Dungeon Siege III

Lore & Background

Dungeon Siege III is set in the pseudo-medieval kingdom of Ehb, 150 years after the events of the original Dungeon Siege. The story follows descendants of survivors of the 10th Legion, a military force that provided stability for 400 years. Thirty years before the game, the Legion attempted to remove King Hendrick from the throne, resulting in his death. His illegitimate daughter Jeyne Kassynder rallied the Azunite Church against the Legion, killing most of them. The king's family was killed save for his daughter Roslyn, who fled into the mines. A small group of legionnaires, led by the Venerable Odo, kept descendants safe and calls them to regroup at the game's start.

Players choose from four characters: Lucas Montbarron, youngest son of the Legion's Grand Master; Anjali, an archon who can shift between human and fire forms; Reinhart Manx, a descendant of the mage Merik; and Katarina, the illegitimate daughter of a noble. The game employs classical role-playing elements in a high fantasy setting, with an isometric perspective and seamless world loading that avoids load screens.

Reader's Guide

Dungeon Siege III received above-average reviews, with critics praising its mechanics and graphics, particularly the character models. Opinions on the story, replay value, and multiplayer system were mixed. The game's significance lies in its departure from series traditions: it was the first main entry not developed by Gas Powered Games, with Chris Taylor serving as adviser. The control system was designed for simultaneous console and PC release, replacing the series' automatic targeting and point-and-click mechanics with direct movement and attack controls. Unlike previous titles, only one companion character accompanies the player at a time, though the active companion can be switched. The game features no health potions or instant regeneration items, relying instead on abilities that replenish health over time. Equipment is character-specific, with nine unique sets per character, and items can be transmuted into gold instantly. Multiplayer allows up to four players online, with voting on quests and story decisions, but only the host's progress is saved.

Did You Know?

• Players can transmute items into gold instantly at any time.
• The game uses a decision wheel interface reminiscent of the Mass Effect series.

The Real-Time Combat Imperative

Dungeon Siege III belongs to a genre whose defining trait is the demand placed on a player's reflexes and physical coordination. Unlike turn-based or menu-driven role-playing games, action RPGs thrust the player into continuous, real-time combat that borrows its mechanical DNA from hack-and-slash brawlers and shooters. Yet the genre is not merely an action game wearing a fantasy costume. What separates it from the action-adventure category is the presence of deep role-playing scaffolding: player-driven character creation, branching skill trees, decisions about how a character develops over time, and often direct control over a customizable party. A character's numerical stats govern relative power and ability, and those stats grow as the character levels up. Even massive multiplayer online titles that adopt real-time combat fall under this umbrella. Dungeon Siege III inherits all of these structural commitments, placing the player inside a loop where split-second dodges and combo timing coexist with long-term build planning and party management.

The 1984 Japanese Genesis

The action RPG did not emerge in a single studio or on a single platform; it crystallized in 1984 through a cluster of Japanese developers who fused role-playing progression with arcade-style action. Jeremy Parish of 1UP credits these creators with establishing the genre, while Shaun Musgrave of TouchArcade adds that the Western industry of the era tended to wall off action games and role-playing games into separate demographic silos. The Tower of Druaga hit Japanese arcades in June 1984 as what its designers described as a fantasy reimagining of Pac-Man, complete with puzzles, monsters, and hidden treasure. Its commercial success directly inspired two titles that followed within the same year: Falcom's Dragon Slayer, released for the PC-8801 in September and widely cited as the very first action RPG, and T&E Soft's Hydlide in December, the first of the genre to feature an overworld map. John Szczepaniak notes that these three titles still vie for the position of true genre precedent, and their rivalry echoed through the industry for years.

From Bump-to-Attack to the Sword Swing

Early action RPGs like Dragon Slayer and Hydlide forced players to physically steer their character into an enemy to land a hit, a mechanic that limited both the feel of combat and the expressiveness of the character on screen. That changed with the 1986 release of The Legend of Zelda, which introduced a dedicated attack button that triggered an animated sword swing or projectile on the display. Though Zelda does not strictly satisfy every criterion of the later action RPG definition, it became a structural template for the genre's combat language. It also pioneered open-world, nonlinear exploration and battery-backup saving, features that would be absorbed into countless subsequent titles. The following year, Zelda II: The Adventure of Link pushed further into traditional role-playing territory by layering experience points and level progression onto its action framework, making it a closer fit to the modern genre definition. For a title like Dungeon Siege III, this lineage is essential: the expectation that combat should feel responsive, animated, and player-directed rather than menu-mediated traces directly back to that 1986 innovation.

Parties, Karma, and the Depth of Character

The tradition of managing a group of distinct characters and tracking moral consequences stretches back to the mid-1980s. Falcom's Dragon Slayer II: Xanadu, released in 1985 and billed as a new type of real-time role-playing game, packed its protagonist with a wide array of stats and a sprawling quest, and it introduced an early Karma morality meter: killing enemies deemed good would raise the player's Karma, causing in-game temples to refuse to level the character up. T&E Soft's Hydlide II: Shine of Darkness followed with its own morality system the same year. In 1987, System Sacom's Sorcerian took the party concept further, letting the player simultaneously control four characters in a side-scrolling view, complete with character creation, class-based puzzles, and a choice among fifteen scenarios that could be played in any order, with expansion disks adding more. Meanwhile, the Ys series launched its long-running franchise that same year, finding a devoted audience primarily in Japan. These early experiments in party dynamics, moral consequence, and player-authored character identity form the deep roots that modern action RPGs like Dungeon Siege III continue to draw from.