Dungeon Siege: Legends of Aranna (PC)

GameSpot editors' review

• CNET editors' rating: 2.5 stars OK
  Detailed editors' rating
  Overall score: 5.4 (2.5 stars)

• Reviewed by:
  Jason Ocampo
• Reviewed on: 11/13/2003
• Released on: 11/11/2003
• Originally published on GameSpot: Dungeon Siege: Legends of Aranna (PC) Review

More than a year and a half after its release, Dungeon Siege is still a game that provokes a mixed response from gamers. Microsoft's highly anticipated 3D Diablo-killer met with completely different reactions from different players, some of whom were highly impressed by the game's visuals and advanced artificial intelligence, and some of whom felt the game went overboard with the AI--which ended up doing most of work without direct involvement from the player. At any rate, clearly the game had some room for improvement, and one would hope that the significant time that elapsed between the original release and the release of the game's first expansion pack would have been spent addressing some of these issues. However, if you were expecting Dungeon Siege: Legends of Aranna to shatter the status quo, you're going to be disappointed. Legends is a 15- to 20-hour long expansion that packs more of the same type of dungeon-crawling gameplay from the original--with an emphasis on the "crawling" part.

Some of the grumbling about Dungeon Siege stemmed from the fact that, while it's hardly a bad game, it is one that can get old quickly, depending on how much control you hand over to the AI. Since the AI handles most of the combat, by default, it's easy to feel like you're not doing much...in terms of actually doing anything. It didn't help that the levels were designed in a way that limited any sense of exploration or adventure, as most of them were just narrow, linear paths that you couldn't stray from. In essence, Dungeon Siege basically felt like the rail shooter of Diablo clones, with the added disadvantage that you weren't really doing anything besides watching your characters do all the cool stuff while you were left to smash ton of crates. And we mean a ton of them!

Since Gas Powered Games and creator Chris Taylor are busy working on Dungeon Siege II, Mad Doc Software (Star Trek: Armada II and Empire Earth: The Art of Conquest) handled the yeoman's work on Legends of Aranna. Mad Doc played it safe with the expansion by sticking to the original formula and offering the obligatory new campaign, creatures, and items that are expected in an add-on. You still control a party of characters, slay monsters left and right, pick up lots of loot and gear, and then repeat the process over and over again.

The campaign story in Legends should sound familiar to PC role-playing fans: An ancient evil has reawakened and seized the McGuffin it needs to take over the world. Naturally, your job is to neutralize this threat, and along the way you must discover whatever happened to your parents, who left you behind years ago. It's a fairly standard setup that quickly sets up the game, but it provides little motivation to keep you churning through the dungeons. As Legends was designed for beginning characters, you can't import your existing high-powered Dungeon Siege character, so you're basically starting from scratch once again. This will probably annoy Dungeon Siege fans who were hoping for an add-on campaign that would challenge their 40th- and 50th-level characters.

The level design remains true to the original; it still feels like you're being guided through the world with the designer holding your hand, as opposed to actually getting to explore the world on your own. It's somewhat frustrating because there are times when you'll feel that this could be a great engine if it actually presented you with a world that gave you choices on where you'd like to go, as in most other role-playing games.

As you travel down the path, you'll run into groups of monsters every 50 yards or so. This is a Diablo clone, after all, so you'll cut through about a regiment or two's worth of monsters every hour, and though there's a huge variety of monsters in the game, it tends to throw waves of the same type of monsters at you at one time. The enemy AI in Legends remains as it was in Dungeon Siege; monsters will ignore you until you trigger them. Then they'll charge at you. There's no sense of actual intelligence or tactics by the enemy--or even awareness, for that matter. Combat only gets difficult when it overwhelms you with numbers, but the system is so easily manipulated that all you have to do is just trigger a small group of monsters and take care of them while the rest of their buddies stand idly by.

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