Dungeon Siege: Legends of Aranna Updated Impressions

Gas Powered Games' first product, Dungeon Siege, was released last year, and it met with critical acclaim, thanks to its colorful 3D graphics and easy-to-learn hack-and-slash gameplay. The studio has enlisted the help of developer Mad Doc Software to create an expansion pack for the game that will "offer an entirely new adventure," according to Gas Powered Games' Chris Taylor. The expansion will take place on the lost continent of Aranna, and as we saw for ourselves, it will offer a lot more than just a few new areas and a new monster or two.

The expansion pack will take place in the remains of Aranna, the lost civilization of the Utreans, a race of mad sorcerers who sought to conquer the world by imprisoning ancient and powerful monsters but were themselves destroyed. Unfortunately for the world, the disintegration of the Utreans' influence also means that their captive monsters are now free to run amok. It's your job as an adventurer to follow a mysterious enemy known as the Shadow Jumper to Aranna, do battle with the ancient monsters, and finally solve the mystery of your parents, whose mysterious murder led you to begin your adventures in the original Dungeon Siege.

We watched a party of adventurers consisting of humans, Utreans, and half-giants hack and slash their way through various areas, including tropical outdoor areas that reflected the island environment of Aranna, as well as underground dungeons populated with some of the expansion's toughest monsters. You'll be able to use your original Dungeon Siege characters if you wish to play multiplayer games in Legends of Aranna, but the single-player game will start you all the way back at level one, a starting point that, as Taylor explained, will help players feel like they're playing a brand-new game, rather than just some thrown-together levels. Fortunately, though, you'll have plenty of new items and other options to help speed you through the early part of the game.

In fact, the expansion will offer plenty of new options and equipment for your band of adventurers, including a brand-new line of "orb" spells that summon a glowing orb around a specific character and provide powerful bonuses in battle, as well as transformation spells that let your characters turn into powerful animal creatures. Over the course of the game, you'll also be able to collect complete sets of weapons and armor, some of which belonged to your parents. Individual pieces of these sets will provide minor bonuses, but completing the sets will make your characters much more powerful. You'll be able to recover five or six different sets in the single-player game and 15 or 20 in multiplayer.

Legends of Aranna have plenty of other additions that will help you get right to hacking and slashing, including several interface shortcuts. The expansion will let you hotkey various different "classes" of spells, including orb and transformation spells, so that rather than having to open a series of menus to access different types of magic, you'll need only to tap a hotkey or two to swap in new ones, which is a good thing, considering that the expansion will offer about 70 new spells. Legends of Aranna will also let you auto-distribute your health and magic potions among your party so frontline fighters (who tend to suffer severe physical damage) will get the majority of the health potions, while spellcasters will receive the majority of the magic potions. You'll even be able to sell off items quickly and easily by arranging filters to sell only the weapons you've picked up, or only the potions.

And to carry all that loot, you'll still need to recruit the services of a beast of burden. In addition to the original Dungeon Siege mule, the expansion will let you add a "tragg" to your party. The tragg, a scaly-skinned, horn-headed quadruped, doesn't quite have the carrying capacity of a mule, but it puts up a much better fight in a pinch, and its attack power will gradually scale upward with that of your party (though it won't actually gain character levels).

With a good beast of burden and a party of stalwart companions, you'll be able to take on the hordes of Aranna, which will include powerful "boss" monsters that may require some tactics to defeat. We watched one battle with a giant spiderlike creature that fought viciously while hatching smaller spider creatures from its abdomen. As Mad Doc Software's Ian Davis explained, the trick to beating this monster will be to attack the abdomen to prevent more monsters from swarming you (at the higher difficulty levels, you can expect to see 15 to 20 enemies charging you at once). Several of the game's enemies will require at least a bit of tactical thought to defeat, such as the rune casters, which will hide behind summoned monsters. You'll even encounter a host of intelligent humanoid monsters that use swords and sorcery just as well as your party does, including the Utreans, the catlike Hassat, and the reptilian Zaurask--including one particular Zaurask lieutenant who may have been involved in your parents' disappearance.

With Legends of Aranna, Gas Powered Games and Mad Doc Software hope to improve on everything that was good about the original game, and considering all the major and minor enhancements we've seen so far, the developers seem to be well on their way to reaching that goal. Better still, Legends of Aranna will actually be released at retail bundled with the original Dungeon Siege at a price point that Taylor suggests will be "competitive with other retail expansion packs for other games." Legends of Aranna will be released later this year.