TL;DR: An average ARPG
Once upon a time Dungeon Siege was new and inovative in it's systems. The graphics where beautiful, the combat AI was fairly good and especially the pathfinding was extremely well done.
In 2026 the graphics are dated, but still functional and posessing a unified art style, the systems remain quite good, actually. The music is worse than I remember. It is used sparringly, the tracks are very short and there are stretches where you have no music at all. The greatest sin this game ever comitted is that it has a killer theme and then wastes it on the first 20 seconds of the game, never to be heard again.
As a game Dungeon Siege was, is, and will probably forever be, utterly average.
The story is forgettable, the world is well built, but so obviously a pipe getting you from your starting farm to the final boss that it starts to get weird. Characters don't matter at all, not even legendary wizards bent on saving the kingdom.
The items are boring. The spells are boring at best and non viable at worst.
The game also allows you to have a party of up to 8 people which is pretty nice as far as customizability goes. Since XP are distributed according to contribution to any given fight this means that you can have a lot of weaker members or one overpowered steamtank of a fighter - if you chose melee, that is.
I once played through until the end with a combat mage and I was close to giving up because the most effective spell was something that I got in the middle of the game that remained the most effective magic until the end and it was one of the most soul crushing experiences of my live.
Melee is complete easy mode - I never even needed to take a health potion until I stopped after the goblins. I think the best experience that also gives you a bit of challenge would be a group of 4 to 5 fighters, when the monsters can actually harm you to the point of posing a threat. Seriously, when I played solo melee there was only one thing that got me: A chest. It was rigged with something that exploded me straigth into death, and since the game trained me to ignore the plethora of traps due to completely negligible damage(people in this world routinely rig hand grenades to their clothing chests) I was completely blind sided by this.
What really struck me is how many things are here that we take for granted today. Auto attacks that don't give you carpal tunnel, a reasonably well working combat AI with different stances, rubber band boxing of your units, a seemless world that you run through from start to finish without ever seeing a loading screen. I don't think I have seen another game adding mules to carry more loot around for you.
All in all I still think that Dungeon Siege is worth a look, at least until you grow bored with it and put it down. The reason for my negativ review is first: If you play only one Dungeon Siege, play Dungeon Siege 2, it's a lot better.
Second: Either the game always had breaking bugs or it didn't walk into the future gracefully. After the goblins I had to deal with crashes that froze my machine to the point where I had to restart the whole computer. I couldn't even get into the task manager. Once, or maybe twice... okay. But it kept doing it and I don't have the motivation anymore to see if it gets better in the next biome or if something broke now that breaks the whole game in unpredictable intervals. Which is a shame, because I wanted to see if I could defeat the end boss without ever taking a potion.
