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A farm boy and his… pack-mule?
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Peanut butter was a great invention. So was jelly, and putting the two together is pure genius. That's exactly how I feel about adding pack-mules to an RPG. In a lot of RPGs if you decided to leave behind a party of travelers and venture out alone, you'd often end up wasting time organizing your inventory and keeping only the most valuable items. In Dungeon Siege, if you decide that the game would be more fun playing as a lone character of immense power, you can bring a pack-mule along to help carry loot (you can have a pack-mule with larger parties too).
Truthfully, in many games I like to play as a single character. Even in RPGs, it's just easier than dealing with a large party and sharing experience. Taking both of these things into account, Dungeon Siege is designed so you can have a party of up to ten members or as few as one main character, and as far as experience goes, Taylor told us "Each character earns experience on their own... it is not pooled or shared."
That means only characters who actually fight during battles will gain experience. As I said, I prefer to use one character and try to make him or her a force to be reckoned with. Expressing my concern for the difficulty in making a single character proficient in many skills, I asked Taylor about playing the game as a single character. He explained the party system in Dungeon Siege better than I could in his response, so here it is:
"In order to get how this works, think of all the experience in the world given to one character or divided over a large party. If one character has developed excellent skills by battling every monster in the world alone, spent all the gold on the best armor, and selfishly kept the coolest weapons for their personal use, they will be in a unique position to take on the quest alone. If these assets and resources are shared over a group, each character will have less stuff, but there will be more of them. The interesting challenge for the player here is to figure out how to compose the best party. Everyone will have a different take on what the most powerful and capable party is and how many members should be in that party."
I really am selfish, and I find it a waste spending valuable gold on armor for the fodder that tends to tag along with me. And not just that, but if I'm going to use a single character, I want them to be God-like. It has always bugged me that in many RPGs you can't become proficient in everything you'd like. In Dungeon Siege, the game is designed so that your skills increase based on what you're doing. If you spend your time firing a bow and arrow, casting spells, and hacking creatures to bits with a large axe, then your experience in those areas will steadily increase.
Some of you out there probably find it more fun to fight in large parties, and enjoy RTS games. Gas Powered Games wants you to be happy too, so you can build up a party of 10 warriors (or 9 warriors and a pack-mule… which is just so much cooler), and pause the game during the action at any time to issue commands. The small "Paused" logo can be moved to any point on the screen so it is not in your way, and little touches like that make the game's interface all the more lovable.
Once paused, you can assign way points or put your party into formation and prepare for an oncoming horde of, say, ice creatures. At any time in the battle you can always pause again to make sure you keep track of each of your characters and check to see that the pack-mule doesn't get drunk and think it can take on an ice-warrior by itself. This is how the game most resembles an RTS, and you can fight epic battles that involve melee fighting on a wooden bridge, or battles where archers are positioned at the edge of a canyon and fire over the large chasms at fleeing enemy troops. Additionally, Taylor said, "I will say that strategy will play a much larger role in how battles play out than in almost any RPG game to date." The game may have a focus on combat, but it isn't going to be the mindless "build a big guy, smash things by clicking on them" style of play.
Any weapon an enemy wields can be yours for the low low price of "slaying the enemy and not dying." You can even take contextual weapons from enemies, such as prying an ice sword from the frozen fingers of an ice-warrior. Trust me, things are best this way, because otherwise at some point you would see a really neat enemy swinging a large axe, and your eyes would shine with pure ecstasy as you thought about all of the fun you could have hacking at evildoers with it… then you would fight a long and difficult battle to defeat the creature only to be deprived of the axe you had longed after. So the next time someone says to you, "Aw, c'mon it's not so bad that you can't take every enemy's weapon," make sure to relay this story.
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