What's Ahead: Dungeon Siege already looks and feels polished, but we haven't heard much about its story at all. Although the game is an action RPG, a seamless gameworld with plenty of monsters to kill and dungeons to crawl through won't mean much without some kind of context. We haven't seen or heard any real dialogue yet either, so the suspension of disbelief and, ultimately, player immersion are still at stake. Furthermore, the game's scripted scenarios and its multiplayer mode need to be robust enough to compete with the immense longevity of an open-ended game like Diablo II.

In terms of gameplay, Dungeon Siege is designed in such a way that you're free to experiment and play however you choose to. If you want to be a melee fighter, you use your melee weapons, or if you want to be a magic user, you stand back from monsters and use offensive spells against them. With practice, you'll increase in proficiency accordingly. In addition, Dungeon Siege will let you easily customize the behavior of your party members. You can have up to eight characters in your party, and you can set any of these to have particular types of aggressive or defensive behavior for when they engage in battle. You can even have one of your characters scavenge the battlefield, automatically picking up loot from fallen foes. Dungeon Siege will also support unit formations, waypoints, and other such features found in advanced real-time strategy games. But the best part is that such features aren't essential to the game; they're available if you want to use them, but you'll just as easily be able to enjoy the game without them.

You won't notice some of Dungeon Siege's features right away--you'll be too busy staring at the game's impressive graphics and listening to its incredible soundtrack. Its musical score was composed by Jeremy Soule, the same musician who scored the symphonic music in Total Annihilation and in last year's role-playing game Icewind Dale and action game Giants: Citizen Kabuto. Every distinct area and situation in Dungeon Siege had its own piece of specially composed orchestral music.

First revealed at E3 2000, Dungeon Siege has steadily progressed toward its intended release date in the fall of 2001. At E3 2001, it already looked polished and fun to play, and it had all the environments and characters from the game built into it and ready to go.