XxTaLoNxX

Well... yes. This is Business 101, my friend. If you cut costs then the profit margins are larger. That's why businesses have looked into cutting operation costs for years. If say a business can cut 100,000$ off the energy bill by changing the light-bulbs they use, they increase profits by reducing costs. This is applicable in the game industry as well. If you spend less on development and advertising (double-edged sword, to be honest) you CAN increase profits... IF a reasonable amount of product is sold. So, while it's possible, admittedly we need details. I'm just trying to interject some logic into the discussion. My points are that as long as the target audience sales are sufficiently permeated in the market then you have reached at least ONE milestone of success. You have sold the product to the target audience which is "supposed" to be your largest market. Anything after that is additional success via sales through a secondary market. Make sense?

It is fun! But I'm the kinda gamer that can adapt to poor keymapping to play a game that is worth the frustration. But I will be the first to admit that the FIRST THING I do in a game is go into options and remap keys. So why a developer like Obsidian would leave this out of a game with such fast paced action with tons of keys (buttons) being pressed throughout battles... is well, beyond my comprehension. IT'S A REQUIREMENT IN TODAY'S GAME INDUSTRY TO INCLUDE KEYMAPPING IN A GAME ON RELEASE DAY. This is for any developer who might happen upon this message. BTW I am a game developer, in college for... game development. So for all you "Old Dogs" you need to learn some new tricks before us "New Bloods" come up and take your jobs from you for incompetence in your field. Just sayin' Leaving out NEW GAME+ and Keymapping in this game are the two biggest mistakes Obsidian has made with this title in my eyes. Both are fixable, unlike that train-wreck DA2 from BioWare. Just for the record I would love to program for Obsidian, but dread the idea of taking a job with BioWare.

Honestly... it doesn't matter in the grand scheme of things if it is being highly played. Only that it was highly sold. People beat games and then never play them again. It's a hard-hitting truth about the gaming industry. It takes something like a NEW GAME+ or Arena mode to keep players interested if only for a nominal amount of time. BUT you have to understand, being played and being sold ARE NOT THE SAME. Also, who was ever the market for DS3? Hardcore DS fans? Obsidian fans? RPG fans? To be honest each of those projected catagories are only SMALL PARTS of the gaming industry and player demographics. So let's say that every DS fan bought DS3, and every Obsidian fan bought DS3. As far as anyone should be concerned that means the game has already been successfully permeated in the target audience and the rest of the sales are residual income from sales that have been formed outside the target audience. But nothing is ever so concrete and even if they were the agencies that we use to postulate such hypothesis don't give us the full story. I'm pretty sure that every DS fan and Obsidian fan hasn't yet bought the game, since nothing is 100% so let's again use a hypothetical yet realistic number 80% and the other 20% of sales are probably from outside the target audience. Regardless it seems like a success under such circumstances. It's not like Obsidian/SquareEnix used millions of dollars on advertising, and the game seemed like it was turned over rather quickly from the time of us learning about it's development and Obsidian is expert at creating games under strict timelimits and funding. So I would assume it wasn't a high budget project. So with these assumptions... 1) Not much money spent on advertising. 2) Not a high budget project. 3) A large amount of target audience sales were sold to said audience. It sounds like they at least made their money back plus some. Sounds like a success to me. And the game is still being sold.

Uh huh, yeah been here for a whole day and you assume you know me. I guess you assume you know a lot of things... Wait, first you say that this Dungeon Siege had nothing to do with and was unrelated to the other games and when someone points out that you are incorrect you tell us not to "pull that crap on you"? Ok, now that is just ignorance being bliss, but the thing is you aren't keeping that ignorance to yourself. You are sharing it with the world for us all to see. I was using a similar game as a reference point. And here is the thing, as far as hack n' slash RPGs go... this is the best in years and will be at the top as far as quality goes until Diablo is released. My point is that Obsidian did a good job, and a hell of a lot better than an industry RPG "giant" or whatever the BioWare fan boys are calling them. In fact BioWare started taking the suck train and never got off since ME2. Great! Yeah, me too. I played DS1 and DS2 years ago. I enjoyed them both but those games were as generic as they come and at least Obsidian/SquareEnix put story at the top of their "to-do" list with this game. So yeah, in a way you're right. DS3 is nothing like the first two DS games... it has a story. Going to have to cut you off again. See, I lived in the Age of the Arcade and DS is NOT an arcade game. It's more of an action-rpg. See arcade games all share one real big thing in common... Highscore charts and Leaderboards. DS3 doesn't have that single defining trait. There is no similarity between DS3 and StreetFighter vs Capcom. 1) Why would WoW fans flame me because I think Obsidian is better than BioWare? WoW has nothing to do with BioWare. 2) Blizzard wrote the book on RPGs? What book are you reading? It's wrong. SquareSoft/Enix wrote the book on RPGs. 2a) Final Fantasy 2b) ChronoTrigger 2c) Secret of Evermore 2d) Dragon Warrior 2e) etc, etc, etc

Oh! I get it! This was a joke! *whew* You had me worried that you were serious, I men yeah, any game with dudes in full plate armor that are beamed one at a time down from the Starship Enterprise, must be awesome... right? Oh, wait, no it was bad. DS3 is 100x better than DA2. Period.

Ok, a suggestions thread. So here are mine. 1) NEW GAME+ (by popular demand!!!) 2) New MP loot tables. (currently MP is almost unplayable this is one of the reasons) 3) New MP difficulty balancing (it's pretty brutal, even on Casual and Normal) 4) Character Quests that reward "Master Gear" or very high level drops 5) Do something with the Influence bar/stats (currently it's pretty much unused and useless) 6) Camera Angles (even in SP need some work) 7) Key Re-Mapping (HOW COULD YOU FORGET THIS?)

Here's my view on the matter of reviews and sites like Metacritic. Dragon Age 2 got an 80ish score... it sucked balls. Dungeon Siege got a 70 and it rocked balls (with some flaws that could be patched up and fixed). That tells me that I can't trust Metacritic and I am NOT going to be a sheep and play games that obviously had influenced ratings by means other than the integrity of the game itself. If you don't get what I just said, then basically, "Eff Metacritic and IGN, they suck and they show ratings that publishers PAY FOR." I, however, am going to be my own judge. I like Dungeon Siege 3 and would recommend it to anyone who games. Yes, it has flaws, but it's fundamentals and gameplay are solid. NEW GAME+ can be added. Camera Angles can be fixed, and Keymapping can be added.

I agree. I this point I am grading it one less on the 1-10 scale, it would be a solid 7 but it's just a 6 without keymapping. 10 - The game starts here because I love the game and Obsidian. 9 - -1 for horrible camera angles 8 - -1 for no NEW GAME+ 7 - -1 for stupid bad multiplayer and horrid MP scaling (casual = single player hardcore?wth?) 6 - -1 for no remapping of the keys

Ok I will present to you a choice. 1) You are ignorant, cynical and spouting the same nonsense that every CLUELESS hater is spouting. 2) You have no idea what you are talking about and forgot the mantra, "Better to be silent and appear stupid, than open mouth and remove all doubt." Throughout THE ENTIRE GAME events and characters of the past are referenced over and over and over again. IN FACT there is an entire level in the game dedicated to those past games... AND a quest called Dungeon Siege. If that is Obsidian's way of going off the beaten path of the old games then I am sure as hell glad they didn't give this game to BioWare. In every possible way, DS3 is better than DA2. In every way. So I can only assume the reason the review scores are so low is that people are snubbing Obsidian and they have their heads up BioWares asses. Obsidian and DS3 are 1000 times better than BioWare (or any other RPG developer right now, and that include SquEnix.. FF13? a joke). Arcade? Seriously? Where are you putting your quarters? Wait.. I dunwannaknow. Yeah, calling DS3 (a dungeon crawling hack n' slash) arcade-like is about as smart as calling any fighting game an arcade game.

DS3 is one of "those games" from a dev-team that I absolutely love, and by "those games"... I mean a game that has all the makings of something great and awesome, but fell short. And here is why it is one of "those games" that just fell short. 1) No NEW GAME+... seriously, after building my character/s up as far as I did, with as much love as I did, tweaking and finding what build/s I enjoy.... nothing. That's it just nothing. In this day and age... HELL after ChronoTrigger, I saw NEW GAME+ as a "industry standard" and there are only a few games that don't have some sort of NEW GAME+. For an RPG though.. it's not an excusable feature, it's goddamned required. 2) Some serious balancing issues are present between Katrina and well, all of the other characters. I hate to say that my favorite character is so completely OP I cakewalked her through HARDCORE without saving (outside of town) or dieing once. 3) I really didn't feel like the decisions in the game actually mattered in the long-run. I also felt like the "decisions" weren't mine to make, and that's bad. If it was me I would have told the "Meisters" to eff-off and die and I would have joined the Dapper Gent, that's as vague as I can get but that's the jist...... OF THE ENTIRE GAME. I felt just like I was playing Dragon Age 2 (which sucked balls btw) when it came to making stupid forced and completely linear decisions that made no goddamn connection to ME as a person. It may as well have had no decisions if you won't let us forge our own path. What if some people didn't want to help the Queen or join the uptight and corrupted Meisters? And those big decisions at the beginning of the game... like busting a certain artifact to free a tortured soul? Yeah, meant nothing in the grand scheme of the game. 4) Agility... that's it. All you really need when it comes to stats. Why? Because that is the true source of DPS and DPS ends fights before the enemies can even mount an offensive. My point is that it is a "master stat" I played through HARDCORE and for every character I had with me all I did was pump AGI for crits and every damn fight ended before they really ever began and always in the same fashion 20+ criticals spread out across the screen. 5) No NEW GAME+.