Dungeon Siege II – Multiplayer

As good as every game that is released nowadays support some kind of multiplayer game mode. And with the original game supporting it, it should come as no surprise to anyone that so will Dungeon Siege II. The method of implementation has shifted a bit however.

While we don’t know which multiplayer modes from Dungeon Siege 1 have made it into the sequel, we know of one addition or replacement that has been made. While Dungeon Siege II will not support GameSpy Arcade, it will be using GameSpy matchmaking technology.

Multiplayer Map

The original Dungeon Siege came with a special multiplayer adventure, the Utraean Peninsula. This however, will not be the case of Dungeon Siege II.

“Rather than shipping with a fully separate multiplayer world like we did with Dungeon Siege, we’re focusing on making the single-player world huge and giving it a lot of depth. It’s much less linear than Dungeon Siege’s world, with lots of secret nooks and crannies, and the player can travel around it much more easily.” – Daniel Achterman, GPG Designer

With a deeper world, it is more and more important to be able to save our progress through it, and in Dungeon Siege II you will be able to save in multiplayer and then later pick up where you left off.

Multiplaying Multiplayers

One very interesting feature of Dungeon Siege II is the ability to bring more than one of your characters into the game as a party! Here’s what Gas Powered Games has to say about it:

“There are several multiplayer modes to choose from to get different mixes: you can play it so that each player controls one character, or you can play with two players each controlling three characters, or three players each controlling two characters.”

As you might gather from the above quote, the number of players able to come together in a game has decreased. In Dungeon Siege II, a maximum of four people can get together and go on adventures.

Hey! That’s mine!

Cheating. A side-effect to the ease of modability, much of the original game was plagued by cheaters and modders gaining 3 levels per slash with their sword.

“Preventing cheating is a real tough problem… As developers we wrestle with this, because the only way we can insure that there is absolutely 100 percent no cheating is to run the game on a secure server. As you can imagine, that’s extremely costly and complex. Having said that, we do want as many people to enjoy the game as possible and do as much as we can with the multiplayed model to keep it to a minimum.” – Chris Taylor

Besides cheating, it has also been an issue with other players killing you and grabbing all your items. In Dungeon Siege II, “Drop on Death” will no longer happen in player-vs-player.

In related news, quests awards will now generate in multiple copies, one for each player. This should help diminish the quarreling of who should get to use that nice piece of loot.