Dungeon Siege III Previews

We have another trio of hands-on previews for Square Enix’s Dungeon Siege III, and while at this point they all cover already treaded ground they should serve as a helpful reminder of the reasons you may (or may not) be interested in Obsidian’s latest offering.

CVG seems impressed with the game’s polish:

Each character class comes with typical positives and negatives, but to mix things up slightly everybody’s packing an alternative ‘stance’ to best tackle certain enemies. Anjali’s a prime example: in her standard state she runs around bashing people with a staff, but toggling the secondary stance with LB morphs her into a hovering flame sprite who hurls fireballs at foes from long range.

The key to victory is in knowing who you’re fighting against and which stance to tackle them with. Predictably there’s a wide choice of upgrades to tinker with when levelling up. Skills and spells are mapped to the top three face buttons (a is your standard attack button and RB is the catch-all ‘open/investigate/pick-up’ action input) and change depending on your stance.

GamesRadar focuses on gun-wielding Katarina:

As we dove deeper into Katarina’s adventure, we discovered that simply pulling the triggers of her pimped-out pea shooters wasn’t cutting it. When facing a witch who conjured undead allies and a towering red knight whose health bar was as long as his oversized sword, we found a more focused strategy was in order. After filling swarms of forest-crawling foes full of holes, we almost forgot our pistol-packing heroine was a witch. It seemed time to unleash some death not delivered through a gun barrel, and magic abilities like Caress of Suffering and Warding Ritual were just what the witch doctor ordered. The former, an enemy-stunning poison, worked perfectly for stopping charging enemies in their tracks, while the latter forcefully pushed harder-to-manage hordes backward. These did little harm to the knight or witch, but worked wonders on their minions. Managing the magic abilities’ cool-down periods, we alternated between the two, then broke out our up-close guns to clean up the mess; with little time remaining before more swarms were summoned, we then switched to our ranged attack and fired a few of those aforementioned heart-stoppers into the primary threats. A third stance, used for defense, also came in handy during these more daunting encounters, as it allowed for quick healing.

While NowGamer thinks Torchlight was just “an appetizer” to Dungeon Siege III:

As well a fully developed progression system for each class, there’s a constant stream of looted weapons, each sporting particular stats and effects. It’s a quiet joy determining which loot to keep, equip, sell or transmute to gold as you find it all.

With the best elements of combat, exploration, loot gathering, endless stat fiddling and story all looking so polished, Dungeon Siege III promises to be an addictive and enjoyable experience. We’re completing the noble 10th Legions epic quest.