Story
This is one point where Dungeon Siege 2 improves over the original game. Whereas a lot of story points took place behind the scenes, much of Dungeon Siege 2's story takes place right in front of you. It doesn’t hide much from the player, except for certain moments meant to surprise and awe.
As for the actual story, here’s a summary of what goes on: You and a friend by the name of Drevin join a mercenary band controlled by the warlord Valdis. Consumed with dreams of taking over all of Aranna, Valdis aligned himself with the infamous Dark Wizards, ancient entities with control over equally ancient black magic. Valdis’s minions order you to assault a temple controlled by dryads (one of the races you can play as, but more on that later) in an effort to take a fragment of a magical shield. You do this, and Valdis thanks you by attacking the mercenary group, killing Drevin and leaving you unconscious.
You later wake up in a treetop village under control of the dryads as a prisoner. After being forced to do the jailer’s bidding, you’re eventually freed from their control, and go on your way to stop Valdis and the Dark Wizards. Without revealing anything else, you and your companions journey across massive swaths of landscape, fighting various creatures and uncovering more about the crisis at hand.
Setting
Like the Dungeon Siege: Legends of Aranna mission pack, Dungeon Siege 2 takes place on the land of Aranna, only this time it takes place on a different part of the land’s territory. This is one aspect of the game that is connected with the original Dungeon Siege game: many of the environments are those from the original game. There’s forests, deserts, mountains, caves, etc. This time around, the environments are more lifelike than the first game, and are more interactive as well. There’s all kinds of secrets in each environment, and they often hide numerous goodies, or a special pack of monsters to slay. All of this is a big improvement over Dungeon Siege, which at times had somewhat restrictive environments despite their looks.
Characters
This is another big improvement over Dungeon Siege, although it’s not as massive as one may think. In the original Dungeon Siege, the characters (major or minor) had no depth or personality. With Dungeon Siege 2, your party will sometimes talk with each other at certain moments, often showing their character. Along with your party, the other characters within the game have their own personalities as well. Valdis is a mad, power hungry lunatic, which meshes well with the sinister aura of the Dark Wizards. Even the secondary characters seem more lively than the secondary characters in Dungeon Siege, especially when you’re doing a quest for them.
Gameplay
More so than anything else within this game, the gameplay is the most improved aspect of Dungeon Siege 2. For starters, you can choose from a small list of races to play as. There’s humans, dryads, elves, and half-giants for starters, and dwarfs with the inclusion of the Broken Sword mission pack. Each of the races have their own strengths and weakness, which also happens to match them with certain class styles (half-giants = warrior, dryads = nature mages, etc).
Which leads perfectly into the next improvement. While the original Dungeon Siege was a remarkable game, it was very restrictive in terns of multiclassing. Most of the time, if you strayed from your primary class, you wouldn’t get very far, and would waste a lot of time. With Dungeon Siege 2, multiclassing into another path often gave your character a new path to power, and gave you more variety in terms of abilities and spells.
Even if you didn’t multiclass, sticking with one of the four paths (melee, ranged, nature magic, combat magic) still gave you a route to power. For example, a melee character can choose to increase his skill with armor & shields, or he can use two weapons to increase the amount of damage he deals. Ranged characters can use bows & crossbow, or he can opt for thrown weapons. Just sticking with one path gives your character numerous paths to advance oneself, and you even get special powers from leveling up certain skills. These powers are often the thing that can determine the outcome of a battle.
This also leads into another improvement. With Dungeon Siege, there wasn’t much of a difference between nature mages and combat mages. They both healed, did damage, summoned monsters, etc. Things have changed a bit with Dungeon Siege 2: combat mages are the death dealing magicians in Aranna, throwing fire, acid, negative energy, & lightning all over the place, while at the same time spouting curses to weaken enemies. Nature mages are almost complete opposites of combat mages: they like to stand back, heal, summon monsters, control the environment, and manipulate the power of ice when the times calls for it.
The monsters are the final improvement within Dungeon Siege 2's gameplay. While Dungeon Siege had a wide variety of monsters, they all seemed to become the same by the time you reached the end of the game. Dungeon Siege 2 has a equally impressive gallery of beasts and creatures to slay, but this time said beasts and monsters have weakness, strengths, and other traits that differentiate each other from the various other monsters in the world.
Graphics & Sound
These two items are also improvements in Dungeon Siege 2. Ironically, the one thing that this game and Dungeon Siege have in common is the graphics engine, but that’s the only thing they do have in common. The enging used in Dungeon Siege 2 is basically a advanced version of the original Dungeon Siege. At times it’s noticeable, but only if you’re zoomed in closely. When you have more of a “above everything” view, you take in the sights and peoples of the world, and notice many more landscape details than in Dungeon Siege 1.
The sounds aren’t a big improvement in Dungeon Siege 2, but they definitely are better than the sounds of Dungeon Siege 1. Actually, that’s kinda of a lie. The sounds, at least in my opinion, seem like nothing more than upgraded sounds from the first game. That’s not to say nothing sounds bad, as in fact many things sound great. It’s just that many of the noises sound like something that came from Dungeon Siege. It could just be me, but that how I hear it.
Overall & Rating
Dungeon Siege 2 is definitely more advanced than it’s predecessor. The story, characters, gameplay, all the way to the graphic and the sound show that this game is much greater than Dungeon Siege before, yet still retains the fun factor from the previous game. In my opinion, Dungeon Siege 2 is the best game of the Dungeon Siege franchise. This game gets a 8.5 out of 10.
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If any of you were curious, I don’t have any plans to review Dungeon Siege. While it looks better than the first two games, I don’t like the changes they made to the gameplay mechanics, as it feels more restrictive than Dungeon Siege 2, and even Dungeon Siege. That’s saying something!v
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