Dungeon Siege 3 in Development at Obsidian

DS3 should be like DS1. DS2 Sucked.

DS1 LoA FTW!

I'll have to voice my disagreement with the crowd. I happen to like Obsidian quite a bit.

While their games do have technical issues holding back the overall package, I've always found that the depth of their games and excellent design outweighs that. Pretty much the same way I feel about Troika games. Flawed but still among my favorite games ever.

I just finished Alpha Protocol on Hard and liked it as much as the Mass Effect games. Sure, the combat and movement is a bit clunky, but it also has a lot more diversity than Mass Effect. I had a lot of fun going with a hardcore stealth/infilration play style, using almost nothing but stealth kills all game - something that can't be done on ME.

Really it's the RPG elements that make AP shine though. Choices you make have weight and immediate consequences unlike ME. Immediately after you choose to spare a life or execute, you get or miss a seemingly key piece of information. I like the character build system as a compromise between the traditional levelling system, and the "improve as you use it" bonuses from perks. Also, people often comment on your past actions in dialogue, even simple things like what order you did missions in.

Yay, I can't wait to play a half finished Dungeon Siege 3! Seriously, this developer has a track record of releasing half done games; KOTOR 2 was missing some major plot elements and felt sloppily rushed towards the end, and NWN2 was just garbage compared to the first - unpolished, and also missing a good chunk of the planned plots. My understanding is that they have some management issues. It makes me sad, KOTOR and NWN deserved better, and now they are being handed the reigns of yet another one of my favorite series.

Why does everyone here not like NWN2? I thought it was a GREAT game with fun gameplay and good storytelling. It was weaker on the multiplayer than NWN1, but I actually enjoyed it a lot more than Dragon Age, which I'm still having trouble finishing because it just doesn't have the same feel or playstyle and is just missing "somthing" in my opinion. The only issue I have is how Square Enix fucked up Supreme Commander 2, though that's assuming they meddled with the development of SupCom 2.

One thing I really would like though is to NOT have Jeremy Soule do the music for Dungeon Siege 3. He's decent at peaceful fantasy music, but he's been downhill in originality ever since Total Annihilation and the original Dungeon Siege theme song. He can't do battle music if his life depended on it. He doesn't know how to get someone's heart pounding, their blood pumping, etc. and that's a huge problem in games where fighting is what the gameplay revolves around. I do think he should stick to theme songs because those are always great...the most memorable being Morrowind. Anyways, those are my random thoughts.

I love Obsidian. But not for their technical capacities, which have each time been proven to fail. (Honestly, Kotor2 was half-cut, Nwn2 was not optimized when it got out, and Alpha Protocol has some technical problem as well.)

No, I love them because they're the last one writing good dialogs and stories (And before you all throw stones at me, I like Bioware's games too), and which license are they given ?

Dungeon Siege. A game without any worthwhile dialog, repetitive action and a great engine at the time.
The only good thing which ever came from Dungeon Siege was, IMO, the fan-projects of Ultima V & VI.

Talk about paradoxes....

Awesome! Dungeon Siege was so much fun on a LAn and single player. I really hope they can revive the series.

There can NEVER be too many Diablo clones. If you have never played NOX or REVENANT- go back and play those. They are EXCEPTIONAL over looked games.

Revenant is one of the BEST games I've played in this genre and no one has ever really played it. It is a lot of fun.

Almost makes me want to play Titan Quest (almost), cept for the lack of blood! Worst game decision, ever.

I am excited to hear about Dungeon Siege 3. However that excitement disappeared when I read Obsidian games were the developers for it. I mean, why are people still giving these guys good game licenses to screw up? Fallout: New Vegas is another title i'm bothered about. Hopefully Alpha Protocol was just a one off screw up for them. I never played KOTR2 or NWN2, but heard bad things about KOTOR2.

DS1 was very enjoyable, well worth the money when it first came out. I've said it before though, the game suffered from some aggrevating aspects. Most of these observations in my opinion can be attributed to design decisions by GPG and not limitations of the software.

The Economy. It became possible to amass such a wealth of gold you could nearly buy your own kingdom. If you scavenge every item you find and sell it, by the time you get to the king who gives you the Star Key, you find that no one space, except your pocket, can hold all of that gold. By the end of the game, there is no reason to have gold and if you drop 9,999,999 gold, every floor tile near you is maxxed out for some distance around you. When I saved and then reload, my dropped gold was gone.

Multi-level Dungeons. The best example of this is when you are in the swamp and a party member falls through to a lower dungeon, splitting your party. It only happens once, it it provided some of the most stress because your party had to be managed as two teams.

Pathfinding. Later in the game, party members would go out of their way to engage enemies, despite having them configured to do exactly what you say and not engage even when attacked. Towards the end of the game before the stage where you fight the dragon Scorch, there was a great deal of micromanagement and reloading saved games because a key party member ran off and got killed.

Enemies. The best enemy was hands down the Swamp Hag. She could warp in some very powerful enemies, yet the Swamp Hag failed to provide a significant challenge even on the hardest difficulity. I never felt like I couldn't get past a particular point because the enemies were too hard.

Overall, the storyline was optional and you didn't suffer from not following it. At the time the graphics were good and the changing locations kept the visuals interesting. Replayability-wise, once I had completed the game I never came back to it. The multiplayer seemed interesting, where I could import my character, but I just couldn't bring myself to spend more time in that world.

I'd like to think that a third game might bring me back, but I would definitely wait for reviews on this one. In the end the scenery was nice, the scalability of the camera was impressive, the number of enemies you could face was mildly challenging but never something I worried about surviving. i played it to finish it once and for all.

Cool, I'm enjoying Alpha Protocol thoroughly, good developer team.

some tough critics in here. i like diablo type games. and dungeon siege was alright. ill give it a chance.

Obsidian needs to stop making new games and go back and finish all the ones they have already put out.

I'm quite sure how to feel about Obsidian Entertainment these days. I was pretty excited when the studio was first founded, I mean we're talking about Black Isle alumnus, with the likes of Chris Avellone among them.

However, after consecutive releases that merely border on good but never great, seeing potential unreached and content that doesn't have the same quality of polish that I've come to expect from a top-tier developer, it's disheartening to say the least.

Alpha Protocol, in a sense, was supposed to be and do what Jade Empire was and did for Bioware. It was supposed to show and strip away the notion that they were merely a 'kept developer', in other words, rather than developing titles based on existing IPs owned by third parties, it was supposed to be their very own magnus opus, from start to finish. And while once again, the raw potential is there for all to see, they mucked up the level of polish. Again.

And now, we're back to this? Seeing this level of talent being marshalled once again to work on someone else's IP (and let's be honest, a fairly boring one at that). Seeing talent of this magnitude squandered on creating yet another unnecessary sequel for this B-grade series of action rpgs is just... depressing.

Where exactly is the energy and drive that brought us a gem like Planescape Torment? I saw glimpses of it in the Mask of the Betrayer expansion for NWN2, however fleeting.

I guess this is what happens when your entire modus operandi is to set yourself up as the India of developers.

Hell yeah! I loved the first two.

What is there to botch here? After DS2 the series can only go uphill.

"They are a very talented developer who really knows what it takes to build a deep and engaging RPG experience, and I can't think of a better group to continue the Dungeon Siege series."
Oh I could think about half a dozen at least.

Squenix? Guaranteed to be shit.

Weird our first thoughts all seem to be on Obsidian botching this. What does the future bode for New Vegas then? I know after NW2 I don't exactly have mountains of trust in them as a developer.

concept art. shitty studio. do not want

cool, another license for obsidian to botch.

I hope their lead designer doesn't fuck up this series, like he did with AP...

http://g4tv.com/thefeed/blog/post/702706/dice-2010-hot-topics-adam-sessler-discusses-indie-games-with-chris-taylor-and-mike-capps.html

Here Chris Taylor says Gpg had a lot of layoffs but are building back up that is probably why obsidian is developing it.Obsidian also had layoffs around the time the aliens Rpg was cancelled i wonder how they are doing now but they seem to have lots of stuff going.