Dungeon Siege III Previews

Obsidian’s first foray into Diablo territory has once again been given the E3 preview treatment, and this time it’s AtomicGamer and GayGamer providing the words.

A little something from AG’s article:

Loot flew out everywhere during this demo, and while it was pretty obvious that it was just for the purposes of showing the game off at E3, the system was sound, with plenty of random and class-specific loots. The creators also showed us a drop in/out cooperative system on the same machine, which was particularly impressive because this was actually a PC version of the game being shown – features like that usually are only seen on consoles. It could be that this feature was only put in to show off what it’d look like on consoles, but I’d love to see this bit survive to the final PC game. All they have to do is allow players to either use two gamepads or one to use a mouse/keyboard and the other to use a gamepad.

There’s a verticality and fluidity in Dungeon Siege 3’s environments that we don’t often see in games like this. Off in the distance and far below us we saw a town, and were told that eventually we’ll be working our way down the mountain towards it. The intent is for this to be a fully-rendered world with no load times, so switches in lighting and dynamic loading of distant areas must mesh in with the action that’s in your face. From that perspective, DS3 is already delivering on some of the promises, as early as they are in their development cycle.

And a bit from GG’s article:

Only two classes have been revealed, the tank/melee Guardian and the sexy angelic she-warrior Archon. No mention of party size in either solo or local multiplayer – or of online multiplayer – but by the sly grins on the faces of the developers I’m guessing we’ll have at least the genre-standard four, perhaps even the much larger parties favored by the previous Dungeon Siege games.

Another Obsidian hallmark is storytelling – not historically the strongest point of this series, but Obsidian is injecting plenty of story and personality with on-the-fly dialog and cutscenes: they won’t stop the game or slow down the fast-paced action the series demands, but will enliven the Dungeon Siege universe by spinning a richer yarn as you hack, slash, and cast.