Dungeon Siege III Previews

In case you’re curious or interested in Obsidian’s sequel to Gas Powered Games’ series, another couple of previews for Obsidian’s hack’n’slash have been released.

Segment Next summarizes what we know so far.

You will be doing hack-and-slash most of the time, cutting your way through innumerable bandits, racking up experience and advance in level. This awards you with ability, proficiency, and talent points to spend on customizing your characters. Ability points aren’t awarded at every level, but when they are, they will allow you to purchase new abilities to use in combat.

Proficiency points are used to customize those abilities. Each ability had two proficiencies and five slots. Each time you purchased a rank in either proficiency, it occupies one of those slots and alter the effects of that ability.

Finally, there are the talents. Talents are similar to proficiencies, though they aren’t tied to any one ability and instead help our character as a whole. Each talent is broken into five ranks and can be used to beef up a character’s critical hit chance or increase the amount of gold he or she finds.

While Gametrailers provides us with its usual video preview treatment, focusing on describing the game’s combat mechanics.