Dungeon Siege is the newly formed Gas Powered Games' first game, but the team is far from inexperienced. Leading the gang is the infamous Chris Taylor. It seems that no matter what web page or magazine you look to for a Dungeon Siege preview, inevitably you end up getting a history of Chris Taylor's accomplishments. Let's just say that he rocks, and that his last major project, Total Annihilation, was an amazing game.
Now, onto the actual game… Dungeon Siege is one of those "original" and "unique" games… all because someone finally decided pairing two genres of gaming that fit together could work out and make something fun to play. So what two genres have been fused into one this time? You might be glad to hear that a porn game and a Reader Rabbit "edutainment" product aren't being melded into a single nightmarish package; instead, Dungeon Siege is an RPG game with RTS influences. To me, that's the next logical step for RPG games. In Baldur's Gate you selected characters and gave them commands in a way that was reminiscent of RTS gaming… but the game still didn't allow players the freedom to treat the game like more of an RTS.
Dungeon Siege hopes to do just that, by letting the player define how he or she plays the game. If waging large scale battles is your thing, and you enjoy putting your units in formation, using way points, and telling your party when to fire at will and when to hold back, then you'll like Dungeon Siege. If you prefer a more solitary approach with a single character approaching deity status, then you'll like Dungeon Siege. We'll have more on that later; for now, you might be wondering what kind of story the game has.
Sometimes when you talk to companies about their games' stories, you're met with a less than amiable response. In fact, often it tends to go like this:
Me - Wow, your game looks really cool. Just one question, why are you fighting packs of large, demon-like creatures?
Company X - A great evil was unleashed upon the land.
Me - Um…
Company X - They're really evil. So you have to kill them.
Me - Isn't there more to it than that?
Company X - No… did someone say there was? Who said there was? No one's supposed to know!
You might think I'm exaggerating, and well, I am, but things do get nearly that bad once in a while. So I must commend Chris Taylor on being upfront in saying he doesn't want to give away too much of the story right now, because he wants it to unfold as the game progresses. What he did tell me is more than enough to pique my interest, so I'll relay that to you,
"The basic idea is that the player is a humble farmer, working the land, minding their own business when a horde of evil Krug attack and kill all the cows and chickens and set fire to the farm. Everything is destroyed. The player retaliates and kills them off but it's too late."
Believe it or not, I actually have chickens and live on a pseudo-farm. If a monster killed the chickens and set fire to anything around me, my mom would shout, "George, get yer shotgun" (to my dad) and we'd start defending our land… but it couldn't end there. We'd set out to find why the monsters attacked us, and that's just what the hero (or heroine) of Dungeon Siege decides to go do.
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