With the release of Dungeon Siege, Microsoft jumped into RPG territory formerly dominated by titles like Diablo and Baldur's Gate. In Dungeon Siege, you start out as a simple farmer taking on a world brimming with evil, gaining new skills, weaponry, and armor along the way. Multiplayer mode allows you to team up or fight against each other over the Internet, trade equipment, and explore dungeons built with the free Siege Editor. While we've seen a lot of these things in previous games, Dungeon Siege does it in such a beautifully rendered 3D environment that you're likely to find yourself taking a break from the almost non-stop fighting just to admire a gorge or a waterfall for a while.

Gameplay
Mastering the basic controls of Dungeon Siege comes very quickly. Everything from the camera view to player movement is manipulated with a few mouse clicks. The keyboard is required only for advanced commands. Combat is relatively automatic, but by the time archers and spell casters get into the fray, you certainly won't be taking a snack break in the middle of a battle. Nor will your character sit there and take a pounding without fighting back, unless you explicitly tell it to do so. The game effectively let's you control all the key elements of play without bogging you down in detail or becoming a click fest. My one complaint about the interface is that, since everything is moving around in real time, it's easy to accidentally click the wrong item and thereby end up, for example, moving instead of shooting.

Abilities increase based on which ones you use rather than what class your character is. While this gives you almost complete control of your destiny, it does undermine the class system. An archer, for example, will acquire casting skills quickly enough just by using spells.

As always, gameplay varies significantly depending on whether you go it alone or play online. The single player map that comes with the game is quite linear. Basically, you hack and slash your way down the road because there is nowhere else to go. Your party can grow to as many as eight characters, including a pack mule. You will encounter dungeons, caves, swamps, and towns complete with stores, bars, and blacksmiths. Note that the occasional sub plots are laughably shallow compared those of earlier games. They are over quickly, you get rewarded zero experience, and it's back to the long, long road. The story line, as far as there is one, doesn't amount to much, so if you want to go the single player route, expect to do a lot more fighting than thinking. Also expect to lose interest immediately after reaching the end of the long, long road. (Did I mention how LONG it is?)

Playing over the Internet, however, will extend your enchantment with this game considerably. The multiplayer map is much less linear than the single player one. It can be played cooperatively against the computer or players can form teams and go against each other. Monsters respawn, meaning that when you turn around and go the other way you don't just encounter dead bodies. Incredibly, the AI adjusts enemy numbers to the number of players "on the fly," so that when a player joins a game already in progress, the size of the monster army increases accordingly.

Perhaps the biggest drawback is that the Net game accommodates a maximum of 8 players, and, while the single player game lets you accumulate a party of up to 8 characters, in multiplayer mode you can only play one character at a time. It should keep the action flowing quite smoothly, but don't count on the kind of massively multiplayer, persistent world experience offered by games like Everquest. Clearly, that was not the objective here. Dungeon Siege will be at its best when people are creating and hosting custom-made adventures for small groups of friends and cohorts who gather online for a few hours of gaming, no MMORPG-style monthly fee required.

Which brings us to one of the best things about Dungeon Siege - it is refreshingly mod-friendly. With the free editing tools available at their Web site, users can create their own campaigns, scenarios, and worlds. Almost everything can be changed or tweaked, and you can bet that many people will be enticed to build whole new gaming environments that bear little resemblance to the original.

Graphics and Sound
Every game boasts about graphics these days, but Dungeon Siege truly delivers on this score. The landscapes are no less than spectacular. The world is "seamless," so there are none of the download breaks you get in some games when moving from one "zone" to another. The detail is also impressive. Spell effects are pleasant to look at, and arrows remain sticking out the enemy. When you put on new armor, your character's appearance changes to show it, and combat movements are tailored to weaponry, so that a staff is handled much differently from, say, a mace. Trees fade away when they block the view of your party, which you are able to spin around and zoom in on.

Swords clash nicely, arrows swoosh through the air, fires crackle, and the sound is generally solid, if not a tiny bit excessive when the battles get large. The music is as appropriate as any I've heard in an RPG. On the down side, the voice acting isn't nearly as convincing as some of the other games in this genre.

Summary
Obviously, no game can make it on graphics alone, but this is one case where watching is almost as enjoyable as playing. For a hack and slash style multiplayer RPG, Dungeon Siege is a very good. The multiplayer game will easily double or triple the life you get out of this release, but the 8 player maximum is a serious limitation, especially with Never Winter Nights now accommodating 64 players per map. Still, I'm looking forward to seeing its potential unleashed by mods and custom-made worlds, which are already beginning to hit the Net.