Dungeon Siege 3: Final Thoughts

Blasting stuff in the face with a rifle

The other day I finally finished Dungeon Siege 3, so that's one more game out of my backlog. Hurray! Before completely closing the door on it, though, I did want to jot down some final thoughts on the game. Overall, I didn't find it hugely entertaining. A lot of the gameplay is common to the Diablo-alike sub-sub genre of action RPG except with nothing to really set it apart from the pack in a meaningful way. Moreover the game is pretty easy. About the only reason I bothered to play to the end of it is because I found the story mildly interesting, but then again it is a game from Obsidian, and they're usually pretty good at that sort of thing. Looking back on my time with the game, I'd have a really tough time recommending it to anyone, even if you get it for dirt cheap in a bargain bin, a Steam sale, or whatever.

The game takes place many years after a big uprising. A group that prides itself on protecting the land, the 10th Legion, is accused of killing the king, and the people, lead by his bastard daughter, Jeyne Kassynder, rise up and destroy this group. After this civil war breaks out as Jeyne tries to take over the kingdom while a royalist faction tries to maintain control. Fast forward to the present and this war is still going on, though things aren't looking great for the royalists. Where the player comes in is that there are a few descendants of the 10th Legion as well as survivors of the massacre, and players must pick one of four characters to restore the legion and bring an end to the war. Much of the story is typical fantasy fair with a bit of politics tossed in. It's not top tier storytelling or anything, but it did manage to keep me entertained. In fact, and as I said earlier, it's the one part of the game that kept me playing until the end.

Of the four characters I chose Katarina, a gun-toting women with an Eastern European accent. I chose her because I wanted a ranged class for kiting, and generally shooting stuff from a distance. The other characters are a mage, a knight-ish paladin kind of guy, and fire spewing archon (kind of a demigod-like creature). Whoever you don't pick will accompany you on your journey anyway, so they're never too far away, but you can't control them. They just do their own thing, and only one can be out and about doing stuff at any given time. I found the guns to be fun to use. Katarina has a rifle for hard hitting long ranged attacks, and a pair of pistols for when enemies get too close, plus a bunch of special abilities. It's a nice mix of weapons.

Most bosses are pretty average in size, but this guy was
impressively huge

Much of the time I found myself mowing down trash enemies from a distance with my rifle while I had my archon tanking them up close. It wasn't very challenging at all unless I was being hit by a large number of bad guys at once, and this rarely happened. Boss fights could get a little bit more exciting because there was a lot more to dodge, or other things that needed to be done besides wailing on the actual boss. However, difficulty in these cases was still mitigated by liberal amounts of dodging. So, challenge was weak during my playthrough on normal. I guess one would really need to crank up the difficulty if they want to be pushed hard by the game. Luckily there are a decent amount of settings to choose from in that regard.

In terms of presentation, I liked the visuals. There's a good amount of detail to everything, and the game kept me moving forward so the environments stayed reasonably varied, not repeating themselves or anything. The characters looked nice, and there were some snazzy lighting effects, especially when spells were being blasted around. The one thing that really bugged me about the visuals was the camera because it can be a huge pain in the butt. It defaults to an auto-follow setting that makes the thing swing around in really inconvenient ways, and even if you turn it off the camera feels slow and unwieldy. Sometimes the thing will also decide to zoom in a whole bunch making it impossible to see enemies properly. The camera is very problematic.

What to do with Jeyne now that she
is defeated

I should also note that I was playing the PC version of the game, and it was obvious that the thing was a very quick, ho-hum port of the console game because it didn't feel like the game was optimized for the PC. The thing that bugged me the most was the save system because it's just save slots without the ability to actually name them myself. It would just display a time and the place where I performed a save when I'd go to load one up. The problem here is that there are some choices to be made in the game that will obviously change the course of the story to some degree, like choosing whether or not certain characters live. I would have liked to have been able to set the saves such that they could be easily pulled up if I wanted to explore multiple branching story paths. Instead I have to remember the time and place that I made a save before one of these events happens which is very inconvenient.

In the end, I just didn't enjoy my time with Dungeon Siege 3 very much. The game is quite easy, and the camera intolerable. I didn't find the combat all that engaging, and then there are the more nuisance-y issues of the game, like its save system. I mostly soldiered through for the story, but I could see even this not being enough to hold some people's attention. Even if you find the game on the cheap at a Steam sale or something, you may be better off skipping it. The thing will still gobble up 20 hours of your time, and there are better action RPGs out there.

Final Fantasy XIV: So How About That New Trailer?

I completely missed the boat on Final Fantasy XIV when it came out. I was busy playing World of Warcraft at the time, and the hype train was going full speed with the upcoming release of the Cataclysm expansion, so I wasn't really paying attention to the run up on Square-Enix's MMORPG. Moreover, when it finally did come out, there were a lot of complaints swirling around it, which convinced me not to bother with it.

Now after a year or so of heavy retooling the game is about to get rebooted with Final Fantasy XIV: A World Reborn. There was a big in-game event to commemorate it, and also a really snazzy trailer. I've not seen any of the festivities that took place on the various servers, but I did have a chance to check out the trailer, and it looked pretty good.

I particularly liked the visuals, but that's always been a strong point of Square's. More importantly, the video was able to quickly give me the gist of what's going on in the game right now just through music and video. There wasn't even any annoying narration, which was nice. About the only things I didn't like about video was Bahamut going around torching everything (I know this is meant as a bit of badassery, but I was getting quite the Deathwing vibe from it what with being a giant dragon burning stuff), and the music was also kind of cheesy. I'm told that the music is related to a bunch of recent events in the game, so I guess it will have a greater impact on those familiar with it, but as an outsider looking it, I didn't much care for it.

Nonetheless, it looked pretty impressive. I'm still not sure if I'll ever give it a try, though. I'm just not a fan of subscription-based MMOs anymore. Not to mention that I'm pretty happy just playing Guild Wars 2 and Phantasy Star Online 2. How about you? Have you had a chance to check out the trailer? What did you think of it?

Dungeon Siege III: A Reminder of What Bad Cameras Are Like

The camera is pretty useless at this angle

Okay, a quick rant for today. Well, maybe not a rant, but a little bit of grumbling on my part. I've been muscling my way through Dungeon Siege III over the last few days so I can hopefully finish it, and add one more game to the list of ones I've actually managed to finish. It's an okay game. The story is keeping my attention, and the visuals are kind of nice. However, the camera is driving me nuts.

The thing isn't fixed so it moves as my character runs around and if for whatever reason, my pointer finds its way to the edge of the screen, it sends the camera spinning. I've been constantly wrestling with it, shoving the camera back into a position that is at least somewhat useful for me, but much of the time it becomes a constant battle because it likes to shift around again every time I move somewhere else. This is especially "fun" during battles or other heat of the moment situations where the mouse is being flung around the screen with wreckless abandon. Often it leads to even more frenzied twirling of the camera.

Only recently have I learned that I can disable this. However, then I have to manually move the camera around with the A and D keys. There's still no option for the trusty hold right mouse button and flick style of camera control that has worked so well in countless games before. Frankly, I wish auto camera wasn't an option in the first place. The other problem is that sometimes the camera will zoom in a ton so that it's right on my character making it so that I can't even see where the monsters are around my guy. It's far from helpful.

I think I would have been happier with a fixed isometric view for the game. It's a bit more old school, but at least there wouldn't be that constant battle with the cameras. I'm over half way through the game, though, so I'll try to soldier through it. Like I said earlier, the story has been keeping me entertained, so I'd like to see how it ends. The combat itself is pretty fun. I'm playing as Katarina who uses a rifle and pistols, and she's a nice ranged class character. Still, it's hard to overlook the cameras. They're not the worst I've seen in a game, as there are plenty of PS2 titles in my library that are far more worthy candidates for "Worst Camera Evar!", but it's still tough to overlook the issue.

How about you? Are there any games out there that really stand out for you because they have bad cameras?

Final Fantasy: Waxing Nostalgic about my Favorite Cid

There are plenty of little touchstones that one can find in the Final Fantasy series: chocobos, moogles, Gilgamesh, and so forth. The one that I find myself wondering about the most when I play one of these games is Cid. What will he look like? What kind of person will he be (besides an engineer-y scholar type)? I've always found him to be an interesting fellow, but there's one above all else that I'm particularly fond of and that's Cid Pollendina from Final Fantasy IV.

I think a big reason for this is because he was the first Cid I ever encountered. I grew up in the late 80s and early 90s, so when the Final Fantasy games came here (what few that did, that is), I was playing them before he got retconed into the first game, and the second and third games in the series didn't see a release in the West on the NES. After the first game debuted on the NES, the series just jumped right into part four on the SNES with the thing being renamed Final Fantasy II over here. So, I didn't even get to see the two previous incarnations of Cid in the second and third games in the series.  As far as I was concerned at the time, this was the only Cid there was because I didn't know any better at the time.

But yeah, my first Cid, my favorite Cid.

He's certainly a likable guy, if a bit on the loud and exceptionally confident side. Cid fills the archetype of the middle aged master builder quite well. It's certainly a character type that we see a lot of in anime, like Hiraga Gengai from Gintama, for example. I like that he pushes himself so hard for the team, and has very concrete views of right and wrong. It's these attributes that make him so likable. Sure, some of the other Cids also exhibited these traits to varying degrees, but this Cid in particular really amplified them in just the right way to make me warm up to him far more than any of his counterparts.

It probably also helps that Final Fantasy IV is my favorite in the series, so I have overarching positive feelings toward the entire game that likely make me look at this Cid in an even more positive light than I might otherwise. The characters in the game, the world I explored, the story in general, they all resonated with me in a big way. Final Fantasy VI does this as well, but IV does it just a little better for me, edging the former out of top spot in my books. So, being particularly fond of the game in general probably makes my like of this Cid all the more.

Anyway, go Final Fantasy IV Cid! You'll always be my favorite, you ridiculously likable, hardworking engineer, you! Do you have a favorite Cid in the Final Fantasy series? If so, I'd love to know which one. Hop in the comments and share your own thoughts about the character.