Dungeon Siege 3 Pc Multiplayer 14
Vanina Mazzillo
No, this can also only be done in the Single Player campaign, but there are mods/siegelets where you can or that add a few of these party members to find in the world. (also, try for mods or for info on some good siegelets)Quote:
Dungeon Siege has both a single-player and multiplayer mode. The single-player mode consists of a single story and world; players can either create a new character when starting the story or use one created in a prior playthrough. The cooperative multiplayer mode allows for up to eight players to play through either the single-player storyline or in the multiplayer map, which features a central town hub with increasingly difficult enemies as players move away from it. Multiplayer games can be set to different difficulty levels, allowing accommodation of higher-leveled characters. Additional maps can be created by players that can allow for competitive multiplayer instead. Multiplayer matches can be created and joined via local area networks, direct IP addresses, and, prior to its closure in 2006, through the Microsoft Zone matchmaking service.[7]
Dungeon Siege is set in the Kingdom of Ehb, a varied region on the continent of Aranna containing deserts, swamps, forests, and mountains, created three centuries earlier at the dissolution of the Empire of Stars.[8] At the beginning of the game, the player character's farming village is attacked by a race of creatures named the Krug. The main character, a farmer with no given background who is named by the player, journeys through the Krug forces to the town of Stonebridge.[9] Upon breaking the siege of the town, and gaining their first companion, the player character is tasked by the town's garrison leader Gyorn with journeying to the town of Glacern and alerting the Ehb military forces, called the 10th Legion, of the incursion and defeating any forces they encounter along the way.[10] After journeying through crypts, mines, and mountains, the player character reaches Glacern, where they are informed that the Krug invasion happened the same day that the Grand Mage Merik disappeared, and are charged with traveling over the mountains to Fortress Kroth to assist the legion there.[11] In the mountains they find Merik, who informs them that the Krug invasion is part of a larger invasion by the Seck, who destroyed the Empire of Stars before being imprisoned underneath Castle Ehb, and who have escaped and taken the castle. Merik asks the player to help recover the Staff of Stars from the Goblins. Prior to its theft, the Staff had kept the Seck imprisoned in the Vault of Eternity.[12]
Gas Powered Games included their game development tool, called the Siege Editor, as a tool for players to mod the game. Having seen the output of players creating mods for Total Annihilation, Taylor wanted to "take that to the extreme" and provide a full set of tools to foster a community of players enhancing and changing the game after release. He felt that the tools, which could allow players to make new game worlds, characters, and gameplay, would help support a large, long-term community of players around the game.[19] Gas Powered Games hoped that providing what Daily Radar called "one of the most comprehensive level toolsets we've ever seen" would allow players to quickly and easily create small game regions, as well as allow more serious modders the ability to develop entire parallel games using the Dungeon Siege game engine.[23] They also hoped that this modding community would be able to enhance and extend the multiplayer gameplay beyond what they could release.[24] Taylor attributed his enthusiasm for releasing their own development tools for modding to both his enjoyment of seeing mods for Total Annihilation produced years after its release as well as the lack of negative consequences to John Carmack and id Software's historical tendency to release the entire source code to their games.[23] Taylor later estimated that the company spent around twenty percent of their budget on developing the modding tools.[25]
By 2000, Gas Powered Games had begun to search for a publisher for the game. Taylor claims that multiple publishers were interested in the game, but he was convinced by Ed Fries to partner with the newly established Microsoft PC publishing group. Although Microsoft's publishing wing was established in part to publish games for the newly announced Xbox console, Gas Powered Games and Microsoft did not strongly consider bringing the game to the console. Taylor believes that this was due to the size of the game itself, as well as the small market for role-playing games on consoles at the time.[17] Dungeon Siege was initially planned for release in the third quarter of 2001, before being delayed to the following year, and Gas Powered Games spent the added time tuning and polishing the game and expanding the game's items and multiplayer features.[29] Dungeon Siege was released for Microsoft Windows on April 5, 2002, by Microsoft, and for Mac OS X on May 2, 2003, by Destineer.[18][30]
The multiplayer content received mixed reviews: Adams praised the amount of additional content, while Suciu and the GameSpot reviewer noted that the multiplayer gameplay could easily become unbalanced between different players.[1][3][34] The single-player plot was generally dismissed as inconsequential: the GamePro reviewer termed it "skeletal" and the Game Informer reviewers "lackluster", and the GameSpot reviewer called it "bland and forgettable" and concluded that players who wanted a "deeper role-playing game" would be disappointed.[1][32][33] Overall, Vederman of PC Gamer called Dungeon Siege "one of the best, most enjoyable games of the year" and GamePro's reviewer claimed it "walks all over its competition with almost effortless grace", while Adams of IGN concluded that it was entertaining but had "untapped potential".[2][3][33]
Gas Powered Games' release of the Siege Editor did spark the rise of a modding community around the game; even before release several modding groups announced intentions to use the engine to create large-scale mods remaking games from the Ultima series of role playing games.[24] After the game's release, numerous mods were created, including several "total conversion" mods that made wholly new games and stories such as "The Lands of Hyperborea" and "Elemental".[17][50][51][52] Gas Powered Games released one mod of their own in July 2002 titled "Yesterhaven", created by six designers over six weeks, which provided a short multiplayer storyline for low-level characters wherein they defended a town from three thematic plagues of monsters.[53][54] It was followed up by Legends of Aranna, a full expansion pack developed by Mad Doc Software and released on November 11, 2003 for Windows and Mac OS X by Microsoft.[55] The expansion pack added little new gameplay besides new terrains, creatures, and items, but featured an entirely separate story from the original game.[56] In Legends, the player controls another unnamed farmer; after the Staff of Stars is stolen by a creature called the Shadowjumper, they set off to retrieve it. After fighting their way through monsters in icy hills, jungles, and islands, the player arrives at the mystical Great Clock, a giant artifact which controls Aranna's seasons. There they defeat the Shadowjumper and retrieve the Staff of Stars. It received generally less positive reviews than the original,[57] with critics praising the amount of content but criticizing the lack of changes to the base gameplay.[56][58][59][60] At the 7th Annual Interactive Achievement Awards, the AIAS nominated Legends of Aranna for "Computer Role-Playing Game of the Year", though it lost to Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic.[61]
Are there any major differences between the multiplayer for Dungeon Siege 1 and 2? I have played 1 a few years ago, and thought it was very Diablo-like and easy to pick up. Is Dungeon Siege 2 the same way?
During the outbreak of war on their home island, the Utraeans were forced to leave the region, abandoning their inventions and buildings. One of them is the H.U.B. (Helios Utrae Basilicus) - the so-called Utraean Basilicus, which is a network of teleporters between important cities. Leaving the peninsula, the Utraeans locked up the strange demonic force of the Maljin in a deep dungeon near Hiroth, and the key to it was divided into several parts, which became known by future residents as the Townstones.
Having collected all 8 stones, the player brings them to the High Priest Kavaren in Hiroth and sets them in the Utraean circle. Then the circle begins to transform: it glows, opens the elevator somewhere in the dungeon, and the air turns blood red. Priest Kavaren informs us that we accidentally opened the way to the underworld, and the air was filled with ash and sulfur. The priest gives us the Tenstone stone and says that we must go down to the Utraean catacombs, destroy the Maljin demons and install the tenstone in the sanctuary, consecrating the dungeons. After successfully completing the assignment, the priest says that we will always be remembered "as the person who saved us from our own ambitions."
While the map generally follows the in-game geography, there are a number of inconsistencies due to how the game handles regions and loading. Most of these involve the scale of land bridged by underground dungeons and lifts; they seem to warp time and space into their own pocket dimension.
One example is Loola's Lift which goes from the Great Northern Forest to the Eastern Island; at least this one takes a long time and the lift might as well be flying. Another is Hovart's Folly, which seems to cover the entire Elddim area and has places where the dungeons should be sticking out into the world but don't, such as the Great Northern Forest entrance. Maybe it's Utraean displacer magic at work? Who knows. A particularly egregious time-space inconsistency is the Ancient Temple and its associated elevator, which spans a full half of the overworld map despite its relatively small size and the fact that its elevator is attached to a fixed shaft.
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