Dungeon Siege III Preview

There are some updated impressions of Dungeon Siege III over at GameSpot, and as you might have guessed, they’re courtesy of the game’s showing at this week’s GamesCom. It’s a great time to be an action RPG fan:

We watched Obsidian play the game as a Guardian class character. The developer was able to adapt the character’s stance to wield one or two swords at a time, with the emphasis on being a support character to the other player. The combat seemed straightforward enough–the game would auto-target enemies so that the guardian could perform a blade dash on multiple targets. There are three levels of more powerful special attacks too, including a spectacular “fall from heaven” move where your character rises into the sky and crashes down to earth destroying anything in the vicinity.

Importantly, this is the first game to use Obsidian’s brand new in-house engine called Onyx. The results are impressive from both a technical and artistic perspective, with dynamic lighting, ragdoll physics and a smooth frame rate resulting a handsome looking game. As an RPG specialist, Obsidian should be able to provide some interesting dialogue to carry the story, and in fact the vocal options revolve around an actual tree on-screen in the game. As a result of this, there will be multiple endings depending on the choices you make through story.