So, I've now purchased beaten dungeon siege three.
Comments:
1. The aformentioned issue with not noticing that one possible player character is an Archon, a semidivine entity of elemental fire who can (poorly) disguise herself as a human is slightly less severe later in the plot, but it crops up in ways that are increasingly hilarious.
There's one instance where you get sent into a segment of mine being intentionally flooded with explosive gas, and not only does it not explode, no one even mentions the fact that sending someone who has fire instead of hair into the area might not be ideal.
However, the other Archons in the game are apparently able to tell that she's one of them, although everyone else is apparently orange-natural eye color colorblind and can't hear reverb.
2. Apparently no one in this setting can negotiate without someone getting the shit beaten out of them first. One instance was particularly unhappy, because
I'd gone into what was apparently union-incited violence, which was reasonably clear cut because of the murdering and suchlike, until I abruptly discovered it was actually a slave revolt. That... was not clear cut. But I kept getting attacked on sight until I beat up the organizer. Happily it turned out slavery was actually illegal in that city and their status got upgraded to "19th century factory worker" which I suppose constitutes an improvement.
3. The last two "dungeons" are
really awesome.
Basically, you get to storm the citadel of a crazed Archon, who has become the patron saint of a religion other than the one that she's a semidivine servant of at the behest of the voices in her head. There's a bunch of other Archons of varying sanity, all of whom make for entertaining fights. Once you've finished that up, you get to fight through a cursed forest/swamp you visited earlier, only now it's on fire and being pounded by a meteor storm. It's full of zombie archons and four-armed giant nasties, and finally you fight a zombie god.
4. The game has one of those accursed dialogue wheels, like Mass Effect. It's actually decently implemented; there's no magic to the arrangement where you decide what kind of character you want to play and always pick one particular option, and the sections are all informatively and accurately named. Still, I hate them on principle. What happened to those old KOTOR/NWN2 dialogue MENUS, where you got to read each option in its entirety? Were they too much fun for modern publishers? It's not merely an idle complaint, the wheels restrict possibility because you can't have multiple options for action AND tone in any given conversation.
5. There was one point where it seemed like you might get to choose to side with the bad guys. I'm rather curious about that.
6. It's got a fallout-style outro. I always like those.
7. Combat was hardly
difficult on the normal setting, made possible in part by fire-form Archon teleport spam. However, it was pretty fun.
8. The interface was developed with consoles in mind. I can tell. Notably, your attacks require the invocation of a mystery bullshit auto-lockon feature instead of using the
cursor. You can select your target via right-clicking, which is also the movement key, except when you can't.
9. This game was made by Obsidian, but from the lack of bugs you'd think it was from Valve. I'm genuinely impressed. Apparently they
did just need more time in the past.
