Dungeon Siege III has plenty of secrets, some of which haven’t been discovered and listed. Whether it’s a secret treasure room, a cool new weapon, or a new character ability, there are plenty of options for gamers to get their fill of the dungeon crawling style of Dungeon Siege III.

Check your surroundings at all times, there may be secrets hidden in the walls. Either by touch or by destruction, there are certain rooms that can be found throughout the game that are not visible on the map. Some rooms will require in-game tasks that are naturally found in the environment to access as well.

TIP: Inside Gunderic Manor in an office, there is a hidden treasure room. The same can be said for the Gunderic Mausoleum, in which there is a bricked up archway in the first room you enter after the first causeway opens. That doorway can be destroyed to access that secret room.

Train and save money for long enough and something odd will become apparent to you. When visiting the shops the first time after a level up, better weapons will be available that are expensive but worth buying if the money is available. If you leave that town with that shop, those special items are replaced by more generic attribute items.

TIP:  Saving money will be a problem in a game that always has a new item to buy at every turn. Save up enough though, and just after leveling up reveals exciting and often very advantageous weapons and armor purchases.

Using the defensive blocking ability all the time might seem like the way to go when you’re swarmed by enemies, but there are moments when you can get flanked and then flayed alive. Don’t just stand there and get attacked hoping that you won’t get hit. More often than not, you will.

TIP:  Blocking should be carefully learned and then implemented into combinations because both Reinhart and Anjali have the limited ability to phase out of existence and appear in the desired direction. This will seem much flashier in comparison to Katarina and Lucas, who just roll like normal.

Learning the area affect spells of each character can be a great addition to your set of combo’s. Each ability can stack one on top of the other especially during a fight with many swarming opponents.

TIP: Chaining together a combo of a summoned creature, plus a distance attack and then a melee attack as well as an area affect spell one right after is a terrific combination to keep you alive. Just be aware of the health meter.

Upgrading your characters’ proficiencies and talents can easily lead to mistakes. In each of the proficiencies there are two separate sections to upgrade within that ability so you must choose one or the other since you won’t be able to choose both.

TIP: Be very selective and tactical in your approach to selecting proficiencies, you’ll only get a chance to upgrade one aspect of the two in the proficiency bar. Choose Proficiencies that allow for health to return when characters are attacked. Also, Reinhart’s Lightning Strike and Katarina’s rifle can be upgraded for a higher chance to ricochet off the first target and hit a second target. This saves focus points that you can use for the next unlucky target.

Katarina might seem weak at first but her dual wielding guns are a huge boon if you take the time to train and upgrade her weapons. Third person shooting fans looking for a fun time will enjoy this little slice of heaven stuck inside an action RPG. For even more Tomb Raider-type fun, play as Katarina and dual wield your pistol and shotgun. Just make sure you don’t get overwhelmed by an entire horde of enemies. Her armor won’t hold up.

TIP: Ever seen the movie Equilibrium with Christian Bale? Did you love the concept of a ‘Gun Kata’ or martial arts shooting form? Then don’t ignore Katarina’s power sphere abilities when she uses her shotgun and pistol. She’ll dual wield like out of a movie, arms spread, shooting 360 degrees to eliminate her foes.

Additionally, RPG fans who are interested in item collection and intense training sessions will realize that when you save, your health returns to 100%. This doesn’t work for focus points, but hit points do fill up again. When going to the save points, it’s not entirely necessary, though always suggested to save just as a precaution.

The action aspect of this Role-Playing Game means that you won’t be able to set your characters with a certain auto-set of attacks and healing that you would normally be able to do such as in the Final Fantasy series. Here you’ll have to be alive and paying attention rather than zoning out with a slightly glazed look on your face.

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Training is an inherent part of Dungeon Siege III, like many role-playing games. As you journey across Ehb there will be forests that reveal a host of monsters that yield experience points as you search for treasure and weapons. It will give you a good sense of the character’s abilities as well as their shortcomings.

Traditionally, as with most RPG’s, these shortcomings make the characters well balanced across the board but in a few instances, a Dungeon Siege III character can become awkward to use in combat.

Make no mistake, this is not at all like Assassin’s Creed where the character is immediately remarkable after 30 minutes of play through. Training is a requirement and will only serve to enhance character appeal. Time spent training early on can yield very nice abilities to play with, depending on character choice and playing style.

Unfortunately, for sheer excitement during combat, the female characters seem to have gotten more of the fun abilities while the men are left to languish with somewhat generic physical combat maneuvers. In a game where training is not only suggested but required, exciting combat is a huge plus for gamers. The built in weaknesses of each of the four heroes succeeds in making the player choose the one closest to their playing style.

Your long range shooter won’t have much armor initially, while your swordsman won’t have any distance attacks at all. Several of the power sphere attacks are just bigger versions of the characters’ standard magic or physical attack. The power sphere meter fills as you attack and another new sphere appears every few level ups. These special attacks might have greater range and damage but the visual affects aren’t always going to wow you at every moment.

There are a few, however, that players will never get tired of using because of sheer cool factor. This isn’t a bad thing since a screen can get bombarded with multiple onscreen spells triggering at once, but does reduce some of the variety in an already exceptionally focused game.

Katarina, the Ranged Shooter of Dungeon Siege III, is the illegitimate daughter of the former Grand Master of the Legion. As a Lescanzi witch, she’ll have a greater degree of magic power later in the game and her initial benefits will be long and short range combat. She will have the power of a long range rifle, but this requires some strategic thinking since the rifle doesn’t work as well as it could up close, so upgrading your pistol and shotgun is suggested.

Charging straight into the fray will only result in a quick death when you get overwhelmed. Unlike his half sister Katarina, Lucas Montbarron can survive using only his two-handed greatsword. In the truest sense of the word, Lucas is a classic swordsman through and through. He’ll have a set of rush attacks as well as some minor degree of magical power. Much of the time, your sword and shield combination won’t do you much good at all, especially when fighting against large groups.

Trade defense for offense and stick to the larger two handed sword. His weapon can still be used as a shield but his major weakness is that he has no ranged attacks at all. This makes certain aspects of the game, such as boss combat, somewhat more difficult. Reinhart Manx is a descendant of a Grand Mage Manx, who is both a Mage and scholar.

He will easily be the strongest characters available early on in the game. This is fine, except that when using his magic attacks, there’s a huge empty buffer zone between the player and the magic attack. Distance magic attacks will cover one area, and then once enemies get close, switching to melee attacks to hold back the enemy hordes.

It’s an annoyance to switch in between the two modes in an otherwise strong character. His melee attacks are strong as well, but not very exciting to watch. Anjali, easily the most fun and versatile character in the entire game, is a joy to play. Not of this earth in the traditional sense, she is an Archon that has a floating fire elemental form that’s both gorgeous and deadly. Her ability to throw fireballs at a distance is only matched by her ability to burn the enemies that surround her while she attacks.

In human form, she wields a fire element spear that is lethal at close range. You’ll probably stick to the fire elemental form for the most part, but the human form has its own appeal from many angles. Something that is nice about the game is that you’ll have multiple save slots. When you want to save, find a save point and do so; there are plenty in the game. This makes playing through the game as all four characters much easier versus having one save slot only, losing all your past saves every time you want to start a new character.

Many of the boss monsters in the game will chase you and, at least early in the game, there will be a set of trees or a formation of rocks that stops the monsters from chewing you up. Running around in a circle might not be the most fun strategy, but it’s often the most useful. Stopping to turn around and attack can then be thrown into the mix, and there are certain creatures you’ll be able to catch up to by running up behind them and attacking.

When facing boss creatures, having a companion with you will make your life much easier. Hopefully, you’ll spend some time upgrading the companion character so that they can help you when you’re stuck. At the very least, the companion character can help revive you, assuming that they don’t die right after you!

Gaining influence with your companion character will yield small attribute bonuses to your primary character, though they aren’t as noticeable at first. Each companion character will offer a bonus boost that varies by companion character but is generally a +5 bonus in those areas.

With many players getting Anjali as a companion character, it is likely that a +5 attack bonus is in the works for a lot of players. This is a nice extra thrown in for those players who do take the time to painstakingly answer the conversation questions correctly. It will not however, replace training and weapons attributes as a valuable source of raising the level of the primary character.

The heroes of Dungeon Siege as a whole, seem to be balanced in their abilities with one or two minor exceptions. The characters are different enough for multiple playing styles, but the voice acting and script leave much to be desired. The characters and the action aspect of this role-playing game make for a more active, if slightly repetitive playing style.

Multiple button presses allow for players to chain together a dizzying mix of physical and magical attacks that can light up the entire screen with multiple colors all at once. To learn the true nuances of the game see part 3 for our review of Dungeon Siege III Tips and Tricks. Exceptionally focused, a tad restrained and slightly bland with voice acting, Dungeon Siege III has the potential to be many hours of fun if gamers will stick to this series.

Players looking for a decently plotted, training oriented item collecting action RPG need look no further. Despite boring item titles, odd character design and lack of several visual necessities, Dungeon Siege III plays well enough with most characters and is traditional enough of a sample as an RPG before gamers transition to the full scale entree course of larger more modern scale RPG’s.

The article Dungeon Siege III Character and AI Design Part 2 Review appeared first on The Toonari Post - News, Powered by the People!.

French author Aliette de Bodard has established herself as one of fantasy’s rising stars. She is the author of the genre-crossing Obsidian and Blood series, which follows Acatl, the Aztec High Priest of the Dead, as he investigates supernatural crimes in pre-Columbian Mexico. The series currently has two books: Servant of the Underworld (Angry Robot, 2010) and Harbinger of the Storm (Angry Robot, 2011). A third book, Master of the House of Darts, will be released by Angry Robot in October of this year.

In addition to her novel-length works, de Bodard has also published short fiction in such publications as Azimov’s, Interzone, Realms of Fantasy, and The Year’s Best Science Fiction.

De Bodard was kind enough to answer the Toonari Post’s questions via email.

Toonari Post: When did you first realize that you wanted to be a writer?

Aliette de Bodard: It depends… I started writing when I was eight, but I didn’t have much organisation or drive at the time. I guess the starting point was my deciding I wanted to publish a novel: I was sixteen at the time and living in London, and I found a book by Orson Scott Card about “How to Write Fantasy and Science Fiction”, which explained the nuts and bolts of craft. I immediately started working on a novel (I still remember cutting out my own index cards). I didn’t ever finish that novel, because the hard disk it was on was fried on the move back to Paris–which taught me a very important lesson on the value of backups–but I never looked back after that.

TP: Could you describe your journey from aspiring writer to published author?

AdB: I have the inconvenience of not living in an English-speaking part of the world, so for a while I was struggling to find like-minded people. I finally joined up an online crit group at Hatrack, and started writing short fiction, which I religiously submitted to Writers of the Future every quarter. For a few years, I skipped between crit groups, trying to find one that would work for me–I finally joined OWW, which provided a big breakthrough in terms of craft: I could crit the numerous stories posted there on my free time, which enabled me to gain a much better understanding of the things that worked and didn’t work for me, and I could get fast feedback on a piece.

I kept submitting (and collecting rejections, which I pinned to the wall behind the dining room table where I worked), and I finally got two big breakthroughs at nearly the same time: first, Jetse de Vries told me he was buying my short story “Deer Flight” for Interzone; and, about a month after that, I got a call from Writers of the Future telling me I’d placed second in my quarter.

TP: What made you decide to write about the Aztecs?

AdB: I had had exposure to the myths and legends of many cultures when I was young, but somehow I’d managed to always skip the Aztecs: the first I heard of them was through my Spanish courses. At the time, the consensus was that of the conquistadores: that the Aztecs were a barbaric, bloodthirsty people. I twigged on pretty early that the conquistadores were not very nice people, and it made me wonder what they’d managed to distort in their reports on the Aztecs. And, sure enough, it only took a little bit of digging to find out about a fascinating civilisation, who was way ahead of Europe in lots of ways (gender equality, medicine, astrology), and whose empire managed to span the entire length of Mexico (no mean feat considering their armies were basically on foot and had to cross mountains and deserts). And I thought it was a real shame that this entire culture had been basically reduced to bloodthirsty villains. I don’t personally agree with human sacrifice, but I can see why they would have thought it was necessary given their belief system (and God knows the Middle Ages that their raft of practices I personally find unsavory, such as torture–something which actually shocked the Aztecs, as they couldn’t understand why something as sacred as pain and blood would be so casually used). So I decided to write stories set in that milieu, partly as a way to explore the culture, and also partly seeking to do my bit to redress the balance (though I’m aware it’s going to take more than a few books to change perceptions, but I can at least try).

TP: How did you find your agent? Do you have any advice for writers who are struggling with the dreaded query letter?

AdB: I found my agent through a series of weird coincidences. Basically, we met at World Fantasy in Calgary, in 2008, through a friend we had in common; but it’s likely nothing would have come of it if my plane back to Heathrow hadn’t been canceled, leaving my agent, me and Marc Gascoigne (who was editing for Angry Robot) stuck in the same hotel lobby with nothing much to do. They both coaxed me into pitching Servant of the Underworld to them; and, after the first moment of panic, I managed to condense my query letter into something short and punchy–and that’s how I ultimately got both my agent and my editor.

I have struggled with the query letter myself, and I think a lot of the problems I had was trying to summarise the entire book in two paragraphs, which is just impossible. I found that it helped me to think of the query letter as a short introductory paragraph setting out why you’re contacting this particular agent, the book title and word number, two or three short paragraphs of book summary, and a paragraph about the relevant bits of your experience as an author (mention previous publications, and other credits if they are relevant to the book). The main problem I had was with the book summary, and I solved it by thinking of it, not as a summary, but as that little blurb you put at the back of the book to make readers want to pick it. I got books from the library and studied the blurbs for a while, and I saw that they were focusing on one aspect of the book and one cool character, and that was about all they had space for. That’s how I wrote my own summary.

TP: Do you have a particular routine for writing? For example, do you set aside a specific time to do it? Do you aim to write a certain number of words/pages per day?

AdB: I wish I had a routine, but the sad fact is that with the day job and the irregular evenings, I don’t have much of one. I basically slot writing into the empty spaces of my schedule. I tried aiming for a certain number of words or pages, but it didn’t work for me, because I can be so irregular. I prefer to set aside, say, 1-2 hours during which I do nothing but write, and accept that sometimes I’ll have 500 words at the end of it, and sometimes 100 words–and sometimes negative words, because I’ve been editing and had to excise an entire section…

TP: Do you do anything special to get yourself in the mood to write, such as listening to a particular kind of music?

AdB: I do have music I listen to, which helps me maintain the mood across the various computers I write on. What I usually do is brew a teapot full of tea (or a herbal brew if it’s too late in the evening), and bring it to my writing desk. I then answer a few emails and browse forums for a bit; and then I start writing by turning the music on.

For music, I mostly go for singer-songwriters such as Vienna Teng, Dar Williams, Girlyman (my new favourite), or for ambiant mood pieces such as traditional Asian songs. I used to listen to last.fm to get my songs, but we got a home stereo with way better sound, so now I tend to put a CD on the stereo and listen to that. It has the advantage of giving me a break when I get up to change the CD.

TP: Given the prominence of human sacrifice in Aztec culture, some readers may find it odd that Acatl never sacrifices anyone as part of his duties as High Priest of the Dead. Could you explain why you chose to omit human sacrifice from the cult of Mictlantecuhtli?

AdB: I did it for a couple reasons. The first was that I was a very green writer when I started writing Servant of the Underworld, and I took one look at the possibility of writing a scene with an actual human sacrifice–and just didn’t think I could pull it off in a way that wouldn’t be corny.

The other one was a basic sympathy problem: the Aztec civilisation is already fairly brutal and fairly distant from our current society, and I didn’t want to add to that distance by having an utterly unsympathetic main character (and I was already running into enough trouble with the animal sacrifices, which put some people off). Acatl was the reader’s only viewpoint in the society, and so he had to create some reasonable empathy with the reader, since I wasn’t going to be able to use someone else as a counterpoint in the narration. I had already given him a sense of duty and a distaste for political manoeuvering, but he remained fairly distant as a narrator, and I thought having him offer human sacrifices in the name of his god would break the fragile balance of empathy I was trying to achieve. So I decided that I was going to skip the human sacrifice part from the clergy of Mictlantecuhtli, but also that it would be disingenuous to remove it from the society. I tried to include some of it in Servant of the Underworld, but I think I was more successful in integrating human sacrifice in both Harbinger of the Storm and the forthcoming Master of the House of Darts.

It’s been three years since that first draft now, and I feel more confident that I could pull this off and still draw the reader into the story, but still… it would be a very difficult juggling act, since the main explanation I could offer would be religious belief, and a lot of people in the US either find religion repulsive, or follow a religion that categorically forbids human sacrifice as an aberration.

TP: What are your influences as a writer?

AdB: Every book I read! More seriously, in genre, I’m very much influenced by Patricia McKillip (I love her style, and her evocation of magic as something mysterious and deadly, not as a system that can ever be mastered and fully understood), Ursula Le Guin (who always has such lovely wordbuilding, and very efficiently manages to question what we think of as the fundamentals of genre and society, such as gender, or political systems, or religions), and I’m indebted to Roger Zelazny for the flamboyant use of style and mythology in his books such as Lord of Light.

Out of genre, I got a lot from mysteries: I love Ellis Peters’ Brother Cadfael for so accurately nailing the mindset of the Middle Ages, and for presenting a character for whom faith is the centre of the universe; I read Elizabeth George for her depiction of the devastation left by a murder and her fine psychological studies of characters; and I probably wouldn’t have written [the Obsidian and Blood series] if not for Christian Jacq and his books set in ancient Egypt, and Robert Van Gulik and his Judge Dee mysteries.

TP: Could you give us a taste of what will happen in Master of the House of Darts?

AdB: Ha! Master of the House of Darts is, basically, the consequences of what happened at the end of Harbinger of the Storm. (trying not to spoil the end of the second book here…) The main characters made an important decision at the end of that book, but they didn’t pause too much to consider what it would do to the Fifth World. There were also a number of unsolved conflicts, particularly between Teomitl and Tizoc-tzin, that will take centre-stage in this book; and Acatl is in for a number of surprises from people he took for granted.

TP: How do you go about making the past accessible for readers who might not have much historical knowledge?

AdB: Making the past accessible boils down to two things for me: one, making the mindset accessible, and two, getting the details right; The mindset is pretty much vital, but it has to be explained enough. I can tell you that someone I know took a job at a bank manager, and you’d guess they did that because they liked finance and/or wanted a high-paying job; but I tell you that my main character wants to die as a human sacrifice, and I’m going to have to do much more explaining so that you don’t get the wrong idea. It’s the gulf between our Western mindset today and the mindset of an unfamiliar culture in the past.

The second things is details: once again, I can tell you that me and my friends went for Chinese food, and you’ll probably be able to fill in the gaps. If I say that my main character had a typical Mexica meal without telling you what, you have few ways of guessing. So I have to fill in the gaps: tell you what he ate, what it tasted like: I could also do it for me and my friends, and it would reveal things about our characters; but here’s it’s a far more basic need. I have to tell you so you can imagine it. And the more details I give you about the food, about the houses, about the rhythm of daily life, the more real the setting is going to feel to you. There is an upper limit, though, beyond which anything I tell you is just infodumping, but the reader tolerance to details can be fairly high.

It’s also very easy to get details wrong or slip into the wrong mindset (i.e. back into the 21st Century): a writer friend and I once had a good laugh over the fact that his main character in a medieval fantasy had just had donuts–I surmised he must have been hungry at the time.

TP: In addition to your historical fantasy, you’ve also tried your hand at alternate history in the form of your Xuya universe. Could you briefly describe Xuya, as well as your inspiration for it?

AdB: Xuya is what I think of as my sandbox of cultures: it’s what would have happened in North America if the Europeans hadn’t arrived first. The basic premise is that Chinese ships land in America in 1411 (this would have been technologically possible, because Chinese ships were much more advanced than European ships of the same time period; it just didn’t happen because various factors caused China to all but close its borders and fall back into hardcore Confucianism). Because the Chinese were more interested in prestige than in conquest, I imagined that as when they met the Mesoamerican Empires, they would prefer trade to conquest. And, because China already has a foothold in America (and brought gunpowder and smallpox ahead of schedule), the Spanish find it much harder to land at the end of the 15th Century.

This leads to a tripartite North America: you have a Chinese colony in the West (but with far more rights given to the Native Americans), the northern tip of the Mexica Dominion (the Aztecs) in the South, and the much diminished and much impoverished United States. This is the setting for the modern stories; I also took this forward into space, and imagined civilisations centred around Minds, artificial intelligences incubated in human wombs.

TP: On your website, you say that you’ve written novels set in the Xuya universe. Do you have any plans to publish them?

AdB: I do have plans! My SF thriller set in the Xuya universe, Foreign Ghosts, is undergoing revisions at the moment, and I’m brainstorming a few sequel ideas. Then it’s going out on submission, and we’ll see what happens.

TP: There are all kinds of stories now about authors finding success by self publishing on the Kindle. What made you decide to go with a traditional publisher? What are your thoughts on the future of the publishing industry? Do you think self publishing will be the way of the future, or will there always be a place for traditional publishers?

AdB: I’m not really in a position to know, I confess (I live in a country where Kindle access is fairly limited). I wanted to have a physical book, and one that would be sold in major bookstores, which pretty much ruled out self-publishing (and, at the time I was writing, self-publishing was just taking off, and the Kindle was barely out).

I think there will always be a place for traditional publishers, both as gatekeepers, and as people doing the work authors don’t want to do. It’s a bit like agenting: I could negotiate my own contracts, but I don’t have the will, the time or the competences to do so. Similarly, I was listening to Michael J. Sullivan at the Nebulas weekend, and he was saying that doing the covers, editing and proofreading his work had been very much time-consuming–and I totally believe him, because I’ve seen how much work went into friends putting up even a simple short story on the Kindle. I have a dayjob; and I admit I just don’t have the energy to do all of this.

TP: What advice would you give to aspiring authors?

AdB: Believe in yourself, and keep writing. And beware of rules: you have to know and understand why they exist, but after you do that, you must allow yourself to break them. Otherwise you’re just limiting yourself.

TP: What’s next for Aliette de Bodard?

AdB: Several things are in the pipeline: I have a novella I hope to finish one day, and then I’ll move to editing the Xuya novel, Foreign Ghosts, as well as planning its sequels. Then we’ll see; I reckon that should keep me busy for a bit.

To learn more about Aliette de Bodard, check out her website . You may also follow her on Twitter or ‘like’ her fan page on Facebook.

The article Aliette de Bodard, One of the Rising Stars of Fantasy Fiction appeared first on The Toonari Post - News, Powered by the People!.