I’ll keep this one short-ish. (edit: I lied)

 
Grats to Dungeon Siege 3 and Steam for wasting approximately 5 hours of my life over the past two days. This game was definitely not for me. Isometric dungeon crawler where the dungeons are straight lines and the fights are copypasta swarms. It’s just a scrolling scenery click fest with very little room for strategy. Another sorry example of an industry that acts more like an industry than an artform by churning out games that need fine tuning. The most complicated part of the game was the menus in menus interface that kept you busy for far longer than necessary. 8 clicks to equip an item I picked up off the ground compared to the 8 clicks it took to kill an enemy. Something terribly wrong here, and it really wouldn’t be hard to fix.

I don’t want to harp on forever, there were a few… uh. No, not really many redeeming qualities at all. Not for 2012. The graphics were tired and dated (I blame consoles primarily) even if the art direction was good in theory. With the amount of BEAST in my machine I should be running this game sideways with rainbows spewing from no less than three orifices due to all the insane shiny I could be rendering. Instead my CPU didn’t poke past the 50% mark, and that’s while I’m watching a movie on Netflix to pass the grind time. That’s a double fuck you to Xbox and PS3. DIAF already. The world needs to move on.

Yeah, there’s some grind. Thinking infinitely spawning waves of enemies every 20m (if not closer). The map is a collection of straight lines, the fighting area is a corridor by any stretch of the imagination. Oh you have ranged attacks? Doesn’t matter, melee on you anyway. While their ranged pesters you from afar. There’s no strategy, you can’t get away from the melee. You can hope your companion will handle them, but all the melee just obscure your ranged targets. It’s all mouse clicks anyway, I’m trying way too hard to care about this game design. One would think the melee tuned characters would hold the melee critters better. Guess I shouldn’t expect a whole lot from a game whose premise on creature spawning is “Walk another 15m or so”.

Combat, as I’ve mentioned it might have a poke at. There’s three stances, I’m not sure why they did it this way, basically there’s an offensive or melee stance, a ranged or defensive stance, and a block stance. The first two you can toggle between, which switches your primary weapon, and to block you hold space. They tied three abilities to each stance as well. Nothing is really explained well, and it’s all far more convoluted than it needs to be for a game that you can click your way through. Depth is added to all the wrong places, and it doesn’t help at all. I get swapping weapons out, and having abilities tied to them, kinda. They could have taken another 3 for each stance and been fine. What I don’t get is why the blocking abilities needed to be separate. It’s a nitpick, I guess it works. But why bother blocking in this game? You’re invulnerable during a dodge, you take some damage when you block. The animations just aren’t smooth enough, or interruptive to whatever animation is current, to make blocking actually reflexive. You either anticipate two seconds ahead of time, or you’re missing the window to stand there bracing for impact. Needs improvement.
 
You can’t jump. I meant to screenshot earlier, there’s a point in a swamp where the lever for a bridge is conveniently located 5 feet away. There’s some swamp water in the way. Fuck, I don’t think I would NEED to jump, there’d be enough room to just stretch my legs across. However, taking the alternate path was required. For fucks sake, my character is a FLYING FIRE ARCHON. It just breaks the whole suspension of disbelief in half and beats you with both ends of it sometimes. Terrible level design. Terrible. Fucking terrible. WTF’ing terrible. Who is making these video games these days? Where are the masters of the art that could make grinding feel rewarding? Where are the artists that made epic dungeons that rivaled the likes of Diablo? DS3 makes me lose faith in the gaming industry. It’s a crap shoot at best. Not sure if worth the $7.50 that I paid for on Steam.

There’s just too many core mechanics of a game that are badly out of shape. It’s passable. People probably play through it because they’ve paid good money for it. I did not, and therefore have less invested in it’s sanctity. I don’t need to pretend like it’s worth what I paid for, having something to write about is nearly worth it anyway. I can’t see a game like this getting fixed to the point that it’s worth more of my time. Even IF modding were a thing, they would have a hell of a time creating something of use out of this pile. No wonder it was on sale.

Point to note, I did not buy the DLC.