Dungeon Siege 3 diverges from its forebears to such a degree that it should almost have had a different title. Players expecting the traditional PC RPG trappings of the first two games: character creation, large parties, pause-and-go strategy, mouse and keyboard oriented gameplay, will almost certainly be disappointed. That’s what this game isn’t. What it is, however, is a polished and addictive button-mashing action-RPG that succeeds in creating a story-oriented co-op fantasy dungeon crawler for modern console audiences in the tradition of Secret of Mana or Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance. In fact, the game’s lead designer, Nathaniel Chapman, mentioned both of those games by way of comparison in our recent interview with him.
Dungeon Siege 3 returns the series to the first game’s Kingdom of Ehb, a fairly generic fantasy setting once protected by a group of honor-bound warriors called the 10th Legion. At the opening of DS3, the Legion has been all but obliterated by the armies of a religious zealot called Jeyne Kassynder, who holds the Legion responsible for the murder of the former King of Ehb and has dedicated her life to vengeance against them. You and the other playable characters are part of a mere handful of surviving Legionnaires, and your quest involves reuniting the various splintered factions of Ehb with the remnants of the Legion. All this game’s talk of Legions actually led to a few humorous moments for me when NPCs would celebrate how, “The Legion has returned,” and I’d think, “Well, yes, but it’s basically me and this other guy.” The abstract arc of the story is superficially similar to that of Dragon Age: Origins: as a new member of an elite but dwindling order you recruit allies amongst the kingdom’s squabbling factions by doing quests for them until you have enough force to march against the Bad Thing. But what has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.
