Dungeon Siege II (Legendary Mod)

[DF]

It's nice to come back to an old favorite from time to time, but it's not so nice when you uncover its flaws and realize how much they mar the experience. This review covers two runs I did with parts of a third. I shelved it, played other games and then came back, and I kind of regret it now. For reference, Playnite reports I got around 89 hours total, with my two runs being 48 hours when I stopped and 26 hours when I got to the end, and the third stopping partway into the second act a year or two ago. All three times, I played with the Legendary Mod as well as a number of other mods like the Aranna Legacy Mod. And I'll note that my playtime only includes the base Dungeon Siege II experience and doesn't touch Broken World.

What is Dungeon Siege II?

It's the second game in the Dungeon Siege series of action-RPGs. Much like other Diablolikes, you go through various areas and slaughter thousands of critters and enemies to get their loot and level up to continue the cycle. What sets the games apart from its inspiration is that you slowly make a team of heroes instead of being a one-man army kicking ass.

Evil despot Prince Valdis has his sights on world domination, and in an interesting twist, you actually start out working for him, albeit as a lowly merc during the game's opening tutorial beach invasion. Of course, that gig doesn't last long, and soon you find yourself opposing his forces and embroiled in a plot to keep a dismantled artifact from him, and you eventually take the fight to his doorstep. Good thing you aren't going it alone!

What is the Legendary Mod?

The first two Dungeon Siege games kind of infamously launched on Steam without their respective expansions--Legends of Aranna for DS1 and Broken World for DS2. Legendary Mod is a compilation of mods to bring these four parts into one cohesive whole, so you can play the entirely of the DS1 campaign or expansion or whatnot with the systems and items of 2. There are four extra maps included too, and you can play your character on any of them and transfer progress between them all!

Gameplay

You move your character through a number of environments, click on monsters to damage and eventually kill them, and then click on loot to put it in your inventory. There are characters in the world you can recruit as part of your team, and these are more than just basic hirelings and they instead have set names, looks, personalities, sidequests, and so on. You can even level them how you please just like your main character. Classes are handled by gaining experience points with a weapon equipped, so carrying a sword grants you levels in the Melee class while using a nature magic spell levels Nature Mage. Gaining class levels not only allows you to equip better gear, but it opens up slots on each class' skill tree. You can, for example, start out just swinging a sword, but can later buy skills that allow you to carry a shield, or dual-wield, or to use giant two-handed weapons. You aren't restricted to just one class and nothing is stopping a Combat Mage from getting a few levels in Nature Mage to get the magic cost reduction skill, but spreading yourself too thin makes it take that much longer to get the more impactful skills later in the trees.

There are only three stats and instead of manually allocating points to them, the game automatically raises them as you play. Strength ties into melee damage, HP, and Armor; Dexterity covers ranged weapon damage; Intelligence governs Mana and the potency of magic. Skills on the class trees are entirely passive by nature, so you're not unlocking abilities as much as slowly improving your parameters. You can buy a skill that improves your healing output, but this doesn't grant you a healing spell, for example. There are Powers unlocked at specific skill breakpoints, and these are the active components of each class tree. They're usually powerful but come with cooldowns of varying degrees, and these cooldowns only tick down during combat. A Power might make the next melee attack deal heavy damage, or you can create a field that pulls in enemies and stuns them for a set duration.

As you're intended to explore the world with allies at your side, there are four formations for everyone to fall into, though the tutorial only covers two. Mirror causes everyone to move with and attack the same target as the currently controlled hero, while Rampage gives more freedom to the AI and they will independently target enemies and move around. Guard mode seems to act like Rampage with the team trailing behind more, but they're supposed to attack anyone that hurts you, and Wait stops everyone but the current hero from acting. And speaking of AI, each character has a spellbook and four active slots and four passive slots (or up to six with Aranna Legacy). You can change the active spell on the fly by clicking on it in the character info window on the upper-left part of the screen, and the passive slots cover things like party buffs or healing so you don't have to stop and cast these yourself when they run out.

There are Pet monsters available to buy or unlock with sidequests. From the Pack Mule that slowly gains three inventory pages to the Ice Elemental that shoots ice at enemies, you can't gear these critters but their development is instead steered by what you feed them. Give them melee weapons and they'll grow in Strength, while giving them Potions will boost their HP and Mana. Each Pet has several stages in its life cycle from Baby to Mature, and each stage grants a stats buff plus unlocks Powers and aura-like Emanations at the final tier. The Pack Mule gets an area-of-effect damaging stun as a Power and its aura lets it break boxes and chests it comes near for maximum lazy play, for example. My four-man run had three Pets, and I can't help but wonder if the smaller team size or the relatively overpowered state of Pets was to thank for that.

The game's about as linear as any in its genre, though Dungeon Siege doesn't use the randomized maps that Diablo and other games of the genre do. The map is the same for every player and every character, so you can actually look up maps to help you advance if you want. You still progress from point A to B and there are some off-path areas for goodies or sidequests, but any backtracking is largely made painless through the use of the teleporter network you gradually unlock as you adventure. And there's always the single-use teleporter spell for a quick return to town. In terms of game speed, I found it to be Diablo III's polar opposite. Instead of an arcadey lawnmower experience, enemies take a decent amount of time to die, and that doesn't count nearby mooks getting drawn into the fray by their kind of ridiculous aggro ranges. I played the game at 130% speed and I don't know if my hours count was in real time or accounted for the increased speed. And the game still did feel kind of slow even with the speed boost. There's only one movement speed, but maps are so big that it still takes quite a while to get through Chapters in an Act on top of the time to kill being on the higher end in my experience. But one part of the Legendary Mod has an enemy level scaler so you can play maps 'out of order' like going from DS2 to DS1 and the enemies won't be complete pushovers.

Controls

There's only mouse and keyboard support. You move the cursor and click in the field to move your team, or right-click and hold to attack an enemy. There are options to automate the need to hold down RMB and another option to automatically have you engage nearby enemies, though this can make it hard to retreat. WASD controls the camera's pan and tilt, and the mouse wheel controls zoom, though you're limited how far away you can pull it back without using mods. The F# keys allow you to quickly change which character you're controlling, Z causes everyone to go pick up nearby items, and H and M cause the party to drink health and mana potions, respectively. Spacebar triggers the anytime pause, allowing you to issue movement commands, change active spells, or swap things around while everything's frozen. Though there's an option in the Escape menu to save, CTRL+S works as expected too. But there's no autosave other than the prompt when you clear a quest, and it's possible to toggle that off!

Gameplay Modes

There's just Single Player and Multiplayer, though you'll need third-party services since the Gamespy servers were shut down. When you load up the main menu, there's a button over to the right to get you back to the last character you were playing in the map you were last on, while hitting Single Player lets you pick a hero and then pick a map. Kind of a nice touch if you're only working on one run.

Difficulty

There are only three difficulties and they follow the standard Diablo formula of "clear one, unlock the next". Overall, I found the game kind of difficult, and this is largely dependent not only on how many people are in your team, but your class compositions and how you raised everyone. The game scales enemy HP in relation to the number of allies you have with you, so someone with with a full roster of six would face much hardier monsters than someone going it alone or even in a pair. You're normally restricted on the team slots per difficulty with two slots at the start and a max of four on Mercenary, five on Veteran, and six in Elite, but the Aranna Legacy Mod lets you bypass this, though you still have to pay ever-increasing amounts of gold to actually use the slots. I'd honestly suggest respecting the intended limits as the two runs I had with six people early on were the most difficult and slowest. In my experience, player damage was fairly low, and enemy health scaled too quickly for more bodies to make faster kill times. Thankfully, enemy damage didn't seem to scale with party size, but I didn't test what influenced that on the player's end, if anything did.

Normally, people who hit zero HP just fall unconscious and they slowly keep regenerating health while on the ground. When they recover around 35% max, they'll be back on their feet ready to go, and healing spells will speed that up. Can't use healing pots on them, though. Sometimes someone who's already weak will take an especially hard hit and just outright die, and you'll need a Resurrect spell to bring them back. If everyone falls unconscious/dead, you're notified of how much money you left on your corpses and are forced back to town. You could either attempt a corpse run with your now-naked team, or talk to the nearby Necromancer to summon your party's corpses with him pocketing the money you left behind.

There's a decent variety of enemy types. You have your melee types, your ranged ones, those that cast spells or summon enemies, maybe this one type debuffs you, etc. It felt like a majority of the fights were with a numbers disadvantage and with the six-man runs, the number advantage on my side did nothing to help me. Even with my four-man run, I often found myself kiting the enemy back to hopefully thin them out so I could slowly come out ahead, since standing and fighting was a death sentence. There's no way to draw aggro other than to simply get in the enemy's range or snipe them with long-range weapons, but if you wanted to keep your frail backline safe, you have a very small number of Powers for that, and I found them lacking. Some enemies will be tagged with "Hates characters who X" like "drink potions" or "use healing spells", and you'll be notified when you piss off these types and are told their intended target. Deal with them quickly, because the enemy gets a ridiculous attack speed buff! The Provoke and Summon Provoke Powers inflict this enrage on most enemies, but not only did they only seem to work for a few scant seconds, whoever did the provoking would quickly become hamburger due to said attack buff...and that doesn't expire as quickly as the aggro-draw.

Graphics

Given the game is quite old, the graphics won't impress you now. Enemies and allies and interactives get an outline when you mouseover them, so that helps a bit with some of the clutter. Everything is done up in 3D and this justifies allowing the camera to pan and tilt as opposed to having the screen in a constant fixed view like the Diablo games. I found the camera to be a problem in a few places due to the camera having collision with the world and causing extreme closeups if I was against a wall. Worse, being that zoomed in made it very difficult to move away since I couldn't zoom out and you can only attempt to move somewhere on-screen. Model quality is probably below Playstation 2 era graphics, and some of the things ported in from Dungeon Siege 1 is even worse-looking than that.

There are white rings under your team with the current hero atop a green ring, and the outsides of the ring fill in with red as their health drops, filling the circle entirely when they're critical. You can still look to the upper-left part of the screen to see everyone's health/mana/buff icons/skill point notifications/weapon/spell loadouts, too. The Powers bar is in the bottom-middle of the screen with flashing circles showing recharging powers. The compass in the bottom right acts as a minimap, and your current main objective is shown with a gold/yellow arrow or star, though this is a 'as the crow flies' direction as opposed to directing you to waypoints. There are limited character creation options, and you can't edit how the other heroes look, but at least your gear shows up on your model.

There are quite a few cutscenes in two flavors--one in-engine ("You aren't getting paid to stand around! Get moving! NOW!"), and another that's prerecorded with in-game models (the end of the tutorial with shield fragment and Valdis' entrance). There are subtitles in the bottom letterbox, but another problem I ran into with changing the speed setting was the animations and thus the cutscene ending before the voices did!

I have a computer that should be able to handle the game, but I didn't get good framerates, staying in a range of 20-40FPS. This is apparently tied to enabling Broken World on the Steam copy of DS2, but there's nothing that can be done about it right now.

Audio

For once, I have nothing to say about the music. When it comes to games I've already played a ton of, I mute the music and play my own to help keep things somewhat fresh. At least I can say that every piece of dialog when talking to NPCs or when party banters popup are voiced! Not the best voice acting, but it's nice that there was that level of detail put in. And though I didn't hit Broken World in this review, they changed all of the character's voice actors.

Replay Value

There's a good bit of potential for alt-itis since there are so many ways to build not only each character, but entire teams. Legendary Mod really opens it up by giving you several playgrounds to wreak havoc, and you can take one team through all of them in any order if you wish. Certain compositions trigger banters at key points in the field, either with one character talking to you or others talking amongst themselves, so there's that if you want to play with different groups.

What Worked For Me

I'm always a fan of customization, so having this much control over more than one person's development is a big plus. It does kind of require you to pick up characters as early as possible since the later people will have several levels in one or more classes, and they might not gel with your current team idea. You can always just mold them how you like anyway, but they'll take longer to get up to the speed that someone who started the way you wanted did. And if you want to do something different, why not bring one or more Pet monsters along?

Everyone having their own full-size inventory is nice enough, but a dedicated button for pickups? God, I wish more games had that. Items still vary in size and modded ones seem to take up a ridiculous amount of room, but not having to click on every single item is a blessing. And if you have a Nature Mage in your party, you can just dump all the junk you don't want on the ground and have them use the Transmute spell to convert everything into gold instead of heading back to town.

There are a couple of nice features too I'll lump together, like being able to set up automatic buffs or summons. Potions are also done in a neat way, where people don't need the potion in their inventory to drink it, and they'll take exactly as much as they need. Have a Colossal Health Potion that restores 1100HP and you need to only heal 50? You can chug it and leave a potion that heals 1050, and if you find another potion out in the field, you can pour it into that bigger one!

What I Didn't Like

Melee and Ranged people don't get many options other than just attack and use Powers, so both types of mages get the cool stuff. The problem is that you're at the mercy of the RNG to actually get those tools. It sucks because with Melee and Ranged, new gear is just a stats bump or maybe a piece of gear grants some other nice effect. With magic, you might have a strong single-target spell or an area-of-effect spell, or buffs, debuffs, heals, summons...so your real options are just down to how your drops roll. Of course, I found a mod that makes most shops display every spell in the game, but playing without it bites! Worse yet, you can hit a cap on spell power and might be stuck with a lower-maximum spell for a long time while you wait to find its upgrade or any spell that deals better damage.

The boss battles are flat ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥. A lot of this sentiment came from my six-man runs where they had hilariously stacked HP counts, but I still ran into trouble during my four-man run with some of them. Most if not all of them rely on mechanics where if someone gets knocked out, they'll very likely stay down for the entirety of the fight, meaning your healers and mages are going to sit out. Hope you got pots. This is another case where having a maximum team size came to bite me in the ass. In the second run, my last survivor was always my tank who lived thanks to her high health and Armor...but had pitiful damage. So, let's whittle away 65,000HP very very slowly. The kicker was that not only were these big difficulty spikes, they were also cheesable. Leave your gold on the ground in town, set up a Town Portal outside of the arena, and go hit the boss and die. Reclaim your corpses for free, return to the field, remake your TP, repeat. "How to beat Bioshock with just the wrench" tactics. Bosses thankfully don't regenerate health, but this kind of gameplay loop just is not fun. And it sucks because a few of them had neat mechanics other than "punch for 30 minutes", though that's how they ended up feeling like. Like, hit the Dark Wizards with their own spells, or kill the Leaf Generators to keep the Knotty Shambler from regenerating while its Leaves and the big dude all try to kill you, and so on. The bosses also make the fun of thematic team compositions hard to enjoy, if not impossible. I can't see a team of all mages getting past Giant Trilisk without overleveling and potion spam.

The game is exhaustingly long. The first act will probably take you at least ten hours to finish, and they don't get shorter from there. It does make the world feel really vast and you'll cover tons of ground on foot, but remember I was playing 30% faster than normal--imagine how much of a slog it'd be without that. My second run at 48 hours was with very few sidequests and so on, just I was progressing very slowly due to hardy enemies and a poor team setup, and that was at 85% difficulty too! Enemies respawn when you quit out, and without mods, you can only continue from the teleporters you've activated. So if you make a lot of progress and need to quit, you can expect to retread a bunch of ground to get back where you were. You can chance running past the enemies in your way, but if you run into trouble up ahead, you might find yourself surrounded. I haven't played Diablo II in ages, but I could probably get at least some way into Nightmare within 48 hours, even without trying to speedrun.

And then this comes to a head in the final dungeon in the base game, Zaramoth's Horns. There are a total of two teleporters in the map and the later one is right before a boss about 85% of the way to the end. Not only are the enemies here the hardest in the game (and rightly so being the final dungeon), it is very easy to wipe and have to trudge allllllllll the way back and kill everything that respawned in the process. I wish I had kept time for clearing it because I'd swear it was two hours plus, and that was with making 'foothold' Town Portals to keep from having to recover so much ground when I got beat up. My second run ended before I got to that second teleporter because I just kept getting walled and completely stopped, and the third run didn't have a much better time of it either.

And then the invulnerability mechanic for the final boss somehow stopped working, causing me to wipe during the transition to a cutscene, crashing the game. Yee haw.

Verdict - 2/5

I'm still not sure on the score. It's like...you go to dinner at a fancy restaurant. Appetizer? Delicious! The main course? A symphony of flavors coming together in a beautiful harmony. Dessert? Well, I'm not touching it due to the steaming turd on top, and the rest of the good food seems bad now. I hate that I feel this way about a game that I used to love, but I can't figure out how I didn't remember all of these bad things from playing in the past unless I just blocked them out of my memory. It sucks to not recommend it because so much of the game is good and works, just these bad parts ruin the experience that much for me. And I can't even put the blame on the scaling mod as I turned it off and still had hard fights, with some being worse because I was underleveled and now those monsters were stronger. So, I'm an idiot and I'll keep making teams to throw into the grinder (can six Fists of Stone built for tanking just outlive what the game can offer?), but this was not how I wanted to relive an old favorite.

[DF]

Update 2021/02/22: Mentioned that the maps in this game are set and there's no randomization ala Diablo.