Dungeon Siege would have gone under the radar of many game consumers, if it was not for the efforts of the founder of Gas Powered Games, who is none other than Chris Taylor, the lead designer of the Total Annihilation games. Through Gas Powered Games' marketing endeavour, Dungeon Siege was touted as the game that would supposedly fill a gap in the action-RPG subgenre.
Being a game with high-fantasy settings, Dungeon Siege would doubtless be compared with the games that arrived before it in the same subgenre, and most players would see Dungeon Siege as little different in essence. However, a player with a keen eye for spotting differences would notice that Dungeon Siege has a few game designs that would differentiate it from its peers. The other game designs would appear to be mere dressing to make Dungeon Siege appear different.
The ones that are mere dressing would include the designs for the backstory and settings for the game. The world that Dungeon Siege is not named clearly, but the continent on which it is set is: Aranna. Where there is an RPG game set in a high-fantasy world, there would be one or more civilizations of sorts that the player will have to interact to a certain degree with; in Dungeon Siege, this is the Kingdom of Ehb.
There is a backstory concerning the Kingdom of Ehb, but it would not be of much concern to the player in this game; all the player needs to know is that the Kingdom of Ehb is a bulwark against an existence of murderous chaos, much like the other civilizations in action-RPGs. Similarly, and typically, it has come under a grave threat and the player is expected to defend it from this.
That would be a brief and concise description of the story. An even shorter description that would be straight to the point is that it is little more than an excuse for the player characters to go on dungeon romps slaying critters and monsters left-and-right and scraping their lairs and abodes clean of anything valuable.
The player goes about the single-player mode of the game by forming a party of up to eight player characters, which is a sizable number for an action-RPG at the time. He/She will start with his/her main player character, whom he/she can sculpt and alter aesthetically in limited ways, though equipping items on this character would pretty much render the player's artistic efforts moot later. Eventually, he/she will come across other player characters whom he/she can recruit into the party through various (usually very simple) circumstances, if there is space left.
Every player character is governed by a system of statistics. The first set of statistics concerns the physical and mental attributes of the player: Strength, Dexterity and Intelligence. Following the usual tropes of action-RPGs, these three determine the restrictions on gear that the player character may equip.
Attributes also appear to determine the hitpoints and mana reserves that a player character may have. How exactly each factor contributes to the amount is not certain (without looking into the game code), though generally Strength will contribute the most to Hitpoints while Intelligence contributes the most to Mana count.
Then, there are skills: Melee, Ranged, Nature Magic and Combat Magic. Like attributes, these determine the kinds of gear that the player character may equip. Skill levels also happen to determine the bonuses to damage, duration of spells and/or chances of success for the effects of spells, whichever applicable, that a player character can get when using pieces of gear associated with said skills.
As should be apparent already, the mechanics for skills and attributes are quite simple. Yet, any of the sophistication that they may have lies in how they are developed.
Unlike many other action-RPGs at the time which used level-up mechanics to grant the player the opportunities to advance his/her player character, Dungeon Siege uses a mechanic that can be best described as following the "practice makes perfect" adage.
To advance attributes, the player character only needs to engage in combat with any weapon (or spell) equipped and use this repeatedly; all three attributes will obtain points to advance to the next level. However, using a weapon that is most associated with an attribute, such as a bow that is most affiliated with dexterity (which is a common action-RPG trope at the time), will grant more points towards that attribute's counter.
(It has to be noted here that fighting unarmed will not grant any bonus points towards any attribute.)
Similarly, skills are advanced by using weapons and spells repeatedly. However, the player character will have to use specific categories of weapons or spells. For example, to advance in Nature Magic, the player character will need to use a spell from that school of magic repeatedly.
The mechanics of advancing attributes and skills are apparently very straight-forward and not exactly elegant; all player characters have the same freedom of development after all. There will not be many sophisticated advancement strategies and forward-planning to be had in this game. However, these mechanics also remove a lot of hesitation and worry that the player would have if the advancement mechanics had been more traditional; there would not be many lost opportunities to regret in Dungeon Siege.
However, the player will still have to have his/her player characters specialize in a certain skill; the design of the pacing in the campaign of the single-player mode is not forgiving of jack-of-all-trades, and there are not enough enemies in the game to give player characters enough experience in battle to become a master of everything. Moreover, having up to eight player characters would give any player a lot of leeway in having some party members complement the others and vice versa.
Furthermore, the official single-player campaign introduces new recruitable player characters at points in the campaign in such a way that their default specialty would be almost immediately apparent. For example, the campaign will introduce one of them, who is a dwarf called Merik, by throwing him into a battle with some monsters; the player will be able to observe the battle as his/her party draws closer, and from said observation, it should be apparent that Merik is a close combat specialist. Otherwise, the campaign resorts to placing recruitable NPCs at town regions, where the party can talk to them to have them describe themselves and how they would benefit the party. These parts of the game are also where the only significant voice-overs for these characters can be heard.
Once the player has created a party with a versatile enough make-up to take on any kind of threat, he/she can then appreciate the other game designs, namely the ones that allow the player to determine how every player character behaves in battle autonomously without any micro-management on the part of the player.
By default, when enemies approach the party, the player characters will move up to engage. As long as there are enemies within range, player characters with ranged weapons or spells will stand where they are and spam attacks non-stop, while player characters with melee weapons or very short-ranged spells will move up close to deal damage. This basic behavior can be altered by accessing already compiled AI scripts and assigning these to them; this can be conveniently done in-game. The library of compiled scripts can also be added to with custom-written scripts.
These AI scripts confer changes in the player character's actions when certain conditions in battle are met. For example, when a player character with ranged weapons is menaced by enemies that had come too close for comfort, he/she can be instructed to switch over to melee weapons to defend himself/herself with, or run away a certain distance. Another example is the setting of the thresholds for hitpoint and mana levels before the player character automatically decides to take swigs from the appropriate potions.
The right choices of scripts can reduce the intervention of the player to just directing where the party should be going (which is an instruction that can never be automated, unfortunately). Yet, virtually complete automation is not possible, because the scripting cannot be extended to the casting of spells so easily.
The automation of the casting of spells would have been much welcome as there are many spells with different properties and effects that could benefit from conditioned scripts, but said scripts are largely absent.
Instead, the player will have to make do with how spells are worked into the game; they are no more than another kind of gear that player characters have to equip. A player character can ever only equip two spells at a time, much like how he/she can equip one melee weapon and one ranged weapon at any one time. Therefore, to use different spells, the player will have to access the inventory and swap them out, which can be a hassle. For example, there are some buff-applying spells that would remain useful even late into the game, so to cast these when the durations of the current buffs have run out, the player will have to swap them into the player character's slots and cast them one-by-one before swapping the usual spells back in.
If the player can stomach these shortfalls in design, he/she can have a great time having his/her party carving through mobs of enemies and looting whatever that they drop.
Speaking of looting, there is a button that can be tapped when there are player characters selected to have them automatically grab anything collectible in the immediate area. It is a very amusing - if rather oddball - sight to watch; player characters scramble around, approaching nearby loot and even racing each other to the last piece of loot. The hilarity is raised a notch if there is a packmule within the player's party too.
The packmule is a special player character that can be hired to carry doles of loot around instead of actual party members, though it obviously does not participate in combat and actually runs away from it. It also will not advance in statistics or in fact anything at all no matter how long it stays in the party. There is a different variant of the packmule somewhere halfway into the game, but it has practically the same function, only exchanging some carrying capacity in return for increased survivability.
The beast of burden feature is a design convenience, but a player may have the impression that it could have benefited from further designing, namely ways to improve the beast of burden to be better at what it does. Otherwise, a shrewd player would prefer to have an actual player character instead so as to have a party member that can actually grow stronger.
If there is another complaint to be had in the looting mechanics, it is that there is no way to have the party automatically destroy any nearby loot containers and loot whatever is inside.
Much of the loot obtained is of the usual high fantasy action-RPG sorts: pieces of armour, bows, crossbows, swords, shields and axes, among other items that would predictably be in a game of such a setting.
There are some notable items, such as advanced-looking repeating crossbows and weapons that would be more at home in a sci-fi game like flamethrowers and miniguns (their presence is apparently explained by some steam-punk themes that are in the game), but they are effectively little more than amped-up ranged weapons with few - if any - unique properties. Speaking of properties, some gear can have additional properties like setting enemies on fire, stealing health and small instant-kill chances, yet these would seem very, very familiar to veterans of action-RPGs.
Although the inventory and gear designs in Dungeon Siege are mostly unremarkable, there are some innovations that can be seen. One of them is the design of potions. Unlike the usual potions that have been seen in earlier action-RPGs, they are not necessarily one-off usable items that restore a set amount of health/mana, with any excess amount being completely wasted. Potions in Dungeon Siege, instead, act like containers that hold health or mana points in any amounts. The player character will only consume the exact amounts to completely replenish his/her health or mana, and not anymore.
Potions are removed from the inventory when their held points are completely expended, but they can also have their contents combined with other potions, effectively adding their points together. This also means that low-level potions will remain useful late into the game (if they are still within the player's inventory), if only to act as refills for potions of larger capacities. (It has to be mentioned here that potions are sold at prices proportional to the amounts of health/mana points that they hold, not their capacities.)
Another innovation is the auto-arrange scripts for inventory screens; taps of the button that execute the scripts will have the inventory being arranged and re-arranged to form different permutations of the placement of items in the inventory space. One tap can have the inventory being re-arranged to provide maximized free space for large items, another will have weapons and spells neatly stacked into clumps, and so on.
If it is not apparent already, Dungeon Siege's main attraction is its designs that are intended to make playing the game as convenient as possible.
Sans these however, the game is a very linear and typical action-RPG. The party will be going in essentially one direction, defeating mobs of enemies that would seem to be cookie-cutter action-RPG staples. Back-tracking would be a boring affair, as enemies will never respawn and the player would be doing this for little other reason than selling off excess loot. (There are a couple of other reasons to backtrack, though these appear to be little more than easter eggs included in the official campaign.)
The enemies to be encountered in Dungeon Siege behave in pretty much the same manners despite how different they look due to the fact that they share generally the same AI scripts; enemies will typically move into range to attack the nearest party member and not stop until its current target is dead, though they will switch targets if their target has ran too far away.
The boss fights would appear to be not as typical. Battles involving them are often preceded with impressive animations and these bosses often have behaviours that regular goons do not; an example is a fight with an ancient and (presumably) evil dragon, who appears to be slumbering before the party had aroused it (and its anger) and who will promptly spew fire onto the battlefield while taking occasional swipes with its claws. However, these are really only battles of attrition: the party need only stay alive as long as possible by consuming potions while whittling down the health of the boss. That the boss is completely immune to status effects would strengthen this impression further.
As an action-RPG that is powered by a fully 3D engine, Dungeon Siege is a beautiful game compared to its peers in the genre at the time. One aspect of its graphics that would appear immediately impressive to a new player is its levels.
The settings of the game have the Kingdom of Ehb conveniently located in the midst of several regions of different climes. Therefore, the player will get to traverse through locales with different aesthetics, such as deserts, mountainous places both dry and snowy, jungles, swamps, forests and even volcanoes. They are surprisingly well-furnished with terrain features like trees, ruins, rocks and the likes, and are also draped over with pleasingly appropriate textures. There are also neat graphical effects to be looked at while going through these locales, such as ripples across murky water as the party trudges through swamps, splashing embers in volcanic regions and snowfall in wintry zones.
They may be impressively detailed and sculpted, but gameplay-wise, these environments are really little more than outdoors "dungeons" to be explored and cleared of enemies and picked clean of loot. Any one of such environments will eventually reach a transition zone of sorts that expediently connects two outdoors environments together, thus eschewing the need to show the gradual change in climes, and also introduces an indoors environment, otherwise colloquially known as a "dungeon".
Speaking of dungeons, while they play in a similar manner to their outdoors variants, they do have the same level of impressiveness. Many of them are foreboding to look at, as dungeons should be. They range from decrepit tombs, underground ruins filled with detritus and fungus caves to monster lairs and Dungeon Siege's version of hell (which apparently has a lot of floating platforms).
The Kingdom of Ehb is populated mainly by Humans and Dwarfs; thus these form the bulk of the models for player characters. For all gameplay purposes, Humans and Dwarves are equivalents: there are no in-game differences between them, such as statistical differences or a different gain rate in statistics. The differences are mainly in aesthetics, but even so, the animation scripts for Human and Dwarf player characters are pretty much identical, with only adjustments in certain animations to accommodate for the differences in physical stature.
This can be a bit disappointing to players who had expected more than just aesthetic differences between Humans and Dwarves.
Another disappointment is that other than the voiced-over lines that they have when they introduce themselves to the player for the first time, there are next to no voice-overs for player characters. Even death will not elicit much from a dying player character.
What would not be disappointing are their animations. Melee-oriented player characters show tremendous skill in the use of any weapon and simply exude style and/or gusto in any stroke that they perform. Ranged attacks and spell-casting show less exertion, but different ranged weapons come with different postures and spell-casting are at least accompanied by dazzling particle effects.
The AI scripts for enemies are not impressive, but their appearances and canonical designs are. There are a lot of enemies in this game, many of which are not immediately recognizable as the usual high-fantasy menagerie thanks to their seemingly familiar yet strange aesthetic designs and names. A great example is the race of Goblins, who are far different from the pathetic pariahs of greenskin hordes that they tend to be in other franchises; instead, they are a race of their own with astonishingly advanced technology - namely the aforementioned miniguns and flamethrowers.
Enemies also have great and varied animations. Some of these can be seen in how they are visually spawned into the game world: giant spiders abseil from ceilings, wyverns and drakes swoop down from the (unseen) sky and undead dig themselves out of the ground, among other kinds of dramatic appearances for different foes. Even most of those enemies who are already in the game world would not be standing around waiting for the player's party; they would be doing something like milling about a campfire, gawking at a point of visual interest like a great statue, or are sleeping.
When they go into battle, a bit of the variety is lost. Every kind of creature has the same set of animations for moving and attacking, though this is understandable considering the programming limitations in this era of the history of electronic games.
The graphics are a pleasing portion of the aesthetic designs of Dungeon Siege, though the audio can be a different matter.
As mentioned earlier, player characters lack voice-over outside of scripted (and one-sided) conversations; the same applies to NPCs, such as those in towns. The voice-overs - or what seem to be voice-overs - for monsters can be a bit annoying.
They are not exactly grating to listen to; in fact, most of them are quite satisfactory, such as bugs chittering like bugs do, fierce, feral creatures snarling and very angry monsters roaring to the top of their lungs (if they have any), among other sounds that high-fantasy creatures would appropriately make when their lives are being threatened by loot-hungry do-gooders. Yet, the problem is that they have a lot of sounds and utterances.
Coupled with the sound effects that weapons and spells have, battles can be terrifically noisy, with the din increasing in intensity as the game progresses for there would be more enemies with more aurally impressive attacks to use against the player's party. In fact, battles can drown out the currently playing musical soundtrack at times, which is a disappointment, as Dungeon Siege has heart-pounding and exciting orchestral soundtracks.
Once the player had enough with the single-player mode, he/she may choose to export the entire party of characters, including even the official player characters that Gas Powered Games has made for the single-player campaign. One of these characters can be used to restart the campaign with, though this will result in severe game imbalances.
Other than that, he/she can be used for the multiplayer co-op campaign, which is designed to have a narrative different from the one used for the single-player campaign. It does conveniently use the same materials for its levels, though there are some extras such as an enemy type that is exclusive to this co-op campaign (at least officially) and an easter egg zone.
In this co-op campaign, only one player character is available for any player to use, i.e. the one that they have chosen to start the campaign with. This means that the player will be at the mercy of other players who may not be expected to act in coordination and that design conveniences such as the aforementioned AI-scripts will not be available. This is of course part-and-parcel of the vagaries that come with multiplayer in action-RPGs, but the impression that Dungeon Siege is really only another action-RPG will be especially strong in this co-op campaign.
In conclusion, as an action-RPG, Dungeon Siege is not very remarkable because it essentially has the same content and core gameplay that had been seen in many others in the genre. However, it is best noted for its designs that make gameplay a lot more convenient for the player.