Dungeon Siege 3 - anyone give it a shot?

[kandrathe]

Of course I might not be wanting as much from my games recently. I actually prefer the Mass Effect games (though I think I liked 1 better than 2) over say Oblivion, partly because it was more linear and I wanted to see the story. I get so distracted in Morrowind/Oblivion and end up getting caught up in min/maxing and that detracts from the game. I played through Mass Effect three times because while the character development was as you say "red bar, blue bar, or purple bar" for skills and "red choice / blue choice" for actions it did change how things played enough, and the different squad choices could change how it played enough. I also knew I'd be done in 20-40 hours of play. With Oblivion I might put that much time in and not even have one gate closed. It's not that I don't have fun, but I've found I do like to know I'm making progress and being forced to do so as opposed to forcing myself to do so, can be nice. Of course the Mass Effect ports from the console to the PC also came with changes to the interface so that a mouse/keyboard would work well. They put the extra effort into it.

I have Oblivion for both console and PC, and I think they did a pretty good job. My only complaint is that I miss tweaking things with the ~console that I can do on a PC, but that's back to command line which is difficult to do without a keyboard.

I still pull out Mass Effect and Mass Effect 2 once in awhile, even though they have fairly linear plot play through. I think the first one had better immersion, in being able to land on the planets and explore (even though the number of planets was limited). But, I do get a little annoyed by the limited dialog choices, and the resultant plot consequences. For example, if you play the male Shepard as a "nice guy" paragon (who is checking up on them frequently to get their loyalty missions), you invariably attract Jack, Miranda, Kelly, Tali and confuse Garus, and Mordin about your intentions. And, this isn't Fable, where they'd resolve the multiple attraction conflict with an orgy in the captains quarters.

It's not really a problem of these RPG genre games being on this particular hardware, so much as it is in the ability of the designers to step away from storyboarding a plot line, and forcing the protagonist into their version of the story. This is a failing of many RPG games. They can wow us with the spectacular cut-scene specifically designed for when Roger flicked his Bick, and lit the fuse to the humongo explosives.

If you let the player wander around anywhere they want, and resolve the problem without a lighter, then you might never see that movie they spent a gazillion dollars producing.

What it really means is that beyond physics, they need to incorporate more simulation and allow the NPC's to react and think for themselves. If you let the protagonist wander around, he might interact with the environment in ways they didn't expect and the environment needs to react as well. This is why Oblivion has nearly infinite replay value, even though the NPC's become somewhat predictable, and in fact, they often run around killing each other without the user having instigated the conflicts (often to the players disadvantage).