Dungeon Siege 3... from Obsidian?

This is obviously going to be the most realistically looking game ever made. Each texture will take 500MB of your RAM.....

Hmm. Even my new-ish PC couldn't run that but only because it's 2GB of RAM short. RAM's still cheap so i could theoretically upgrade it for my friend who has it to play this..... But, nah...

Seriously though, in an age where most games and devs are trying to appeal and reach out to the largest number of people this game has gone back to the old days of when you had to upgrade your PC to play it..... only, i'm not sure who wants DS3 enough to want to do that....

Isn't this on consoles too? If it is, these must not be lowest possible system requirements.....

I guess it would be better if they showed why it requires such a supercomputer, there's always the potential that it's the best game ever. What is sadly more likely is that it's inefficient, but then I'd say even Crysis has a bad engine for the amount of stuttering it does and how it seems to be more brute force than being clever about it's rendering.

The other issue with high system specs is how it limits the audience. As much as I want a game that can show off what a high spec PC can do, they're cutting out a lot of people as potential buyers. I find game that can scale from low end to high end and work to it's best potential across the range much more impressive than turning it up to 11 and breaking the dial.

Yeesh, I just upgraded my video card and it doesn't even meet that. I hope for their sakes and mine that it doesn't come out before 2013 if the required specs stay like that.

That's ridiculous.

I say bring it!

There was a time when Origin would release games that were so high end that you basically waited a year to play it right. Strike Commander anyone?

TheGameguru wrote:

There was a time when Origin would release games that were so high end that you basically waited a year to play it right. Strikeforce anyone?

I remember that. Many of the Wing Commander titles were similar. That said, how's Origin doing?

Long gone but it was over a decade ago so that's not the point. Now of course I'm thinking about Space Rogue and getting nostalgic.

I'll take honesty when it comes to recommended specs over low balling them and surprising people with poor performance.

This far out from release (this isn't a Q1 games, is it?), I wouldn't be surprised to see those specs change.

dowon wrote:

Nathaniel Chapman, lead designer on Dungeon Siege 3

My work PC doesn't meet those system requirements. Just sayin'.

I'd guess it's just trolling by whoever put up the steam page.

Scratched wrote:
dowon wrote:

Nathaniel Chapman, lead designer on Dungeon Siege 3

My work PC doesn't meet those system requirements. Just sayin'.

I'd guess it's just trolling by whoever put up the steam page.

VAAAAAAAALVE!!!

*shakes fist*

[edit]

DS3 looks pretty awesome.... All the different mechanics they've thrown together like the drop-in/out co-op and L4D revival system to the health orbs dropped during combat and the skills just looks really fun. Not sure whether i'll be getting this on PC or 360... Just depends what they tie it to on PC...

Thinking about it, this looks a bit like what i would have liked Too Human to be.

New preview at RPS. More like Fable and less like Diablo seems to sum it up.

When is it coming to the PS3?

The demo is up on XBLM. I'm somewhat impressed, considering I had pretty low expectations. The storytelling in particular seemed solid for a game in this genre. I can't yet tell if the customization is up to snuff, but so far it gets a thumbs-up.

Ah, that's with the week exclusive on XBL because MS want that for their gold subscribers. :\

I played a good bit of the demo and I have to say it turned me from "maybe I'll pick it up" to "maybe when it hits the $10 bargain bin." The voice acting is just terrible, even my wife cringed as she watched me play a bit. Controls are easy to pick up, but you can't see far enough ahead of you and it is just a bit too simplistic for me. I do need to thank Obsidian, they just saved me $60!

Coolbeans wrote:

I played a good bit of the demo and I have to say it turned me from "maybe I'll pick it up" to "maybe when it hits the $10 bargain bin." The voice acting is just terrible, even my wife cringed as she watched me play a bit. Controls are easy to pick up, but you can't see far enough ahead of you and it is just a bit too simplistic for me. I do need to thank Obsidian, they just saved me $60!

The voice acting seems fine, even good by video game standards, to me. Not up to LA Noire's standards, but just fine. I was more bothered by the facial animations during dialogue sequences. The camera also didn't offend, it's fairly par for the genre, unless there are new dungeon crawlers I'm unaware of that let you see 100 yards out.

To each his own. This went from being off my radar to possible $40 purchase (it'll hit that after two weeks).

I reminds me a bit of the old Champions of Norrath games, which is to say it's like a budget console version of Diablo II that tries to make up for being relatively shallow by being very pretty and having lots of neat gimmicks. It is very pretty, and it does have lots of neat gimmicks, but I don't sense a lot of depth here.

I'm a big fan of the Dungeon Siege series. I've had the game pre-ordered since it appeared on Steam. And I've just had the chance to check out the Xbox demo for Dungeon Siege III.

tl;dr: It's not really what I wanted it to be, but it looks a lot better than I feared it might be.

For me, the DS 1 and 2 were really strongly tied to the Gas Powered Games / Chris Taylor aesthetic. They weren't universally great games by any means. They were deeply idiosyncratic visions. That GPG aesthetic put software technology, automation, and executive control at the forefront and really didn't focus on storytelling or plot development. DS 1 steamed in level assets for seamless gameplay years before it was a common feature in many other games. The software tech did interesting things with scaling that were further developed in Supreme Commander and Demigod. And like SupCom, the units in DS were heavily AI controlled so that the player didn't have to spent a whole lot of time giving them direct orders. The best expression of the fundamental approach behind DS was the auto-loot key: after a battle, press 'z' and the characters would all fan out and pick-up all the loot on the battlefield. Much easier than clicking on three dozen piles of gold, Diablo-style.

Of course, there were problems with this approach. The big criticism about DS 1 was that it "played itself". Pretty much all you had to do to get through the game was click on the ground ahead. DS 2 was much better, especially with the expansion. They changed things up by adding a bunch of special abilities. Base difficulty level was pretty easy, but in the mid and high difficulty levels, the heavier battles required a fair amount of player attention.

The DS games were great for playing while decompressing after work. There was endless exploring to do, without having to commit too much attention in tedious clicking or worry that something was going to go horribly wrong.

For DS 3, I was hoping for DS 2 with better graphics, more automation options, a bigger party, better loot, and more tactical configurations. Kinda like Warhammer:DawnOfWar 2 mixed with Diablo, SupCom, and a smidge of the Total War series.

DS 3 isn't that game. It doesn't really seem like a GPG Dungeon Siege game. But, it's not as far off as I feared it might be and it doesn't look like a bad game.

I didn't see the real specs posted, so here they are:

Minimum:
OS: Windows XP SP3, Vista SP1, Windows 7
Processor: Core 2 Duo 2.5 GHz or equivalent
Memory: 1.5 GB
Graphics: ATI Radeon HD 3870 or NVIDIA 9800 GT
DirectX®: DirectX® 9.0c
Hard Drive: 4 GB for full installation
Sound: No accelerated sound hardware required

Recommended
OS: Windows 7
Processor: Core i5 750 2.67 GHz or equivalent
Memory: 2 GB
Graphics: ATI Radeon HD 4870 or NVIDIA GTX 260

Also, region-locked demo is stupid.

I just gave the Steam demo a quick whirl and wasn't impressed.

On the plus side, it looked and sounded pretty. And the intro slide show will make a perfect drinking game! Just drink every time they say, "Jeyne Kessynder" (hint: it's a lot!)

On the minus side, it was kind of blah and annoying. Banal fantasty storyline, bad voice acting, crap interface/mechanisms/etc, identical waves of identical foes, boring, and so on..

Why do developers feel the need to create their own movement and key systems? Do they really think a PC gamer is just sick and tired of moving their character the way they have been for years in the games they love? Like we're just chomping at the bit for some awkward and less efficient system? I hated the movement, actions and key bindings so much that I'm not even sure about the game.

A quick example of an idiot key system that bugged me in the first minute: Press E to interact with an object is great, I'm used to that. But having to run up to everything to see if it is interactive got old immediately. And then, there was a weapon rack that I could open, but instead of opening or giving the items within, it threw them on the ground. So the first E is actually, "toss sh*t on the floor so that I can then hit E again to pick it all up." A nonsense system like this is a great warning sign that the developer is not organized and that the game is going to be annoying. That little lack of forethought to even make a sane looting mechanism is going to show up in other aspects of the game.

I guess I'll spend my $50 on cranky old man therapy and the Grey Wardens, or whatever they called them in their game, will have to stop Jeyne Kessynder on their own.

Jeyne Kessynder!

The PC mouse and keyboard controls were my main problem with it, it really felt like a quick port with the bare minimum thought gone into it. The combat felt poor, hobbled by the controls. Again for the interface, bare minimum console to PC port. I haven't played it with a gamepad yet, so that may be a wholly better experience.

I know they're trying to be unique and do their own thing with DS, but it's a diablo clone, it doesn't really need reinvention, especially given that this is the third in an existing series. Hack and slash ARPGs at their core are simple things with lots of other bits layered on top, but in the case of DS3 that simple core isn't there.

From what I played, technically it's fine, which is saying something for an Obsidian game.

edit: The melee character is less wonky to control than the mage, but still wonky.

I haven't played it with a gamepad yet, so that may be a wholly better experience.

I did. I had no problem with the controls. I found the demo to be pretty dull. Maybe the actual game is more exciting.

What a disappointment. Blah is all I can say (PC version).

Yeah double post.

The PC demo did a great job of convincing me I don't want to buy this.

I found the demo's 2 view modes to be both horribly restrictive and uncomfortable, I'm assuming this is because that aspect is directly ported from the console. The movement controls were inadequate, at one point it took me about five tries to pick up a health orb because the fine movement control just didn't exist. The looting was needlessly awkward: "Press E! OK, now press E again to actually pick it up." Probably the most annoying thing of all though was how slow the menu systems were for inventory. In a game that's a giant loot-pinata I expect to be able to quickly see and compare what I just looted to my existing gear. DS3 has you clicking multiple times while waiting on animated menu screens to cycle.

There may be a fun game hidden somewhere under the technical disaster of field of view, movement control, and UI, but there's no way I'm spending $50 and a chunk of my sanity to find out. It's a real shame because I've always enjoyed the previous DS games.

Elycion wrote:

The PC demo did a great job of convincing me I don't want to buy this.

...

It's a real shame because I've always enjoyed the previous DS games.

Totally agree. Bummer.

Man. I come at this from pretty much the opposite angle from most of you guys. I hated the previous Dungeon Siege games, but I've enjoyed all of Obsidian's previous titles. So I'm interested in Dungeon Siege 3 as an Obsidian fan, not even a little bit as a Dungeon Siege fan. From the demo, it looks like this will be the first Obsidian game I pass over. I found the effort dragged down by gearing itself around the Dungeon Siege franchise.

Obviously that puts in me in a different perspective than most of the people here, but it seems everyone can agree that Dungeon Siege and Obsidian are not a great match.

I feel bad about the demo. It is great that they put it out there, it seems like it is a special effort these days. But it doesn't look like it is going to help sales at all. Seems like more ammunition for those that don't want to put demos out there.