Since combat can be very hectic, you might not realize for some time that one of your spellcasters is standing around doing nothing because the spell he has selected is not an automatic one. It would've been nice to have an option to choose automatic or manual spellcasting with those spells. A new and very nice feature in Legends of Aranna is a single button that allows you to redistribute potions among all your party members.
It doesn't work in multiplayer, but to get an even number of potions among all your single-player party members, including giving your spellcasters mana potions, it's absolutely marvelous. Some of the other interface improvements are a "sell all" button when you're selling to merchants, auto-arrangement in your inventory when your characters pick up new items, a world map, and an improvement in your control groups.
Instead of only being able to set up the active slots for different characters, you can also select different spells or weapons in those slots and switch between them at the press of a key. The tragg is the newest pack animal. It doesn't carry quite as much as your mule, but it jumps right into combat. A tragg and seven party members with backpacks means you're dragging around a lot of loot between trips to the store. New treasure items include backpacks, imbued items, and treasure sets.
Each character can have one backpack, which increases his storage capacity quite a bit. When selling to merchants, items in your backpack don't show up, so you have to move them out into your main inventory area first. It's a minor annoyance, but it is one nonetheless. Imbued items increase your abilities in combat. Most aren't significantly different than other magic items, but they often lack ability score prerequisites.
Treasure sets are composed of three or more pieces of weapons, armor, and equipment. If you sat down and penned a list of things you'd expect to see in the first official Dungeon Siege expansion, what would it include? New items, new creatures, new lands to explore, improved interface and a new storyline?
Well, they're all here, but the only startling thing about Legends Of Aranna is there's nothing startling about it. It's a no-frills extension to the original - great news if you've completed the main campaign. The new landscapes are as pretty and detailed as the old, the combat is still hectic but very smooth, and with the lack of any real Dungeon Siege total conversions, Legends has come along at just the right time.
The only real disappointment if you've completed the main campaign is there's no way to import your high-level character into the expansion, which means you have to start all over from level one and work your way up. This means you're starting a new game from scratch, even though the storyline itself takes over where the original game left off.
New features include improved inventory management and a new half-giant character. There's also a group awareness function which makes your characters more aware of danger, and a new pack mule which helps you in battle, instead of just hanging about carrying your stuff. The obligatory evil arch rival comes in the form of the Shadow Jumper, who's intent on taking over the world. Much of the game revolves around chasing his trail from one place to another before a final confrontation.
The story is fairly compelling, if a little on the cliched side, but the overly cheesy voice-acting does leave a lot to be desired. No surprises then, and the fact that Legends was farmed out to Mad Doc software tells its own story, in as much as it's pretty much an 'out the door' expansion. Nevertheless, it's a welcome and entertaining addition to an excellent game. Having said that, if you can get over this, and the fact that you have to start building up your character from scratch, you'll find that there are several days of classic Dungeon Siege gameplay to enjoy.
And if you're a Dungeon Siege newcomer, it's the perfect package. After working on The Core Contingency, Taylor was fortunate enough to found his own company, something that he had wanted to do since his entry into the industry, and he and other 22 people started a most ambitious would-be Diablo killer soon after — Dungeon Siege.
But rather than skimming the genre to its bare irrelevance, DS takes a completely new swing by adding a party dynamic infused with some clever RTS design and a good deal of freedom centered around character building.
As in other games of its pedigree, most of the fun is centered around finding stuff and buffing up characters via the indiscriminate bashing of evil. But instead of fidgeting with statistics, you build up character proficiencies by using weapons divided into four major categories, be it melee swords, axes, knives, etc , ranged anything with a bowstring , natural magic a great combination of defensive and offensive spells and combat magic burn everything to the ground!
You have a choice of hiring this or that character, or spend more gold on buying powerful items to get that winning edge, or even buy a pack mule to hoard more stuff on dungeon crawls which you can sell later on — the stuff, not the mule. You can develop individual combat strategies via the AI slider that lets you dictate how characters behave in a fight, whether they chase after foes, stay in the background as a supporting spellcaster, form a defensive firing line or jump in swords drawn.
The enemy AI is mostly cannon fodder, but the party AI is so great that, once properly calibrated to your playing style, you can simply click on an enemy and watch the ensuing chaos. You can move around screen elements quite freely.
And of course, you can reconfigure the mouse and keyboard to your liking.
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