[From GameSpy]
The original Dungeon Siege was pretty impressive in a number of ways, but a lot of gamers felt that it was repetitive, simplistic, and light on story. Gas Powered Games apparently listened to a lot of this feedback while designing Dungeon Siege 2, because it redresses a lot of the first game's shortcomings while keeping just about everything that made it great.
The combat mechanics in particular were overhauled, with the addition of different skills that players have to actively engage. You have to keep your mouse on enemies as well, instead of just clicking on an enemy once and sitting back while the game does the fighting for you. The skills are wide and varied, and players have to make strategic choices about which branches and sub-branches they'll climb on the skill tree. You can emphasize melee, for example, but you've also got to choose between being a high-health fighter or a high-damage fighter. Magic users can choose between efficient mana conversation and high burst damage, but can also choose to specialize in fire, ice, or electricity.
This variety also extends to the monsters you'll encounter, with some being low health but high damage dealers, while others can soak up damage but not deal it out. Other creatures may have resistances to certain types of magic, so you'll have to be careful about how you tackle them. These resistances become even more pronounced as you play on harder and harder difficulty levels.
Finally, one of the most interesting additions to the game is the pet system. You can summon or buy pets to accompany your party, and rather than being left out of the whole power-up game, pets have a unique way to increase their abilities. Got too much junk in your inventory? Just feed it to your pet-slash-garbage-disposal. Pets get a little bigger each time you feed them, plus they derive different abilities depending on what you give them. Feeding your pet giant scorpion Pokey lots of armor, for example, will increase his durability.
The world of Dungeon Siege 2 promises to be huge -- so huge that Gas Powered Games added in teleportation sites to help you speed around. Like the first game, the sequel features multiplayer as well, but this time the game worlds are identical. One nifty feature is that you can export your single player party (which can be up to six characters plus pets) to a multiplayer game so that you and your friends can take over. In addition, there's no need to worry if you don't have enough friends available to flesh out a whole six-member group. Individual players can control multiple characters.
Look for Dungeon Siege 2 really soon -- August 2005 in fact.
Read more here!
http://www.gaspowered.com/ds2/news.php
