Those of you who frequent Steam may have noticed that the demo for Dungeon Siege 3 just became available, ahead of the game’s release later this month. I had a chance to sit down with it and play it through last night, and scribbled down a few notes as I went.

I also remembered, about five minutes into the demo, that playing a Steam game means easy screenshot capturing. Hence:

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With that in mind, let’s start with the graphics. The game looks really good. Not ground-breakingly good; there’s nothing particularly next-gen about the Onyx engine that’s on display here, and object/character models don’t have ludicrously high poly-counts. The Samaritan trailer this is not.

But equally: so what? The engine is no slouch; the scenery, object, and character models look really good and boast lots of intricate detail, and the magical effects are dazzling without being comically overstated.

And the lighting…the engine handles light very well. Nighttime scenes at a burning mansion, dim and dusty chapterhouse interiors, country roads and villages at dawn, and deep caves all look terrific, and the interplay of light and dark in each seems unique in how it is handled.

The original Dungeon Siege was praised for the impressive vertical scale of its scenery, and Obsidian have managed to capture some of that same magic here; waterfalls, canyon vistas, and a town built on a rocky hillside are where this is most apparent. 

The one dungeon you get to storm through in the demo, however, doesn’t make as much use of this; it doesn’t convey the same sense of a plunge into the depths of the world as did some of the dungeons made by the Lazarus or U6P teams. There were a couple areas in it that made…decent use of verticals, and in one case this worked to make the cavern seem quite large. But in general, the dungeon seemed a bit shallow; I’ve seen better vertical depth in some areas of Torchlight.

Actually, Torchlight is worth a mention here not only because of the dungeons, but because there were…more than a few points during the game where I got a bit of of a Torchlight vibe. Little things — like the use of “ember” to modify and ehnahce your character’s stats and abilities, and the way loot flew out of bodies and chests — brought Runic’s runaway hit to mind as I played.

Dragon Age 2 is also worth a mention here, since Dungeon Siege 3 also feels a lot like that game in various ways. The control scheme, for example, felt a lot like BioWare’s, as did the camera and zoom controls. Conversation sequences felt almost like a fusion of the Dragon Age: Origins and Dragon Age 2 models; the conversation interface was, like the original Dragon Age, split into an upper portion where the NPC was visible and a lower portion where dialogue options were overlayed on a tinted layer…but the dialogue options themselves were presented on Obsidian’s interpretations of the dialogue wheel that BioWare has been using in their recent titles.

(That said, unlike in a Dragon Age or Mass Effect game, there didn’t seem to be any sort of morality points associated with particular dialogue choices.)

The way the world was built also reminded me of Dragon Age 2; woodland paths were fairly linear with only small side excursions, and towns were only marginally better. The sense of an open world — i.e. a world where you could just go exploring anywhere it suited you — was not conveyed, and there was at least one loading screen separating the opening sequence (a run through a burning mansion) from the middle portion of the demo. 

I don’t know whether the Onyx engine supports the same sort of continuous worlds that made Dungeon Siege the go-to engine for Ultima remake teams a decade ago. If not, it still does reasonably well in allowing for the creation of particularly large areas that can feature multiple types of terrain (the middle and end portions of the demo all take place without once ever presenting you with a loading screen, despite taking place in a variety of interior and exterior settings). If the game ships with a development toolkit, I could see the argument for using it to build Ultima-related projects.

It’s also worth mentioning that while the demo doesn’t allow you to save your progress, it does let you get a look at the save mechanic that the game employs; there are save points (marked by a pillar of light, and by a leaf on the overhead map in the upper-right part of the screen) which appear periodically throughout areas. The spacing of these is well thought-out, and you shouldn’t lose significant progress due to periodic deaths as long as you use the save points as they come. (I don’t know whether saves will be automatic or manual, although I suspect they will be automatic.)

What’s left to discuss? Oh, right…combat.

Combat is…well, Sergorn Dragon, via Twitter, likened it to Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance, and though I’ve never played that game I suppose it’s an apt comparison. To me, combat tended to have the same “gangbang” quality that the original Dungeon Siege did; enemies rush at you in mobs, although the ones with bows or muskets will keep a bit of distance and will shoot at you.

Fighting mostly involves a lot of clicking, although there are a few special moves that can be deployed to help you defeat groups of foes; I played as the Archon character, who in her “Fire Form” can summon a conflagration up around herself that simultaneously heals her (and any party members) as it damages enemies. And in her “Human Form”, she can do tricks with polearms and roundhouse kicks that damage multiple foes at once. 

(Eventually, I figured out that the easiest way to deal with groups of foes was to quickly transition to “Fire Form”, call up a conflagration, then transition back to “Human Form” and make with the kicking and the spearwork. I died less often then. Except for the final boss fight…there I basically just played in the “Fire Form” and shot fireballs at the boss while relying on the conflagration to take out her minions.)

Overall: There wasn’t anything in the demo that stood out as ground-breaking, and there was a lot in the game that seemed borrowed from other titles, but Dungeon Siege 3 nevertheless came across as a well-made, reasonably engaging, smooth and stable game. It looks great, and runs well even at full HD resolution* (on a Core i5 system with a 1 GB Radeon HD 4650 graphics card). And even though I can’t put my finger of exactly what, there’s something about the game that invokes a certain Ultima-esque familiarity.

The sensitivity of the camera (which rotates about the character when you press the A and D keys; this also changes the direction your character walks) take a minute or two to get used to, and some have argued that the control scheme is more optimized for a controller than a keyboard. I didn’t really get that impression myself; the game handled very well with the mouse and W-A-S-D. Moving during combat was sometimes a pain, however.

All in all, I think Obsidian have a solid game here. It doesn’t feel all that much like a Dungeon Siege experience once all the pieces are put together…but not in a bad way. Obsidian have taken Gas Powered Games’ original monster-killing romp, modernized it, and made some changes that, overall, have improved on the experience. It’s not perfect, but I’ll definitely enjoy playing through the campaign once it releases.

And despite the fact that it probably won’t happen, I’m still hoping that Obsidian will release the game with a toolkit; I could see it becoming a very powerful and worthwhile vehicle for Ultima fan projects if that happened.

* Note: I started playing the game in full-screen, but switched to a lower-resolution windowed mode after a few minutes in order to take screenshots…and notes.