As I was retreating out of a spider-infested room under an old ruin, I found myself feeling impatient for Gyorn to hurry up and stop sucking.

 

I recently revisited the 2002 hack-and-slash game Dungeon Siege, which had consumed a lot of my time back in the day.

Dungeon Siege might superficially resemble a classic CRPG – and its still-good visuals and Jeremy Soule soundtrack don’t hurt – but as an ARPG it’s a lot more of an action game than an RPG. The world design is one long, winding corridor with the occasional side spur. Side quests might point you toward some extra loot and XP in those side spurs, but the main quest is basically one iteration after another of “go down the corridor a bit further.”

There are four skills, which are four different kinds of attack – melee, ranged, and two different flavors of magic. Characters advance whatever skill they’re using, Skyrim-style; unlike Skyrim, though, non-combat spells give microscopic amounts of XP, and there are no non-combat uses for the other two skills. There’s something that looks like a character class system, but it’s just a name the game assigns to that combination of skills.

And while new party members might join up favoring one attack over another, you can easily hand that nature mage a sword and use him as a front-liner (who’s going to be behind the difficulty curve for a while, but if you really need another front-liner…).¹

Speaking of party members, they don’t talk after their recruitment. At all. This is no Baldur’s Gate, and doesn’t have anything like that kind of roleplay.

What it does have is a surprisingly enjoyable difficulty curve.

In the moment, aside from more common things like which enemies to focus down first and when to switch weapons,² the main decision you’ll find yourself making is when and how often to retreat. You’re usually outnumbered by slower and weaker enemies, and you’ll often want to back off and wait for them to come to you in smaller, more manageable numbers.

(Don’t “retreat” to an area you haven’t cleared out already, unless you want to be even more thoroughly swarmed under. Guess how I know this.)

Progression is a fine balance. New party members are weaker than your hero and probably weaker than your other companions as well; they’re under-skilled and under-geared, but the fights you’re about to face will be harder because you’re supposed to have another’s character’s worth of DPS. So you’ll be retreating more often and protecting the newbie a little bit.

Then the newbie levels up a bit and can use the better gear you got as a loot drop a while ago, and you have to retreat that much less often. By the time you get through that leg of the main quest, your former newbie can take it and dish it out well enough, and the next character will be the newbie.

And also, every time your party size increases, those smaller decisions I glossed over above get a little more complex. A monster encounter tuned for a larger party, for example, lets the monsters focus down your squishy mages faster, if the AI decides to do so, so you’re more often forced to reposition and defend…

 

By the time I got to the end of the spider dungeon, Gyorn kicked ass, and the boss spider gave me only a little trouble. My next recruit, Gloern, would have to wait until he had good enough stats to use Gyorn’s hand-me-down gear, despite starting a few levels higher than Gyorn had when I first met him.

I’m not sure whether I’m going to finish this playthrough or not, but I did just sink a good number of hours into a game I beat repeatedly 20 years ago, which is as high a recommendation as I can give.

 

Tip: if you get the Healing Hands and Transmute spells as early enough loot drops, save immediately, and use that save whenever you want to “start” a “new” game.

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1. Ulora, your first potential companion, is seemingly designed for this kind of versatility, with a wide and even distribution of skills and attributes (aside from a slightly low Strength), because there’s no way the devs could know what kind of help the lone hero will need at this stage of the game.

2. The weapon hotkeys can streamline things here. Not their default settings – 3, for instance, will have all your party members switch to their first spell quickslot. You can reset them, though, so that 2 is something like “everyone use their ranged weapon or favorite long-range spell,” 3 is “melee fighters get the swords out, archers and mages keep at it” anf 4 is “oh sweet Jesus, everyone with a healing spell start spamming it, everyone else should go melee for the shield bonus.” This doesn’t sound like much, but once you’ve set it up to your taste, it helps.