Dungeon Siege 3 - anyone give it a shot?

[Kevin]

Well said Kandrathe. And I agree with GG too. But when you take a PC-only game series and adapt it so that you can play it on consoles, you sacrifice too much. Imagine our worst nightmare; Diablo 3 on Consoles. Imagine the sacrifices made. Imagine the AGONY!

Now, I must say I loved Oblivion. I've seen what is promised in Skyrim and I try not to get hyped. One promise they made and have shown (somewhat) is NPC's dynamically adapting to situations affecting their town. And the NPC's supposedly aren't shit-for-brained any more with their random outbursts of nuttiness. They'll also react more realistically to players. They might pick up items the players drop, or fight over them. We'll have to wait and see.

I think a great comparison is Oblivion versus Dragon Age, The Awakening. Even in looking at how they award the Achievements tells much about their understanding of "game" play. I've been through it twice, and that's it. There is no way I'm going to replay the exact same story 6 times to get all the Achievements for each character type. I'm not a play tester, I'm the gamer -- let me play!

Now, I could imagine Diablo3 done right on a console. There is no reason it wouldn't work exactly as D1 and D2 did on the PC. You need to look at how some of the co-op games are done right on the networked consoles now.

Interface still matters and consoles don't have as many options. Yes you can get a keyboard for most of them, but the history of console games that required a controller beyond the standard one for the console have a history of more failures than successes and the ones that have worked were very specific. Consumers seeing a game that requires a keyboard for the console are likely to say "Um my computer can do that and nothing else will take advantage of this so why bother?" Even things like racing wheels that seem pretty straight forward can be a downside because the game is designed for the controller and the wheel just works worse. Which is sad in a racing game.

Of course the multitude of options on the PC can actually be a problem as well, but as I've said I've seen that issue solved before.

Of course some of my point was that at times since all I'm after is entertainment, the "interactive movie" genre that I really think the Final Fantasy games helped make so popular, can be what I want. Mass Effect doesn't even try to hide this fact. Heck there is a "movie grain" option in the graphics settings to make it look more like a film. Wet, is another game that embraces this mechanic and does so in a way that still makes the game very fun to play. I don't want all my games to be demanding.

The problem is that games of this nature appeal to a larger market and hardcore gamers can't survive on this fare only. They, like Crusader, want more depth at times, more choices, more freedom, etc.

As you rightly point out, AI programming is not simple. It's one of the slowest moving things in a very fast moving industry. I can't blame companies for saying "Well this is something we just can't pull off, but we can make some really cool/entertaining things if we stick with a story on rails so lets do that."

It's not a secret that design is generally done for a lower common denominator (I didn't say lowest because it's not usually lowest) in order to increase market size. Consoles have very little difference in this, since they have fixed hardware, fixed OS/drivers, etc. That generally translates to lower production costs, and with a larger market share...

As you say, design matters too. Dungeon Siege 3 sounds like it didn't just fail because it was a bad port, but it seems like it failed because it was just a bad design regardless of system.