Dungeon Siege II – Creatures

What would an action-rpg be, without plenty of enemies and monsters that are out to kill our hero? Quite boring, that’s what! Naturally, there will be objects to use your just recently found axe of kill kill carnage (or whatever name it might have) on in Dungeon Siege II as well.

Coach AI

Dungeon Siege II brings a new Artificial Intelligence (AI) system, the Coach AI. As the name implies, each and every enemy receives a “role” by the designer, and then acts according to this role. This will determine not only rank, but also potential targets. Some enemies might concentrate their attacks on characters in your party who are healing, for example.

“Bringing combat in Dungeon Siege II to the next level is our enhanced A.I. system, which we call the “Coach A.I.” We created this new technology in order to spice up the feel of combat, [and to] allow us greater control over pacing and to give the monsters more personality.” – Kevin Lambert, Lead Designer of Dungeon Siege II

The Coach AI will also enable the monsters to ambush the player, as well as to move and attack in more different ways.

Recurring Nightmares

As if it was not enough with making the enemy more skilled and difficult to fight, you might just have to fight them twice! In Dungeon Siege II, monsters will respawn when you reload a game, giving you a bit more freedom as to when to move on from an area, since you can stay back and fight the same monsters a few times, gathering experience, before moving ahead.

Also, more enemies than ever will now have special abilities.

“In the first Dungeon Siege, players had a considerable advantage over monsters because players could cast beneficial spells (known as “buffs”) on comrades and negative spells (known as “debuffs”) on enemies, whereas monsters could not do either. In Dungeon Siege 2, we’ve added support for monsters to be able to use these techniques as well. And, while the jury is still out on whether this makes battles more fun or not, you can probably expect to see some mighty interesting encounters.” – Kevin Lambert, Lead Designer of Dungeon Siege II

In Dungeon Siege, there were a lot of monsters that were slightly stronger than their counter parts, and viewed as small bosses. In Dungeon Siege II, there will be more, “real”, mini bosses, with special abilities and other things to set them apart form the normal enemies.