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| Dungeon Siege - Morte (16/06/2002 6:45:24 AM) |
You know what it is. A hack n slash that whips Diablo II.
Damn good game, for the 72 hours it took me to complete the single player campaign. Some arsehole reckons he did it in 40, but I DOUBT he did every feature in the maps.
The premise is that your character starts out as a nobody, then you determine what their inclinations and stats are, by using a certain type of offense (melee, ranged, nature magic, or combat magic). The more you use that offense, the more UBER skilled you become in that, in addition to an improvement in stats related to that offense (e.g. strength for melee, dexterity for ranged, intelligence for magics). The other stats increase as well, but at a proprotionately lower rate. Your strength determines your natural level of health, your intelligence determines your mana. dexterity determines something, I think basically your die spin on hits/misses/armour deflection bonus...
The interface is 3rd person (or presumably 10th person if you are playing with a full party complement), and a 3 button scrollable mouse is the best interface for the game. To be honest, most of the time you can play the whole game with the mouse, only occasionally tapping the H (health potion) or M (mana potion) in emergencies or longer than usual combat situations.
Much like Age Of Empires II, your party members can be collectively or individually configured to be agressive, defensive or passive; roaming, medium movement, or hold position; follow or detached; you have party formations, including variations of distance, and adaptive positioning based on your locale. You can also group and recall groups, and there are hotkeys for party offence types. Plus, the aforementioned exact required health or mana are drunk by the entire selected party when you choose them.
THE BEST feature, okay, A best feature, is that your potions are only consumed to the level required, so you can have potion portions and leftovers, which you can recombine between characters if you are like me (see retentive note below). Another best feature is that the magic users can be set up to autoheal other players, reducing/eliminating your dependence on health, and at the same time, you can cast a 'mana balance' spell, such that the ENTIRE PARTY's mana is redistributed continually for the duration of the spell, enabling the whole party's mana to be at the disposal of your magic user(s). The only things I didn't like about DS in comparison to Diablo II are:
No insta-port town portals/locale portals. Yes, if you want to buy that 130gold donkey back in the second village, cos you don't want to pay 750gold for it in the third town (all these donkeys are the same, BTW, you just seem to migrate to more money hungry areas), you will have to WALK ALL THE WAY THERE. At least you are likely to find some monsters or paths/crevices you missed before, on the way back. Same with trying to find that shop when you just defeated a horde of rich uglies. WALK THERE.
OH, and MAKE SURE YOU PICK ALL YOUR STUFF UP before leaving the game for the evening/early morning. Even if you save the game, all free items seem to disappear from existence. Boy was I pissed [off], on a few occasions. Especially after the PC crashed. Game came back fine, but no happy treasure items. :(
Save often, nonetheless. I kept getting decompression CRC check errors at certain points in the game, with recommendations to reinstall. (Which I did, often with little or no effect). I still don't know whether it is my RAM, my hard drive, or my PCI latency (I have an infamous VIA 686B southbridge). Maybe it is a game bug? I think I am still playing version 1.000
I prefer the shopkeeps in DS, they don't recharge you twice the price for repurchasing an item that you just sold to them.
In dire straits between shops with too many unequippable items (read CRAP)? Just get a magic user to transmute them into GOLD! YES! (But you don't get as much as at a shop).
A funny thing happened on the way to my getting this game.
My D&D-zealot brother was pestering me to see if I was going to buy the game, it was (and probably still is) $99.95 in Electronics Boutique. I said, no way are you going to play that on your machine, you've only got a Voodoo2 on a Celeron333.
He desisted, but then two weeks later, he called me again and said - "I've bought it, and it doesn't run very well..."
I recommended trying to swap the video driver from software to 3DFX and back to see if either mode works better than the other (he was getting no video cutscenes, and weird colours in the game, besides chronic chunking, even at 640x480).
Trust me, there isn't much other tweaking he can try that hasn't already been done.
I said I would buy it off him for $50. He said NO WAY! and then I didn't hear from him for a week.
Next thing I hear is that he is willing to take the $50, so the next thing I find is that he comes over here on Wednesdays to play it on my satellite 3000, while I work at home. I also found myself spending 4-6 hours almost every night playing it until its abrubt conclusion.
I was usually playing it at 1600x1200 on an AMD 1.2 Ghz with a 64MbGF2GTS. Believe it or not, the framerate went UP when I changed res from 1024x768! (Up to 30-40fps, that is). The framerate is way better at 640x480, but why suffer big pixels on a 21" monitor, I always say. Having read the DS forums, I know I'm not the only one that has happened to (increased framerate for highres).
I feel very upset that I couldn't go further with my kick arse character in single player (like you can in DiabloII), and more so that I spent so much effort working up my other party characters (you can build up a party of 8 characters in the game, with a mix of styles, and a mix of fighters, and pack mules to carry extra stuff), when you can only take a choice of one character (any character) into multiplayer games.
I played it building up a party of 8 pretty early on - 1 nature magic/all-rounder (me), 2 melee specialists, 2 archers, 1 combat mage, and 2 pack mules.
Playing advice - if you are going to get mules, get them early, when they are cheap. If you are going to get party fighters, get them early, when they are cheap. (And malleable).
If you are really anal retentive, like me, you'll get to the point where you max out your gold at 9,999,999 - even before you finish the final single player level, and the shops aren't selling anything you want.
If you want a tough central character to play with later on multiplayer, DON'T have a large fighting party. your character works up in ability to meet the challenges. It might take longer, but you'll become an ultimate fighter, even if you have to suffer the ignonomy of dying repeatedly and getting resurrected/revived by a magic user.
Interesting points - there are technologically inclined goblins (and I always thought gnomes were the tech-heads), with lightning guns, flamethrowers, and vulcan cannons .... which are ranged weapons you can pick up and use (by a sufficiently statted character). Although believe it or not, they AREN'T the most cool ranged weapons you can pick up.
There is a HUUUUUUUUGE community out there supporting it, and there are GMAX game dev modules and an SDK on their way for level and mod design (if they aren't already out). That means free expandability. From what I understand, servers run on a quake3 basis, rather than a persistent MMORPG, and there are NO FEES for their servers. I suppose it's not as big as battle.net, but jeez, it's only a few months old.
So if you haven't played it, it is TOTALLY worth $50. I'd even buy it for $70.
I don't think any games are worth more than $70.
I would also say BUY THE GAME, don't copy it, mainly because I never got any of those decompression errors until I installed the game on a backup I made of the originals (I did it to prove the backups worked - how ironic) - gamecopyworld says there is only basic protection on it, which basically means that you need the CD in the drive to play, which for some strange reason, annoys some hax0rs. (Idi10ts.)
I am of the personal [paranoid] impression that DS employs one of those new copy protection techniques I have heard about whereby one of the normal hardware CD locks (unreadable sectors which are uncopyable) are combined with a software feature to combat the crackers who just jump over CD read checkpoints. Specifically, the game DEGRADES over time, with anomalies popping up more and more frequently and severely, all the time indicating operating system related failures, rather than repeatable game software glitches. Even after you reinstall your 'illegitimate' copy, the problems continue.
Even after I reinstalled the game from the backup, I was getting the decompression errors, (but in different places), but when I reinstalled the game from the originals, the decompression errors went away for a couple of days.
I am not playing DS any more, I am making levels for Quake 3 Rally! You may plead with me for more information on that if you wish. I may submit a review and other info given enough incentive. (N.B. Threats to life, liberty, and property are not classed as incentives). I also spent some time on Trainz!, and that is kewwl, too. But Q3R is more fun in terms of instant gratification.
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Never really had much to do with the q3 mods apart from Rocket Arena.
This Quakerally looks freekin cool though!
I think you should post your map when you’re done.
Who would have thought you could turn q3 into a car game?
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Elsta, no probs, will post. I can't wait till a version better than 1.2 comes out, I compiled their demo map "dirty fun" and the darn scripts didn't seem to be working to support physics collisions on witches hats and barrels. Knocking them around would be a hoot.
It might take me a little while before I post "crap1", as I keep fiddling with it to see what tricky bits I can add in. So far I've got a ramp that pops up to really annoy other players (or you), triggered remotely. What I want now is a section of track that progressively falls apart in the centre, leaving a widening lava pit in the centre. THAT would be kewl. Especially in a race.
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