dungeon siege

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pc - 2002 - gas powered games

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↓ written 28/12/2024 ↓

dungeon siege is an action role-playing game set in a medieval-ish world populated by animated skeletons, blocky dogs, and flame thrower-wielding mechanical goblins.

the potion system is fasinating. each potion - whether health, mana, or the esoteric combination of both - is an individual item that takes up one slot in a character's inventory. rather than knocking back the entire vial, a character will only drink as much of the potion as they require. for example, a health potion that contains 400 hp of liquid will leave a half empty bottle after a swig to top up a 200 hp gap. as opposed to many rpgs that stack health items into a single slot, there is no need to reload when a character is accidentally commanded to consume this precious resource. at worse they will have a sip, recork the flask, and carry on.

as a result of this design choice, inventory management becomes a world class juggling act. each player character's inventory is a 4 by 13 grid. as individual potions only take up one square, each character can potentially carry 52 potions. however, if the party then stumble across a valuable item, a sacrifice has to be made: retaining precious consumables for the journey ahead or building up gold in order to replenish potion reserves later. as the player is unlikely to ever have the funds to max out an inventory like this, it is an extreme case, but one that highlights the sort of strategic decisions the player has to make in regards to managing their characters' inventories.

A screenshot of Dungeon Siege showing a single character's inventory.

as the player progresses through the game, they discover that different characters consume different potions in different quantities, and can adapt their inventory management to reflect it. for example, those that wield melee weapons are more likely to sustain damage than the bow-user. the player may absolute cram the melee characters' inventories with health potions to tank enemy damage output whilst using the ranged character's pack as a back-up store for when those at the front run low. or they may risk it and have the ranged character set out with minimum health potions to sustain only themself to maximise space for hauling about valuable treasure.

↓ written 04/01/2025 ↓

another well considered feature is the full party select. when directly controlling all avaliable characters, the player is able to command them to move, attack, and interact as a group. digging a little deeper reveals that a lot of thought has gone into the functionality for this. for example, the player can command the whole party to drink potions via hotkey (h for health, m for mana), but individual characters will only do so if they are below a certain threshold. this prevents sufficiently healed/mana'd characters from stopping combat needlessly to have a glug and also makes it so that the player does not have to pause the game specifically to instruct a single character. another notable example is with item pickup; the closest party member with avaliable inventory space sufficent enough to carry the new loot will move over and retrieve it. as well as being highly practical, this also makes for a fun spam of sfx when a mostly unburdened party is instructed to pick up 20+ items and endeavour to do so as quickly as possible.

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