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Dungeon Siege II single player demo

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i liked ds1 a lot.. whens this supposed to come out? i think i might have to start playing ds1 again with all the expansion packs
 
If you haven't played Neverwinter Nights, the adds ons, and user modules that might be a better choice.

I finished the 3 Bioware campaigns in NWN Platinum and have now played through a couple of user-made modules that both had more story and strategy than DS.

If you really liked the first DS, the expansion pack for it does give you a new realm, new equipment, and a tweaked UI that tells you useful things like the average damage of a weapon per second instead of just a vague speed and a daamge range. Getting the DS1 bundle with expansion might be a better deal than DS2.
 
Originally posted by: skace

Anyone who remembers the original, remembers several cookie cutter towns and a billion miles of forrest/desert etc in any direction. I just hope this one has a hidden island like the first one, that place rocked.
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Apparently you don't remember the original. There was no billion miles of anything off in any direction. The entire map was a bobsled run with the player locked into one single path that you could not deviate from.
 
Originally posted by: Ryland
They seemed to have turned DS from a "Play itself game" to a "click fest". I used to be able to tell my fighters to just keep attacking something until it died in DS, now i have to keep clicking on the damned enemy to get them to continue attacking. I like it better the way it was...
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You can hold the mouth button down and the attack will commence automatically. I'd prefer a single click like you alluded to. But I often find myself clicking on new targets at they begin approaching my archer, who is in the rear firing away unprotected.

I didn't play DS1, so I have no basis for comparison, but this demo has been fun enough for me and my kid, that I think we'll enjoy playing some coop together. He got all excited when he got 2 henchmen and the bought a "pet" scorpion.

Honestly, if it were just me, I wouldn't be buying it.

And, although many blast them for releasing a 1.4gb demo, I applaud it. There's a lot of content, speech, and decent enough graphics (you can force 16x12 rez in the .ini), to show me that they are proud of their work and want to give gamers a very good taste of what's in store, so they can determine if they like it or not.
 
even worse than the first...hack/slash/hack/slash/hack/slash/hack/slash

this is basically the whole game. And on my ATI X850 XT antialiasing doesnt work.

deinstall imminent - i am not a fan of boring h&s orgies...
 
>>>
There's a lot of content, speech, and decent enough graphics (you can force 16x12 rez in the .ini), to show me that they are proud of their work and want to give gamers a very good taste of what's in store, so they can determine if they like it or not.
>>>

we had that in DS1 already..the gfx *were* nice - didnt change the fact that it was a disappointment for MANY RPG people who got the game with high hopes - and then saw its basically only a hack/slash fest.

In the 10mins i was playing DS2 now....i had to click,click,clicklicklcikclcikclcikclickl left and right...shoot,hack,kill....maybe already 30 monsters in quick series...so fast i didnt even notice what was going on....not to mention any chance of seeing stats/health or anything the like. You just click and click 'til everything's killed.

Go from A to B and kill qanything in between. Sorry..not my thing.
And i am HUGE RPG fan !



 
Originally posted by: GagHalfrunt
Apparently you don't remember the original. There was no billion miles of anything off in any direction. The entire map was a bobsled run with the player locked into one single path that you could not deviate from.
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Sorry. I mainly played the multiplayer game. In which you could walk for 3 hours IRL into random forrests without seeing much of anything. They also had a secret pyramid dungeon in the middle of the desert, and you could spend several hours trying to find that also. Hell, just trying to find the desert town was a ton of work.

Trust me, I remember the game. We played the thing to death. I probably still have screenshots of when we beat the maze pit.
 
I personally thought that the original DS was a really good game but DSII really seems to have major pitfalls (I don't quite want to say "sucks"). My issues with it are:

1) When you Continue a game you start in the last town you were in which forces you to rewalk the same path each time and dealing with low level "random" encounters that you may have already defeated before having saved the game.

2) Still a single path to walk (i.e. "bobsled run").

3) The party AI doesn't seem all that smart. I have party members wandering off for no reason and not running in when they are supposed to be guarding a character being attacked.

4) The fact that characters will start a conversation with you if you get to close while something is coming in to attack so you lose that conversation because you abort it as quick as possible so you don't die...They should just have conversations STOP if a fight is going on so that they can be restarted when its done.

I doubt I will be buying this in its current state.
 
Well I played the demo more last night and found that it is strangely addicting. Let me reiterate my points a bit:

1) Exactly as I stated but it doesn't seem so bad but it would be nice to start from exactly where you had been.
2) There is a little bit of side stuff you can do but not too much of it. Basically a straight line.
3) Im still stumped as to why party members don't come rushing in to help. There might be a distance thing but you can always switch to Mirror party order and they come running.
4) Argh

Another one to add:
5) Enemy AI sucks. It is too easy to fool the enemy into come to you strung out over a line. I figured out how to pick them off htat way which made life much easier.
 
My son has been playing the demo and loving it. He did give me one gripe tho, and I'm not sure how it happened, so I don't know if it's a game flaw or something he did, but when he started a new character and saved it, somehow he lost his old char and saves. I did notice that when you save, you aren't given an option for a "slot" or a "name" or anything like that.

I forsee a potential problem since he wants to play single player by himself AND have a different character to coop with me. Is that even possible?
 
Originally posted by: deadseasquirrel
My son has been playing the demo and loving it. He did give me one gripe tho, and I'm not sure how it happened, so I don't know if it's a game flaw or something he did, but when he started a new character and saved it, somehow he lost his old char and saves. I did notice that when you save, you aren't given an option for a "slot" or a "name" or anything like that.

I forsee a potential problem since he wants to play single player by himself AND have a different character to coop with me. Is that even possible?
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Hopefully it's a demo problem and not something you'll encounter at release.
 
That definitely does seem like a bug. You should be able to have multiple characters running at the same time trying different things. Hopefully they will get this fixed.
 
Well I bought this game, still crappy resolution in the menu and 1280x1024 is still the highest resolution. Still a great game to play. I would rather have a fun game with bad graphics than a crappy game with great graphics.
 
I thought the demo was great, a huge improvement over the first, with the addition of abilities and a nice story, with many optional parts and side quests. With all the optional stuff its really no more of a bobsled than WoW, which is pretty open. Yeah there are signs and paths to each town just like any game. The character problem is a demo thing only. I'm hoping that the game save issue was also a demo thing. Pet's are pretty awesome btw, expensive but very cool. The ai has some quirks that probably will be adjusted with patches.
 
I'm not going to buy it if I have to deal with the terrible saving. Do they even bother to playtest these things?
 
The save "issue" is probably more of a design choice to have a freeflowing world. If they dropped you in at the same place upon loading then they would have to store information about every creature around you in the save file which would make it huge. If they just allow for "random encounters" by having you retrek to the locatoin then that limits the size of the save file and probably speeds up loading.
 
The res isn't locked. You can enable any res you want by editing the .ini file in your "my docs\my games\ds2" dir. I'm running 16x12 in the demo. It looks great, but the text doesn't scale. Bleh.

As for the saves, yeah, I was confused at first. I never played DS1 or any of the Diablo series, so it caught me by surprise a little. But I've now noticed that they put in the teleporters pretty close together, so if you find yourself having to walk, it really isn't too far. In fact, it helped me out the other day. My quick jaunt back to catch up to where I was led me to a cave I missed previously (hidden nicely behind a waterfall).

I grabbed the demo mainly for my kid, but he got stuck once or twice and I helped him out and kinda enjoyed the game. So I installed the demo on my machine, copied over his char and save so I didn't havta start over at the beginning 🙂 It's actually a pretty fun time-waster.
 
Originally posted by: Ryland
The save "issue" is probably more of a design choice to have a freeflowing world. If they dropped you in at the same place upon loading then they would have to store information about every creature around you in the save file which would make it huge. If they just allow for "random encounters" by having you retrek to the locatoin then that limits the size of the save file and probably speeds up loading.
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Not only that but it standardizes the saving between single player and multiplayer, such that anyone can join a multiplayer saved game.
 
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