Kalrathia and the Resistance

I'm on my way to Snowbrook, but I'm always pausing to take in the view..
- there sure are some beautiful designs in DS2

..just look at that artwork - amazing!

IMO, DS2 is still the best looking game around.. :woot:

Hi, Blondin.

As far as the architecture, the flora and fauna, the artwork, I agree, it is certainly visually stunning. I do miss the grand sweeping vistas from DS1, however (those places like Quillrabe Canyons, Iliarth Canyon, the Mesa Desert). In part, DS2/BW is "darker," which was carried over to the brightness/dimness of the picture, and in part, the fog tends to be a bit more dense, both of which hinder getting views such as I'm talking about. There are a few exceptions here and there, but as has been noted previously, these seem to mostly feature territory that is inaccessible to the player characters (and most if not all NPCs, for that matter).

The meshes for characters are better than DS1/LoA as well, but there is still some room for improvement --- additional choices in character creation are really more than simply desirable.

The place where I think DS2/BW falls a bit short aesthetically is in female attire. Some of it is really nice, as I've noted in some of my screenies, but it still pales beside some of the female attire for games like Guild Wars (Female Elementalists tend to have the best attire, imo), Last Chaos (Healers and Mages typically have very attractive clothing, though there are exceptions), 2 Moons (it has unfortunately been too long since I played this one to remember which class or classes looks/look good, but I recall a female archer character and a female spellcaster of some sort whose low-level clothing, at least, was very attractive), etc. Unfortunately, some of these other games really lack in terms of architecture, art, monster meshes, storyline, etc. If the best elements of these various games were taken and combined, we might have the perfect game (and it would definitely be more like DS1/LoA and DS2/BW than it would be like the other games).

Just one example of female attire that I find very nice, from Last Chaos (a Healer, relatively low level; unfortunately, in the game in question, all Healers are both female and Elven, so character generation choices are more restrictive, but the clothing styles are still very eye-catching). I may post a screenie of a Mage from LC (again, all Mages in the game are both female and human, or human-ish) later, if there are no objections, but I don't want to clutter this site devoted to the DUNGEON SIEGE line of games with imagery from other games.

(EDIT: Ah, I forgot, I need to upload the screenshot to another blog post, because it doesn't show up in this reply.)

One of the problems with better attire for the women is that Dungeon Siege lets anyone wear the armor that drops. Men in bustiers just don't look right!

All the games with the better fashions have less choices open once you pick your character. If you start as a mage, you may have to be a specific race, gender and size so that all the costumes will fit. That then means that you can't turn your mage into a ranger later, because rangers are a different race/gender/size.

At least DS2 has more provision for refitting the armors to the various wearers than DS1 did. Everyone ended up armor-shaped, instead of the other way round. I wonder how much Witness' Elves mod influenced the way they did things in DS2?

However, as demonstrated by Witness and Elys, it's possible to make gear so that only a certain race can equip it (Witness' Elf-only gear, and Elys' Succubus-only and Barbarian-only gear). It surely wouldn't take much effort to do the same for gender, and presto: Lothar can't wear the chainmail bikini.

(Edited for typos)

The Male Only and Female Only equip requirements were also done by Ikkyo for Revived. And my original Drake Leather armor for DS2 was a female only armor. The thing is to make a new skill in the formulas.gas and then add that skill to each actor's base template, then place an equip_requirement into the item template that points to that skill.

The original idea that set DS apart from most other games was that your initial choice of character did not lock you in. You could develop the same skills, reach the same levels in anything you chose, by just using the skill you wanted to increase.

If you have equipment based on the initial choice of race or gender, which you can't develop in a new direction, then you've got a different game. Yes, it's possible, but it's turning DS into the other type of game. Which may be a reasonable approach for a Total Conversion project.

Having a vendor stock both male and female versions of some item would be a different situation, but unless they always drop in pairs, too, it just increases the proportion of items you can't use, because it has requirements you don't meet.