I've been quieter than usual. Jeremy bought me Dungeon Siege: Legends of Aranna, which has been sucking my free time from aimlessly reading the entire Internet. ``Games'' of other kinds; at work, various failures are slowing me down. So I'm typing up my thoughts on Legends of Aranna.
Dungeon Siege is a bit of an anomaly in my experience of role-playing games. Despite the initial bugs, Temple of Elemental Evil is a wonderful interpretation to CRPG - good role-playing, turn-based combat, and reasonable UI. Dungeon Siege, perhaps especially the sequel, seems lack on the role-playing side, but the arcadish combat and great UI gives it an addictive playability.
Catering for the collector addict and countering short-term min/maxing, sets are groups of magic items whois individual items increase in power as they are used in combination with the rest of the group. While an 80 armour may be relatively poor after a while, when the bonus moves from +10 armour to +50 armour as you pick up other items in the set means you'll live with slightly poorer armour class for a while in hopes of finding another item in the set. And in the mean-time, you're relying on another item in the set, and you need the bonus of the item you're thinking of replacing. Enticing!
Looking at the UI only visually, you might believe that nothing's changed. Thankfully, under the hood, things have changed. There's now a button to auto-distribute potions, and the inventory self-reorders itself if an item is picked up that cannot fit into the available gaps. Also, weapon groups now memorise the actual spells you want in the group, not just whether it's spell 1 or spell 2 in your spellbook, making spellcasting a lot easier to deal with!
New weapons and armour strengthen the fighter, but a lot more noticeable are the new spells. Orbs and Glyphs are two powerful indirect spells. Orbs circle the caster, and perform magic on behalf of the caster. Runes are fixed in position, and react when monsters draw near to them. Glyphs haven't really got into my gameplay, but my magic users are generally surrounded with orbs that'll last for at least ten minutes.
There're a few new monsters to summon, but the expansion allows you to transform into the same monsters you can summon, so magic really finds its own in the expansion. A magic user with a Orb of lightning, a few dropped glyphs, a summoned Barkrunner, and transformed into a Barkrunner herself is a frightening possibility.
Rounding things off, you can choose a smaller load pack animal, the Tragg, that can hold their own in battle (well, better than the donkey), and you can also have one backpack per person for some additional storage.
Legends of Aranna includes the original Dungeon Siege module, and surprisingly retailed at almost half of the price of Dungeon Siege when it came out. Only downside (for me) is the Microsoft branding.