyx engine which is balanced and really state of the art, and they’ve got great storytelling, and then they’ve got good gameplay instincts on top of that.

I daresay they’re doing a better job than I would have done. I know that’s bull, but it’s true, because I’ve really taken to focusing on RTS.

RPS: So, what are the new features coming with DS3?

CT: Well, I’m not really the guy to talk to about that. I’ve already said too much. But for my part, I’m really happy. It’s a proud moment to see the franchise’s name here, there and everywhere, and to know that’s something I thought of while I was taking a shower 12 years ago.

RPS: You say you’re working on RTS right now, but Dungeon Siege was the RTS spin on RPGs, wasn’t it?

CT: Well because it’s going to a console there’s now less of an RTS spin and more of the single player, direct hero character control.

RPS: Wow. But there’s still a party system?

CT: There’s a party system there, but it’s really tied in nicely to the drop-in-and-play multiplayer. They’re doing a nice job. It’s seamless, you just pick up the controller and just drop in, drop out, AI takes over the character. It’s really cool.

It took a long time for this industry to figure out how important co-operative is versus head to head PvP. People like to play together, you know?

RPS: It’s shocking.

CT: I know! But another 100 years go by, what are we gonna discover then?

RPS: Probably that we really like controlling one another. So you’ve wrapped up Supreme Commander 2?

CT: Supreme Commander 2 shipped in March, and I’m now working on Kings & Castles.

[Here I'm informed that this is a Dungeon Siege interview, and any Supreme Commander or Kings & Castles questions would have to form a separate article.]

RPS: So! How do you feel about Dungeon Siege, looking back on it?

CT: I think we made a game that was bigger than it needed to be, and that delivered more hours of gameplay than people technically wanted. It’s important that people get through a game. If somebody stops playing because of the sheer, daunting size of it, they don’t advertise the game to their friends, which is a really interesting byproduct of game completion.

Think about a game that you don’t get all the way through. You don’t talk about it. But the game you get all the way through in 8 hours, you come to the office on Monday and say “Yeah, I got through this, this and this.” “How was it?” “Pretty good.” “Can I borrow it? Ah, I’m gonna pick up a copy on my way home.”

But when you don’t finish a game, these kinds of conversations don’t happen. You don’t market it to your friends.

RPS: I guess if you don’t finish a game, you don’t finish it for a reason, so the last taste in your mouth…

CT: Is the quitting taste.

RPS: Yeah. You don’t finish it because, say-

CT: The end level boss was too hard.

RPS: And when that happens, you don’t say “Hey man! You have to play this game. It’s probably good. I don’t know.”

CT: Exactly. “I wouldn’t know because I haven’t finished it, but you should go buy it.”

RPS: Which is funny, because a few years ago some developer over at Ubisoft mentioned that they spend way more man-hours on the first few hours of their game, because statistically that’s all most people ever get through.

CT: Yeah, well you do need to make the first 10 minutes great. The first hour great, whatever. But at some level you’ve gotta make the whole game great, you know?

RPS: What’s working as a consultant like? It sounds like a nice position to be in.

CT: Well it could go either way. If you were working with a real crummy developer, it’d be a nightmare. They listen to your comments, then they don’t respond to any of it, then they send you back more junk? It’d be Hell on Earth. But with Obsidian, it’s really nice. I’m reading through the story work they did like it was a novel. I started reading it not knowing what to expect, and then it was like a page-turner.

RPS: Which was something that was interesting about the original Dungeon Siege. There wasn’t much plot there, but what was there was all fairly exciting. Whoever you met reacted to you so strongly.

CT: Well, you know the old saying that necessity is the mother of invention. We had a lot of necessity. We were the underdogs, and still are, frankly, and we had to compete against gigantic, established brands. Every dollar we got, we couldn’t just spend on the game. We had to buy chairs, tables, servers, paper plates for the kitchen. And because we owned the IP, we had to go and do the trademark registration all over the world, and that cost a lot of money, and you don’t even think of that when you go to do the deal initially.

You have to do so much more as an independent, that you don’t even realise because you’ve never been an independent. We learned by doing.

RPS: Considering the cost of setting up a company, did you turn a profit on the first Dungeon Siege?

CT: Without getting into the confidential business stuff, we did OK.

RPS: What was turning out Dungeon Siege 2 like, compared to the first?

CT: We spent almost 4 years on the first Dungeon Siege and a little over 3 years on the second, which was longer than we thought it was gonna take. We thought we could do it in 2 years. We’ve really done a lot better lately, we do games in 18-24 months now.

Monger

I love interviews from places like RPS and Gamersyde, where they actually talk about interesting shit rather than how many modes are going to be in the multiplayer or whatever bullshit it is that the PR manager is trying to shove down everyone's throat.

subedii

rodgersalzer wrote: »

Dungeon Siege 3 is an coming action role-playing game to be built by Obsidian Entertainment and published by Square Enix for the PlayStation 3, Xbox 360 and Microsoft Windows. Chris Taylor, the new creator of Dungeon Siege will serve as an advisor during the development of the game. This is the third game in the series not to be developed by Gas Powered Games, (after Dungeon Siege: Legends of Aranna by Mad Doc Software and Dungeon Siege: Throne of Agony by SuperVillain Studios) and the first to be published by Square Enix after it found the complete ownership of the Dungeon Siege franchise.

Uh dude, why did you register today solely to post press releases in game threads?

C2B

Playstation Blog Interview

Can you describe DUNGEON SIEGE III for those who aren't familiar with the game or the series?

DUNGEON SIEGE III is a fantasy action role-playing game [RPG] that puts the player in the role of a descendent of the once great, but now destroyed, 10th Legion. It is up to him to bring the Legion back to restore peace and order in the land. Along the way he's joined by unique companions with a wide variety of magic and martial abilities.

How have you used the feedback from previous DUNGEON SIEGE titles in the decisions you made when developing DSIII?

As we were developing this instalment, we looked at the first two games in addition to many other action RPG titles, Massively Multiplayer Online RPGs and even non-RPG action titles. Using all of these games as inspiration, we distilled down what would be the best skill and ability system, loot system and action mechanics for our game. A lot of that process involved making sure we understood what players liked most about the original games.

What sort of response have you encountered from the game's unveiling so far?

The team sees the game all the time and have gotten used to the look and feel of our engine, the characters, the animation and the environments. So each time we bring it outside of the developer circle and show new stuff to Square Enix, Chris Taylor at Gas Powered Games or to the press, we are often taken off guard by how positive the response has been. Not that we don't think we are making a good game that also looks visually great, it's just easy to forget what you have until you get an outsider's perspective.

What sort of enemies and characters will players face in the game?

You will find some of your standard fantasy enemies like skeletons and giant spiders to hack to pieces. But we've also developed a number of very unique enemies and computer-controlled characters thanks in large part to the creative vision of our art director, Justin Cherry. Many have a dark and exotic flavour that will stand out.

Will the game have multiple endings based on the decisions made by the players? How far-reaching will their decisions be in the game?

Like other Obsidian games, choice and consequence play an important role. So there will be multiple endings and decisions you make in the first region which will impact things that happen in the last region.

What sort of challenges did you come across creating the game?

Initially, getting the visceral feel of console based melee combat was a challenge and therefore a focus for us. We iterated a lot during pre production and now have a fun and rewarding action experience.

What's been your favourite moment developing DSIII?

I really enjoyed seeing rag doll physics get implemented in the Onyx engine. We've had endless fun launching dead enemies as we tweak the weighting of creatures in the game.

Is there anything else you want to add about DUNGEON SIEGE III?

I'm very excited about the story of DSIII. It's crafted by the skilled hand of our creative lead, George Ziets, who was behind Neverwinter Nights 2: Mask of the Betrayer. I think when players can finally sink their teeth into this game they will see a story a cut above other action RPGs.

C2B

So, some new guy broke the build of Dungeon Siege III for the first time.

Now he got this Shirt



Which is why I hate him.... So much

Mostlyjoe13

I love the visuals going on with the levels themselves. DS 1&2 while never really impressive were always servicable. But 3? Man, that's looking sweet.

C2B

Twitter post

if you live in NY be on the look out for DS3 team members. Yea NY Comic con...

So, if anyones at comic con. Look out for whatever they meant.

subedii

It can only mean one thing.

Dungeon Siege / DC crossover.

The Justice League suffer yet another teleportation accident and find themselves fighting demons and wizards in Ehb.

C2B

subedii wrote: »

It can only mean one thing.

Dungeon Siege / DC crossover.

The Justice League suffer yet another teleportation accident and find themselves fighting demons and wizards in Ehb.

I don't know if I would play it. I mean its probably the most meh combination.

subedii

C2B wrote: »

subedii wrote: »

It can only mean one thing.

Dungeon Siege / DC crossover.

The Justice League suffer yet another teleportation accident and find themselves fighting demons and wizards in Ehb.

I don't know if I would play it. I mean its probably the most meh combination.

Nah, that was the Mortal Kombat / DC crossover.

Seriously, what were they thinking with that one?

GoodKingJayIII

Man, if I have to get Dragon Age 2 and Dungeon Siege 3, there are going to be problems.

C2B

GoodKingJayIII wrote: »

Man, if I have to get Dragon Age 2 and Dungeon Siege 3, there are going to be problems.

We'll see, if Dungeon Siege comes late 2011 there shouldn't be a problem right?

C2B

So it will be a panel

DUNGEON SIEGE 3 PANEL
- Location: Javitz Center, Room 1A22

- Day: Saturday, October 9

- Time: 6:15-7:15pm

- Focus: Envisioning the world of Dungeon Siege for a new generation of consoles with Obsidian team members Jay Bakke, Dimitri Berman and David Espinoza. The team will discuss characters and creatures, in-game environments and more and provide a live game demo for attendees.

-Jay Bakke (Artist. Worked on all three NWNs (Animation, Art) and Alpha Protocol (Effects))
-Dimitri Berman (Charachter artist for all three NWN's)
-David Espinoza (Same. Worked on KOTOR2 too)

C2B

Emil Bliss/SE twitter

Presentations for dungeon siege, FF XIV and Deus Ex all day plus tons of free stuff (t-shirts too!) at Square Enixgaming booth!!

Dave Oshris Twitter (Ripten Editor)

This time I'll make sure to film the whole thing [about Dungeon Siege 3]!! @Obsidian_Ent For The Win. #NYCC

Both infos from the Obsboard

C2B

New Square Enix Dungeon Siege Forum

http://member.square-enix.com/na/forums/index.php?sid=4a11555c0ece20d7f6fb95907d69160e

NYCC

C2B

All info from the Obsboards specifically Funcroc

I saw several Square Enix titles coming to the market. Dungeon Siege 3, which will be available on the PC, PS3 and Xbox 360, is an intense RPG featuring extensive multiplayer action. The graphics look phenomenal, and I’m excited to see more about this in the coming weeks.

Some photos from the presentation (You can see the inventory and dialouge)

C2B

Naturally I think its time to change my title.

Also I will search for footage

surrealitycheck

GET IT C2B YOU SEXUAL TYRANNOSAURUS

subedii

Yeah I may not respond much here, but there's not much to say just yet. I'm still reading through all this stuff because I'm interested in seeing how DS3 turns out.

C2B

Yeah, I hope we get more information in the following days. Dave Oshris filmed the DS3 panel so hopefully I can post that. Keep you posted anyway.

Variable

I never actually played DS but I thought about it a lot! right up my alley

this one looks remarkable

C2B

Presentation Video is OUT (Thanks to World Gaming Network)

Ain't it a beauty

surrealitycheck

Thank you C2B.

Draper

Oh fuck yes I'm on board with this after watching that video.