Dungeon Siege III

8/10
dungeon siege 3 treasures of the sun featured image

Dungeon Siege III: Treasures of the Sun Review

Treasures of the Sun is the first (and perhaps only) DLC pack for Obsidian Entertainment's Dungeon Siege III.  In it, you learn that a former legionnaire named Etienne du Marnay left for the Aranoi Desert to search for "the greatest treasure of the ancient Azunite faith," and you decide to follow him -- as much for the treasure as to discover his fate.  Of course, the desert isn't an especially hospitable place, with skeletons, mummies, and sand worms around, but you eventually stumble across a friendly abbey, and its inhabitants welcome you in, and of course sell you items and give you quests.

In some ways, Treasures of the Sun is a "more of the same" DLC.  It focuses on battles, just as you'd expect, but the battles are tougher than in the rest of the game because enemies hit harder and have more health.  How tough is it?  Even a lot of the breakable objects require multiple hits to destroy.  I'm all for tougher battles, but the problem with the DLC is that the strategies for them don't change.  The same attacking-and-dodging techniques that worked in the original game still work here.  The main difference is that now battles take longer, and you're much more likely to wear out your hand with all of the clicking required.  But the good news is that you're also much more likely to get knocked unconscious (most bosses can wipe you out in a couple of hits), and so there's a little more tension in the fights, something that was missing prior to the DLC.

Outside of the combat, Obsidian provided some new things to see and do, some minor and some major.  The minor additions include a special pool at the abbey where you can re-spec your character (for the low, low price of 20,000 coins), the increase of the level cap from 30 to 35, and several new deeds, achievements, and places where you can influence your companions.  There are also over 40 new items to find in the game.

The major additions with the DLC include essences and ultimate abilities.  Essences are objects dropped by bosses or gained by transmuting objects.  They can be added to your equipment to give you bonuses to your chaos: vampire, doom, retribution, stagger, and warding statistics.  Any number of essences can be applied to an object, with the caveat that the object can only have at most six types of bonuses (but since there are only five types of essences, this isn't much of a caveat).  There is also a coin cost to applying essences.

Essences are fun but they create balance issues.  I added every essence I found to my Wraithband and turned it into a seriously overpowered ring, and that was just from essences from the DLC.  If you start the game over and collect essences all the way through, then you could make your character unstoppable by the end, and remove any chance of being challenged.  In my opinion that's bad, but of course others might take the opposite view.

Meanwhile, ultimate abilities are, as their name suggests, really powerful abilities.  You can find three of them during the DLC (one each for healing, shielding, and damaging), but you can only have one "equipped" at a time.  However, just like with empowered abilities, I didn't use them much.  They're sort of awkward (to trigger them on a controller, you have to press LS and RS at the same time, and since RS also controls the zoom level of the camera, triggering them tended to mess up my view) and they're not necessary, at least on the default difficulty, which is what I played.

Overall, Treasures of the Sun is a nice enough DLC for its $10 asking price.  You get five hours of new content, complete with new locations, bosses and equipment, and it's all polished and well made.  It's just that, at least for me, it's also a little bit uninvolving and repetitive.  I wasn't really a fan of the combat in the original game, and it plays about the same here.  Also, while the story is well written, once again you're uncovering somebody else's history, which doesn't have anything to do with you, and so the events in the DLC don't have any sort of resonating emotional impact.  Of course, Treasures of the Sun is still an action RPG, so maybe I'm expecting too much.  If you're just looking for stuff to kill and shiny things to loot, then you'll probably find the DLC a reasonable diversion.

Dungeon Siege and Deus Ex Series Available on GOG.COM

Among all the Diablos, Torchlights and Titan Quests of old, Dungeon Siege gets forgotten quite often. But if you’d like to remedy that, you can now purchase the whole series bundled into a single collection on GOG. And then, you…

George Ziets Interview, Part 4 – Matt Chat

The latest episode of Matt Barton’s Matt Chat show features the fourth part of Matt’s interview with George Ziets. This time around, the interview revolves around compelling villains, unorthodox RPG settings, save-the-world stories, and more. It also covers the turbulent…

George Ziets Interview, Part 3 – Matt Chat

The third part of Matt Barton’s video interview with George Ziets is now live. This time around, we get some behind the scenes stories from the development of Neverwinter Nights 2’s Mask of the Betrayer expansion. We’re also treated to…

Unconfirmed: Microsoft to Acquire Obsidian Entertainment

From the unexpected newsbin and “what does this mean for the future of CRPGs?” department comes a report via Kotaku that Microsoft is in the final stages of acquiring Obsidian Entertainment. It’s a bit surprising given their history and the…

Obsidian Entertainment’s DLC Survey Results

The results of Obsidian Entertainment’s DLC-related survey are in and you can check them out, all arranged into neat bars and graphs, on Obsidian’s forums. Perhaps the most surprising thing about the results is the number of respondents: in roughly…

Obsidian Entertainment’s DLC Survey

Now that DLCs for video games are pretty much an inevitability, Obsidian Entertainment would like to know which kinds of DLC do you like the most, and how you usually purchase these now ubiquitous pieces of additional content. And in…

George Ziets Interview, Parts Three and Four

Rather than make us wait any longer, Forbes has published the third and fourth entries to the interview they conducted with veteran RPG designer George Ziets, thus concluding the series. The writing-related topics this time around are “Engaging the Player”…

George Ziets Interview, Part Two

The second installment in Forbes’ four-part interview with veteran RPG designer George Ziets is now online, with this particular entry focusing on “Collaboration in Game Development” and the role that collaboration plays in his current position on Torment: Tides of…