May 2002

/ Time to Upgrade Game Manuals - Friday, May 24, 2002 - WintyreFraust
I despise companies that don’t provide an exhaustive manual with their game. Don’t even get me started about "We want YOU to figure it out!" Everquest, which has to be the pinnacle of what I call the current era of deceptive gaming manuals. They what YOU to figure out their game. They want YOU to figure out how this stat affects that skill ... they want YOU to explore the game and discover all this information on your own.

Well, guess what? I don’t have the time, buddy. I’m too busy exploring the real world and yes, at a ripe old age I’m still trying to figure out exactly how THAT world works. I don’t have time to crunch numbers and parse log files to figure out if an extra unit of strength affects the damage I do with my mithril warhammer. I don’t have the time to figure out how your game works; gee, I kinda expect you to inform me HOW it works so I can play it effectively without having to hire an assistant to take notes.

And, you know what? Not everyone that plugs a fantasy RPG into their computer spent three years playing Dungeons and Dragons every night. We don’t just happen to know what the hell you mean by "light armor class 1" or "2d6+4" when describing how much damage a spell does. I’m consistently frustrated by lackadaisical manual editors that don’t follow the first rule of manuals: assume the person who is reading your manual doesn’t understand anything but the language your using. Don’t expect them to have an understanding of your subject matter just because YOU do. Game producers tend to forget, when it comes to producing a manual, that they’re not just writing it for other gaming professionals.

I also absolutely abhor game producers that think it is "cool" to put stuff in the game that is "hidden" from all but the most rabid fans. Cheat codes and special character codes might seem like a really neat way for you to have an inside joke with your elite clientele, but guess what? When the rest of us find out about it, it doesn’t strike us as particularly amusing or funny. Cheat codes are basically just ways programmers invent to have access to power and ability and game content that elevates their participation above what others can achieve. That it is common practice for game programmers to put in such things demonstrates the mentality here; winning, or achieving, however it is accomplished, is more important that competing or playing fairly. That’s what manuals are supposed to be about, you see. Providing a framework for FAIR play, not creating a system of deception and purposeful misinformation - or LACK of information - by which to create castes of players based on "inside" information. In other words, I shouldn’t have to parse log files and spend 150 hours trying out various combinations of weapon/stats/skills in order to find some super-secret method of easily killing high creatures for quick and easy experience. Nor should I have to develop personal relationships with developers to gain access to important game information. Sorry, that’s asking too much of your average gamer.

If you’re going to produce a game, then put all the information you can in the manual. ALL of it. Base your game on everyone having equal knowledge of the game; not on the idea that IF you dedicate yourself to studying the game THEN you will know how to play it effectively. Why not just put an exhaustive play guide/game manual on the game CD? You don’t even need publishing costs for a paper manual. Why not provide exhaustive information about all aspects of the game via an extensive help file you can alt-tab into? If WANT to explore and figure out your game world on my own, then let it be my decision. Don’t hide pertinent information where only the most dedicated players can find it, or figure it out, because then you create a caste system where we casual players have to rely on the professional gamers to disseminate information via websites. Is it REALLY necessary that I go to Allakhazam to figure out the what and how of your game simply because I don’t have the time - or third-party analysis programs - to correlate data from your game?

If I find a "Grimlock’s baking pot" ... is it REALLY important to you that I run to a third party website to figure out what the hell it’s used for? How about .. I just click on the damn item in my inventory, and I get exhaustive, complete information on what that item is for, and what it does, and how it is used, etc.? In Everquest, 99% of everything I ever "found" was useless to my character. It would be nice to have informational access AT THE TIME to sort through experiences and loot before wasting all my time just to find out it’s not something I’m interested in or is useful to my character.

Let me give a specific example: in Marrowind, you can gather up any number of items. Figuring out what to do with them is something else entirely. It would be nice if you could click on the item and a menu of things you can do with that item opened up, with categories and links to explain everything about it. This way I don’t spend hours in the game pursuing knowledge that is ultimately useless to me. Just GIVE ME the information up front and quit forcing me to run down a hundred blind alleys just to find one that works for my character. And don’t hide "cheat" information from me and reserve it for your more rabid fans. That is a betrayal of trust of the worst sort, and I refuse to buy software or games from people who engage in that practice.

Game manuals need a serious upgrade. They need to be updated from official sites and integrated into the game with exhaustive information at the fingertips of the players. It’s another method of reducing the frustration of a game and making it more enjoyable if your character knows what is going on, instead of forcing the player to "learn" an entire world of information. We have our hands full with the real world, guys. Most of us don’t have the ability to focus that much time and attention to on decoding your game world. Figure out a new way of doing it for us, exhaustively and completely. I should only be the motivator of my character in the game ... I shouldn’t have to keep a filing cabinet full of information to play effectively.

Game manuals could be an effective interactive part of the game. When your character finds the Robust Lotus Cake, then they have access to all the information pertaining to it. Perhaps the in-game manual doesn’t allow you to just sort through ANY topic, but rather any information or item or place or rumor you come into contact with triggers a code that allows your character access to all pertinent information about that subject. Do I want to have to go through fifty books, a hundred NPC’s, and visit twenty shrines ... just to finally say, "Screw this, I’m going to Caster’s Realm"?

How is that fun, especially if you only have an hour or two to play? I don’t want to spend all that time trying to figure something out ... I want to spend that hour doing something productive for my character. If I have to spend twenty hours searching out and sorting and compiling information just to find out IF that activity or item or place is what I want for my character, how is it anything other than frustrating to find out ... I just wasted twenty hours, because that item doesn’t work for my race?

Game developers need to stop relying on third party information websites to provide pertinent information and install an in-game method that does the same thing, at least to the degree that the player can reasonably, and quickly, figure out from provided information what is going on and what their options are, and how it relates to their character and future possibilities.


Further
information available here.

/ Marrowind: Day One - Friday, May 10, 2002 - WintyreFraust
The first thing you notice about this game is, when you open the box, you get a detailed, professional manual and a detailed, beautiful map. Thumbing through the manual, I immediately realized that this was going to be a game best played as one might read a novel; you have to be willing to commit yourself to the effort to find out if it’s going to be worth the effort or not. Kinda like marriage. Fortunately, three marriages have prepared me in advance for the effort I knew I had to invest to even attempt to enjoy this game. I gritted my teeth, got 16 ozs of java, and dug into my computer bunker.

Something that bugs me about games today; I don’t know who their art people are, but frankly, they can’t draw any model humans worth squat. Everquest has some good male models, but all their females look like something out of a Russ Meyer cartoon ... if Russ Meyer made cartoons. In Dungeon Siege, the people might as well really be store-bought mannequins. In Marrowind, I went through about 50 race/sex/face/hair combos, and the most attractive thing I found was an Orc male ... but it was only attractive because his "ugly" was done well, and let’s face it, an Orc ain’t human. Every single female face in the menu - dark elf, wood elf, high elf, malibu elf, beverly hills elf, nord, redguard, etc. - was either homely or downright repulsive, and the males weren’t any better. Hopefully I’ll find a helmet soon to cover these grotesqueries up. I mean, is it really too much to as that the characters in your game be attractive?

Going through the seemingly endless character possibilities would have been fun in this game, if creating a new character didn’t require you going through the opening scripted sequence every time. As it was, I had some good fun attacking people I knew were going to whip my dark-elf tail. After choosing my magicka-empowered sorcerer and filling out all the necessary paperwork (yes, paperwork) to actually begin the game, I noticed that I had already consulted the manual more than I had Dungeon Siege. Well ... I’ve never actually consulted the Dungeon Siege manual. It’s so easy to play I don’t know why they even included a manual. It took me thirty minutes of reading the Marrowind book before I realized it didn’t even say how to exit the game ... or maybe it did and I just couldn’t find it. I tried the ESC key and it brought up the appropriate list - luckily.

Movement in the game is something you have to train your hands to do to be effective; you have to use both hands. That’s more involved than I usually like a game. I like to keep a hand free to sip my mocha cappuccino or take a drag off of one of my cigars. The reason I switched to cigars is, frankly, too often I look over and my cigarette was gone, and I never got to suck any of the vile poison out of it. Stogies .. the good ones, that is ... have the common decency to go out when you don’t haul their toxins into your lungs regularly. I find that comforting.

Up to this point I wasn’t impressed with the game. It was complicated, complex and unwieldy, and just to be honest, my characters didn’t look as good as I knew they could. Plus to even SEE my character, I had to hit tab; otherwise, what I’m looking at is my hand and a sword or my two hands extended to cast a spell, like Doom or Quake. In the little village I started in, the people were all doing things and interacting with me with some pretty impressive AI. They all seemed to have things to do, and most of it directly involved irritating the new guy - me - in some way. After standing there a few minutes some guard came up and said, "Move along now, we don’t have any loitering around here." Another villager asked, rather haughtily, what I "wanted", when it was she that stopped in front of me for no good reason. The shop owner cleared his throat and made other impatient noises when I stood there trying to figure out what to do with some of the items I had.

I made a mental note to come back to that village and kill everyone in it, as a lesson to them in polite manners.

Try as they all did to get me to get on some big winged bug and make a fast trip to some place they all thought I should go, I, being the dark-hearted rebel that I am, walked out of town and into the surrounding foothills and swamp area. I found many herbs and flowers to collect, and killed some rats and crabs. The landscape was, without a doubt, truly the best looking scenery graphics I’ve ever viewed in any game. Unlike Dungeon Siege, Marrowind has a sky ... and what a sky it is. It is quite spectacular. If all you did was walk around and look at stuff, the game is worth the price tag just to have this big, breathtaking 3D fantasy painting to explore. The night sky, with its two moons, is something you just want to stand and stare at. It really is fabulous; it has stars and depth that look like a big, vast cosmos stretches endlessly above you.

Then, my first dilemma appeared; apparently, this fellow just fell down and died in front of me, outside of town. Should I loot his body? Could he be faking? Was it some kind of test? When I thought I was alone in the lighthouse earlier, I thought nothing of picking up a loaf of bread -- but it turned out the lighthouse keeper was watching me from the shadows and didn’t find it amusing. So I was wary. I looked around. I even tried healing him. Poor devil was as dead as Molly Ringwald’s film career. He didn’t need his items any more, so I saved the game - just in case - and relieved him of his burden.

Now, I have a sword that shoots lightning when I hit stuff with it. I’m certain there’s got to be some downside to this - probably some Captain that’s going to recognize it and rough me up for stealing it from his good friend. Or worse, they’ll find the body, and then see me waltzing around in his wizard cap that stands two feet off my head like a "guilty" beacon.

Okay, I’m not going to wear the hat, and I’ll keep the sword sheathed in town.

At least until it’s time for their etiquette lesson.

Demonstrate
your AI here.

/ Chronicles of a Game Player, Part III - Thursday, May 9, 2002 - WintyreFraust
When I left the MUD I was playing for Everquest, I took with me a couple of good friends I met online, as well as my brother and his son. We started playing when the game first went live, over three years ago. I still remember my amazement at the technical accomplishment which, today, most people take for granted. Being able to have my 3D avatar look at my friend’s 3D avatar and talk to each other in a fully 3D immersive world was breathtaking. My first character was an Erudite magician, and after I got over my initial wonder, I started questioning why everything was so dark all the time, and why so often it was pitch black to the point of not being able to see anything at all. I constantly got lost and was unable to move. Also, I died about every three minutes until I realized that my game persona was actually quite frail.

I remember thinking at the time ... "I wonder why they made it so hard to play this game?"

Little did I realize the mentality behind the game was, in fact, to make playing the game so increasingly difficult that only those who "played" Everquest like a full time job would ever move beyond an average success. The one thing most consistently on your mind, all the time, was preventing your character’s death, because if you and your party died out in the middle of nowhere, you had to resign yourself to at least a couple of hours of doing nothing but trying to recover your corpses. And when you’re a casual player, with a limited number of hours to invest, dying once pretty much signifies the end of your adventure. The rest of your time is spent recovering.

The fun in Everquest was always about seeing the new stuff, and having fun with my friends. I stopped trying to get anything on my own because it gave me no sense of accomplishment to get an item from the creature it dropped from; on those rare occasions it happened, I just considered myself lucky, and returned to my method of earning enough platinum to buy the items I wanted. There was simply no way I was going to camp anything for a week or more just to get an item. It better suited me to do other things and just accumulate the game money necessary to buy it. I never, ever understood how "investing more time at your computer" to get a virtual-world game item was supposed to produce a "sense of accomplishment".

However, I did meet many new people, and created a guild. We were the laid-back bunch, no real rules or agenda, just play nice and don’t be annoying. Our forte was cracking jokes and making fun dance animations, mooning each other with our avatars. We bought expansions because we wanted to see new stuff, and were continuously disappointed when most of the "new stuff" would likely forever be out of our reach. The effort required in the game by nature generated a situation where people had to irritate and annoy others in order to accomplish any meaningful task. Verant said it was their way of helping "community" to grow, by forcing people to rely on others to progress through the game. What they failed to account for was that most people don’t spend enough time in the game, nor do they invest enough effort in their in-game "networking", to make this a reasonable proposition, so they end up just begging or bugging strangers for necessary help. It’s a textbook case on how to create a dysfunctional "community".

I met few excessively strange people in the game. The really nasty ones I only met when the game first came out ...before long they were so far above me that I never saw them again. More than anything, people seemed desperate for some kind of recognition, and if you didn’t give it to them it angered them. By golly, you WERE going to recognize them, or they’d never leave you alone. You couldn’t do anything without someone presuming to tell you how to do it better, or why you were being an idiot. I remember when I started selling Wu tailored armor; I would enter an area, /auction my wares and prices, and wait. Sure enough, at least one, but usually more than one, person would laugh at my prices. Way too high. The next guy: way too low. And so it went. People wanting me to acknowledge that THEY knew more than I knew, and when I didn’t respond, and just kept hawking my wares, they would escalate from /tell to /ooc to /shout. It would happen, amusingly, every day ... and every day I would sell a full set or two of Wu armor.

Of course, the need of others to be acknowledged was in every facet of the game. I had thought that the sheer size of Everquest would allow some anonymity; and to a degree, it did. However, wherever we came across other players, we ran into people that needed you to know them, to fear them, to respect them, to like them, etc. It was a parade of human needs attempting to find satisfaction in a virtual world. All we wanted was to have a good time, and in Everquest, like in life, people don’t like it if you’re having a good time .. without them. It makes them feel unnecessary, unimportant. They want you to notice them ... so they drag a cyclops through your camp to demand attention. Even if you put yourself on /anon, you will get /tells asking you why you’re on anon, as if the idea that people don’t want to be noticed is so abhorrent and bizarre to others that they feel it’s okay to breach an obvious request for privacy with a /tell. And god forbid you ever tell anyone "no"; you might as well insult their sainted mother.

My online gaming in Everquest was strange ... I spent most of my time avoiding anyone I didn’t know, because I knew that, for the most part, the people in the game looked at me - and everyone else - as an opportunity to express whatever psychological needs or aberrancies coursed through their mind. However, I liked staying close enough to others to be able to interact now and then without eliciting any real communication. It was fun, I guess, just knowing that these were other real people playing, and it gave a kind of satisfaction that other games, up to that point, lacked. However, having played Everquest, and having tasted the MMOG experience, I must say that it is unsatisfying to this point because, at least in that game, there was a preponderance of people that you really didn’t want to interact with very much. They were all too often too needy and too demanding.

That might just have been a product largely of the game itself; the structure promotes neediness and celebrates by design the very personalities that make for poor real-world social skills. Perhaps a differently-structured game would attract - and maintain - and help foster - a different general kind of player base, one where it is the rule, rather than the rarity, that others are generally pleasant, undemanding, and not needful of your help. Perhaps cooperating out of friendly desire, and camaraderie, is a better model than cooperating out of forced need. I’ll try again, in the future, to see if another game produces a different kind of player base, but for now my game world consists of non-internet games, where I can remain blissfully less cynical about my fellow man.

Search
for decent human life by responding here.

/ MMOGs and Fun VS Status - Wednesday, May 8, 2002 - WintyreFraust
I finally figured out what Everquest was designed to be; a way to gain a sense of social status for people how are overly obsessed with computer games. Like the MUDs that came before it, it is an invented arena that creates a virtual "Fight Club" where the pecking order is the main thing - not the game or the fun; those are secondary considerations. What was first and foremost in the minds of the developers of Everquest, and still is, is that the MMOG is primarily a vehicle of invented social separation, a tool to celebrate the hard-core gamer and clearly demonstrate his or her superiority, at least in this realm, over casual and less-involved players. It is a showcase of the difference between a player and a playah, an uber and a noob, the in-crowd of the professional elite from the masses of wannabes.

Everquest was never intended to be a "game", in any traditional sense. It is a competition of one thing, and one thing only; the ability of the player to ingratiate themselves into the "playah" elite, by devoting massive amounts of time and resources into their online obsession. Everquest, at its core, is all about status. It is a tool to create status in the online gaming world, as are most MMOGs. It isn’t about the game, it’s about who has the most items, who has killed the big boss, who has the particle effect weapons, who is a ranking officer in a respected - or hated - guild. It’s easy to see that it really isn’t about the "game", when 99% of most guild message boards are about status, position, building people up, and tearing them down. It’s about fame and reputation. Isn’t that the whole objective of Mythic’s Realm Points, and EQ’s Legends Server and their PvP-server running tallies? Means by which players can accomplish status and fame? Isn’t that what the whole level system is ABOUT? An easy means of establishing your place in the pecking order of characters?

The problem is, however, that you have to sacrifice fun, you have to sacrifice the "game", you have to sacrifice the enjoyment of most of your customers if you want to retain the ability to stratify the players in this way. You have to remove the best content from the access of the most people to foster this sense of status and fame. You have to have elevations in the online world that 90% of the players cannot reach. You have to make sure there are tactics, abilities, characteristics, goals that only the most devoted players can attain ... if your intent is to celebrate the obsessively hard-core "playahs". You simply cannot have a game that is accessible to your entire player base, AND foster a sense of elite status among a few players. It cannot be done.

This is essentially why I’ll never play a product from the same house of ideas that produced Everquest; it’s because their idea of a game is flawed. They don’t produce games; they produce skinner boxes designed to purposely celebrate childish, vain egoism and irresponsible uses of real life time. Their idea of a game isn’t to make something fun; it’s to make it freakishly hard so that those who advance can feel superior. Period. And I have yet to see any information about their upcoming Everquest franchise products (EQ2 and EQOA) to think that they’ve changed their mind. The changes they made to make the "low end" game easier in EQ are done simply to make it more attractive to get into their treadmill of status; all the while, they’ve been cooking up another trbute to their most rabid players with "Planes of Power".

Although it is too early to write anything of any real substance, it looks to me like Turbine is actually intent on putting FUN first in its development of Asheron’s Call 2. Three key factors: (1) No Death Penalty; (2) No Character Burden for inventory; (3) No running to sell items to vendors - player transmutation of items. Just these three items show that Turbine is far more interested in providing a fun experience, than in creating "difficult" just for the sake of "difficult", in order to foster a virtual sense of status and accomplishment.

People have argued with me that a game based on fun, without death penalties or weight burdens or food requirements, etc., would be boring. My opinion of their argument is that they find games boring unless they can get recognized and can pursue fame and status. They don’t like games where, by their own admission, "just anyone can accomplish anything". This demonstrates the fundamental difference between playing to have fun and working to achieve status, and exhibits the mindset that is poisoning the development of current MMOGs.

All, it seems, except AC2. These are the people that, in AC1, allow housing to be a randomly gifted item. Something so coveted as housing would never be a "random loot" in Everquest or DAoC; no, they make you earn everything of any value like an abusive stepfather. Turbine actually said it would be unfair to the casual player if they made housing a product of effort (time invested in the game). That statement is currently considered heresy in the world of MMOG development. Fair to the casual player? Who cares? If they want stuff, let them EARN it, devote their life to attaining it. Otherwise, it’s not worth anything .. .right?

Who knows, Turbine might actually launch something FUN, a game that is considered a healthy pastime, instead of an electronic method of predation and addiction. Like their idea of PvP ... no penalty for death. None. I never thought I’d say this, but that actually makes me feel like giving PvP a try. No death penalty .. won’t that make the game absurdly easy to try new things in? Won’t that open up every part of the game to any green noob that wants to run check something out? The Horror! People might have fun and not "fear" the consequences! What’s next? Random drops? People getting good items they didn’t spend 20 straight hours camping every day for three weeks, or have to endure two-hour lag-fest with forty other players for a one-in-forty chance of maybe getting a chance to suck up to the leader for the loot? Can anarchy be far behind?

Raise
your status - or just have fun - by posting here.

/ Review of Dungeon Siege - Tuesday, May 7, 2002 - WintyreFraust
I’m not sure if there’s already a term coined for the Dungeon Siege genre ... perhaps it is fantasy RPG. Or fantasy RTS. I don’t think either term really fits, so I just invented my own; the GBBSG, or Group Based Battle Strategy Game. Essentially, you have a diverse group of characters with different abilities that you control, and you strategically command them in order to succeed in the game. Prior games like Chess, Link, and Bard’s Tale through Baldur’s Gate have all contributed to this very fun game type, but Dungeon Siege has done something that very few games have ever accomplished before; it is a genre-defining game, ranking up with Doom and Civilization.

From the moment I fired up this game I was impressed. Smooth, clean, easy to understand, intuitive, and beautiful. The attention to detail is remarkable - not just artistically, but in the focus on making very subtle mechanics in the game fluid and tirelessly logical. For instance, while I was playing, one of the things that started to get tiring was buffing my group ... going from one character to the next and finding the target character and casting the spell .. move on to the next buffing character and do the same. I thought, this would be so much easier if you could select the buff spell of more than one caster at a time, then just click onto the icon of the character to receive the buffs, and just go through it all one time. Sure enough, it worked. More than that, every time I think, "this would be easier if ..." ... there is indeed a shortcut to do what I wanted to do, in exactly the way that made the most sense.

The interface and the operation of characters in Dungeon Siege should become a textbook example of game design fundamentals. You don’t understand how much the interface, and ease of character manipulation, means in a GBBSG until you play one that truly shines. You can get into the game, focus, and enjoy ... without constantly fumbling around with the controls. You don’t have to memorize a chart full of code specifications just to play effectively.

The game itself doesn’t really offer anything new to the genre; it just perfects it, and provides a stunning, seamless world with incredible depth and variety to enjoy your new perfectly engineered game. Some people might complain that it doesn’t break new ground in any meaningful sense, but it doesn’t need to. Dungeon Siege isn’t about trying to break ground or inventing a new genre; it’s about offering those that enjoy this particular kind of game the most polished, sophisticated, and delightful experience to date.

The voice characterizations are top notch and very amusing; the graphics consistently enthralling, surprising, and fluid. Movement through this huge game-world requires no zoning or loading-pauses ... just an occasional cinematic pause while the story advances ... but you never leave your characters in the meantime. It’s nice to move down into a dungeon without any pause or skip for a change. The sound effects range from the pleasant, light melodies and sound of a meadow, to the dark, dripping, eerie noises of a basement labyrinth full of undead.

The only "average" aspect of the game is the detail of the characters themselves. Although you can see every piece of equipment with all the variety of looks and colors, they still look just a bit simple. This only really matters when you’re still and looking at your characters, because in the heat of battle, it all looks like something out of a movie. The only other single dissatisfaction I have is that the camera angle can never go below about ten degrees above the horizon axis. You’re always looking down, just a bit, at the scene. I imagine both this, and the basic simplicity of the polygon structure of the characters has to do with graphic engine considerations; if they had to include the sky in this huge 3-D world, and detailed character polygon structures, you’d probably have to use twice the memory and power to keep the game seamless and without "zones".

Probably the greatest thing about this game, is that it has figured out a very intuitive, meaningful method for character advancement; advancement of characteristic through use. If you use the melee weapons, you grow physically stronger. If you use ranged weapons, your dexterity increases. Cast spells, and your intelligence rises. Right now, I have an archer that has a level 43 rating in ranged weapons and a dexterity of 39, and a melee skill of 12 with a strength of 18. I also have a multi-purpose character in the same group that has a melee skill of 18, a ranged skill of 16, and a nature magic skill of 16. When you discover that items often require two advanced characteristics to equip, like a bow that requires 40 dexterity and 24 strength, you realize you need to get your archer into some melee battles to work on his/her strength. Similarly, if you want to dress your mage up with some plate armor, better get him swinging with that staff he’s carrying. Or with that broadsword with the +29 mana.

Although there are essentially only four skills (melee, ranged, nature and combat magic), and three characteristics (strength, dexterity, and intelligence), this allows just enough diversity to be interesting, and not tiring or overwhelming. After a long day of battle, it is fun to go into a trading post and sort out the loot. Most items are obviously just for sale - shirts that require 40 intelligence and offer less armor class than the scale your mage is already wearing - but there are usually several very nice additions to your team’s inventory, including items that can be bought from the store, many of which have very impressive particle effects.


One of the best feature of the games is absolute control over speed and a full pause. As soon as you hear those black wolves growling, you can hit pause and assess the situation, working out the best strategy. In the heat of battle, you stop everything and use your camera to more closely inspect the action, or slow it down so much that you have all th time in the world to watch AND act. So often, to play a game you had to essentially "not watch" the game, when just obsserving the game graphics is half the fun. In Dungeon Siege, you can watch the game and play it too. Stopping spell effects in motion and being able to see them in action, without worrying about checking on the health bar of anyone, is essential to full enjoyment; I just never realized what I was missing before.

This game ranks right up there with "Doom" and "Sim City" as one of the best that I have ever played, and I will eagerly buy any future expansions and versions.

Come
down to the new dungeon
and wail.