Dungeon Siege III Review

We haven't seen a full-on Dungeon Siege title for quite some time, with the last main iteration appearing in 2005. Back then, it was a PC exclusive and was from the creative minds over at Gas Powered Games. Things are rather different now though, as not only does the game have a different publisher in Square Enix, it was also developed by another studio, Obsidian Entertainment. Dungeon Siege III is also the first game in the franchise to appear on home consoles, and it seems like all of these changes hindered the game, instead of helping it move to the next level.

The story once again returns to the Kingdom of Ehb, where the Legion is in a dire state. After being accused of killing the king, his daughter, Jeyne Kassynder, rallies the people of the land together to destroy the very organisation that had served to keep them safe for centuries. She almost succeeds too, as only a few descendants of the Legion still exist and have done under the watchful eye of Odo, a former spy. But when Odo organises a meeting between the remaining Legion remnants, things go horribly wrong.

From here, you embark on a quest to restore the Legion to its former glory and bring peace back to the land.

It's a pretty decent tale, and the branching paths give it quite a lot of substance. It's one of the few games where you feel your actions may well have consequences. The fact your decisions are neatly rounded up at the end of a segment adds credence to this and at the end of the game, you will learn how your decisions affected the Kingdom of Ehb and may well affect it in the future.

The most disappointing aspect of the story, and this is a complaint about the game in general, is that it's so short. There are certain expectations for genres, and with the RPG genre comes an expectation that the game, due to its extended capacity to tell a story, will be a considerable time sink - even more so when side-quests are factored in. Dungeon Siege III can be easily completed in under 10 hours, even if you complete all the different side quests the game has to offer. It's very disappointing.

There are four players to choose from at the start and as you go through the story, you will also meet the various other characters you didn't pick. It gives you the idea that were you to play as the other characters, their story might start in a different place and you'd get a different perspective. However, if you choose another character the story just gets re-written to somehow be exactly the same - it feels like there's wasted potential here. If you meet Reinhart in your travels, he has one story, but when you start up a new game his story is oddly familiar to the one you've already played. It's just odd, there's no consistency.

The gameplay in Dungeon Siege III is quite standard. You can perform generic melee attacks in a small combo and you also have the option to perform up to seven other spells (four offensive, three defensive). Three of these spells, your basic offensive spells that get mapped to the face buttons, require focus. While the other offensive spell and the three defensive ones, require the use of a power sphere. The catch here, is that in order to procure focus, you need to land attacks and in order to procure power spheres, you need to take damage.