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Dungeon Siege: Legends of Aranna

As any gamer knows, January is the slowest time of the year. Most developers manage to ship their A-titles in time for Christmas, so at best we get one or two titles that slipped. This is the time every year that I play the titles that I missed the first time around.

I finally finished playing the first Dungeon Siege game late last year, and was somewhat underwhelmed. Near the end of the game, you spend much more time managing inventory than actually fighting baddies. The problem is one shared by many games where the dropped items are randomly generated. With dozens of different skills and bonuses, the odds of finding a random weapon or piece of armor that one of your characters will actually use falls somewhere between slim and none. To counteract this, developers instead have every single enemy drop something. Because you don’t want to lose out on the 1600 gold that the item sells for, you tote it around with you, constantly trying to guess which junk weapon will sell for the most.

Enter Legends of Aranna. Its basic improvements are to inventory management. It adds automatic potion distribution so that mana potions automatically go to your casters, and health potions automatically go to your melee fighters. You also can see the selling price of each item in your inventory just by clicking on it. Inventory management is still a pain in the ass if you have an eight character party, but it’s much less annoying than it was.

Aside from the new inventory management system, there are new effects on armor, new spells, backpacks, and a new pack lizard. Nothing truly revolutionary. From what I’ve played so far, the new campaign to be much more fun than the original, with more boss monsters, including ones that require more than simply killing them as fast as you can.

My main complaint about Dungeon Siege carries over to Legends of Aranna. It’s really difficult to multiclass. Either you prohibit yourself from wearing any type of armor because your strength and intelligence will both be so low, that you’ll be unable to find any decent armor that you’re capable of wearing. The way class definition works (if you use melee weapons, your melee skill will go up; if you cast spells, your casting skills will go up) is great, but if you want to roll a traditional paladin, good with weapons and with basic healing skills, you just can’t do it. You’ll end up with a character who is good at neither melee nor healing.

The problem is that the game uses the level of your casting skill to determine your effectiveness when you cast a spell, rather than your character’s overall level. For example, if your character is level 50 melee, but level 3 nature magic, he’ll just be able to heal 20HP at a time, even though he’ll have close to 1000 HP. Instead of having hybrid characters that can fill multiple roles, you end up stuck with highly specialized casters, archers, and melee characters. I hope that Gas Powered fixes this in Dungeon Siege 2.

Legends of Aranna is more of the same, but in this case, that’s not really a bad thing.