Review

Nice tech demo. Maybe when they release the dev tools, someone will make a game with it.

What? How can I say such a thing? Ok. I'll explain why I'm abstaining from the giant circle-jerk the gaming press is having over Dungeon Siege, though I'll not wax verbose. The dozen or so hours that I've given Dungeon Siege is already too much.

Let me say that I don't care one bit that Dungeon Siege doesn't have an epic story, nor that it doesn't have much legitimate role-playing, nor that its flow adheres to one-way linear rails. What I (mostly) don't like about Dungeon Siege is that it doesn't have any game to it. It's almost irrelevant that I'm sitting in front of my computer, periodically clicking the mouse. I'm not doing anything clever. I'm not given the opportunity to make meaningful tactical decisions. I'm not affecting the plot progression. I'm not discovering information in order to divine solutions to problems. I'm not even required to exhibit any feats of eye-hand coordination. What I'm doing, and the only thing I'm doing, is ensuring that the group of characters on screen continues to move forward. I'm pumping the handle on one of those human-powered railroad cars.

There is so much talk about how 'revolutionary' the UI is. Oh I'll admit that it certainly removes much of the burden from the player, but here's the catch: they took away most of the things that the player had to do, and didn't replace them with anything else. In Diablo 2 I had to click on every enemy that I wanted to kill, and it was tedious and utterly non-tactical, but at least it was something I had to do, and it mattered if I didn't do it. Gas Powered Games removed much of the tediousness out of this kind of game and then declared victory, leaving the player sitting there like the poor Maytag repair man. So congratulations on the UI, guys, you've succeeded in making a game that's about as interactive as the slot machines in a casino. That's not the kind of 'game' I want to play. I think that Dungeon Siege is the 'Action RPG' genre distilled out to its essence, and the essence is vapor. Systematically moving an avatar in order to automatically compare stats against hundreds of mindless enemy drones for the purpose of calling a random item generator isn't much of a game, in my opinion.

Allow me to describe the UI evolution of Action RPGs:

• Diablo/Nox: click your mouse for every single discrete attack

• Darkstone/Diablo2: click your mouse once per enemy (hold-click)

• Dungeon Siege: click your mouse occasionally. If you feel like it.

What's the next "revolutionary" step? A game that turns on your computer for you and plays itself while you're at work, and then emails you a message saying, "Congratulations: You've won! Here are some screenshots."

If Dungeon Siege is indeed the definitive 'Action RPG' then we seriously need to divine a new name for this genre, because frankly I don't think any of the four words in the name really apply. 'Action'? Maybe, if watching your avatar automatically kill whatever wanders close to it can count as action. 'Role'? Yeah, you've got a role: He Who Pays $50. 'Playing'? I think we've covered that. You don't play Dungeon Siege anymore than you play TV. 'Game'? No, a game is something that is affected by your involvement. So we need a new name for this genre. Maybe something like... 'Passive Random Item Generator'.

I want to say a few things about specific aspects of Dungeon Siege. First, the AI is about as boring as you can get. Maybe I didn't play enough, and eventually the enemies do more than just make a straight line for you after you've breached their trigger radius. If not, then I think this speaks volumes about Gas Powered Games' priority list for Dungeon Siege: "Gorgeous graphics? Check. Pack Mule? Check? Seamless level loading? Check. Did we miss anything? Nope, I think that's everything." Compared to the other technical aspects of the game, the AI looks like the baby bird in the nest that never gets any of the worms, is repeatedly pecked in the head, and eventually gets kicked out of the nest to fall to its death.

Another specific thing that really bothered me is the fact that the inventory doesn't automatically adjust to the size of items that you might try to pick up. I first encountered this when I tried to pick up a shield and couldn't. Assuming that my inventory was full, I opened it up in order to identify something that could be discarded. Instead, I find that there are more than enough open slots to accommodate the shield, but they're just not in the right shape (the shield occupies a square space, and all my empty slots were in a row). So wait, the developers can give us woodland creatures, weather effects, shafts of light poking through the forest canopy, and seamless level transitions, but they can't make the inventory auto adjust? Priorities.

I'm obviously not pulling any punches, so here's another: The automap. It's being lauded in the reviews as fabulous and, like everything else, revolutionary. Well, this revolutionary automap doesn't let me scroll, which in my opinion makes it pretty useless as a map. If I just wanted a better view of where I'm at, I'd zoom out the camera. When I want to know where I've been and where I might need to go, I look at the map... and scroll around. But everybody's too busy gushing about how cool it is that you can still see the action when you're in the map, that they haven't noticed the fact that it isn't really a map, it's just a camera placed directly over your party and set to use an orthographic projection (with some objects converted to icons).

The resolution of the graphics is limited to 1024x768. Did I just travel back in time? Is this not 2002? What's the point of this? Did they realize that nobody is going to be able to get decent frame rates at even 800x600 and so what does it matter? Chris Taylor's last game, Total Annihilation, was published in 1997 and I can run it up to 1600x1200.

Get the demo if you must, but don't buy Dungeon Siege. Dungeon Siege is an anti-game. There's no game in it. It's like a screen-saver you have to click. It's a tech demo. Yet the gaming press is hyper ventilating over this thing like it's the Grand Unified Theory.

I've been reading most of the Dungeon Siege reviews that have been posted on blue's just waiting for someone to tell the truth. Eventually, someone did, and not surprisingly, it came from a tiny, volunteer, home brew site. The truth came first from a website that didn't decide six months prior to release both that Dungeon Siege is god's gift to gaming, and that god himself is, in fact, Chris Taylor. That site is Angry Babies and their review is pretty much dead on. And they didn't wade in wanting to beat down Dungeon Siege either. If you read the news posts on the site, you'll see that they were pretty stoked about the game initially. After that, the next site to take the plunge and point out that the king has no clothes was AVault with their review. (In a coincidentally timed article, Matthew Dujnic of AVault laments many of the issues with which I find fault in Dungeon Siege.)

The table below grew from my consumption of the reviews for Dungeon Siege that appeared on gaming websites. By all means, read as many as you like for opinions other than mine. I encountered some really interesting comments in the reviews, and wanted to chronicle them.

Summary

Dungeon Siege is a terrible milestone for gaming. The industry already mostly shovels bump-mapped manure at us, and Dungeon Siege is the industry's poster child for 'mainstream' gaming. I want my hobby back you bastards.