Yesterday I spoke to two people about Dungeon Siege III. One claimed that playing the demo was such an agonising experience that she cancelled her preorder, the other boldly stated that it was the finest ARPG of its time. I was tempted to make them fight it out by furiously clicking on one another but it didn’t seem right. Not in the real world. Today, there is news of a big chunk of DLC due in October. You’ll have to shell out for this, around $9.99, but it does sound there’ll be a healthy amount of content. That’s if you consider searching for treasure and ruins in a desert full of monsters healthy. New monsters and items are par for the course, but there’s more! An enchanting system will allow you to make your shiniest loot even more shiny and you’ll also be able to respec your character. Cue cries of: “It should have been in the base game!” No word if there’ll be a further patch for us PC folk alongside the DLC. Personally, I stopped playing the game before the keybinding patch so don’t know how much that did to improve things. Any thoughts?

If you really, really want to besiege dungeons three-at-a-time, then this competition is for you. In celebration of there first being Dungeon Siege, and then two of it, and now three of it, the lovely chaps at Square and Obsidian have provides three sets of all three games for you guys to win. That’s right: Dungeon Siege One, Two, And Three (Count ‘em!) for you to play. They’re Steam codes, too, so if you already have one of the games you could always pass the code along to a chum. That sounds like a decent prize to me, but what to do to win it?

Well, we want dungeon-themed limmericks. Send yours to this address, and the best of them, as judged by us, will win the codes. The competition closes 12 noon UK time on Monday. Also see: rules.

The third siege of dungeons arrived a little while back, with Obsidian taking the reins of the Gas-Powered Games-created loot’n'kill fandango. I’ve been frantically clicking my mouse button at it for the last few days – an act which I have now transmuted into some words. >

First point of interest for me in any dungeon crawler: can I summon animals? Silently beating up monsters in rock corridors gets pretty lonely, after all. Also, I’m really very lazy – if there’s some companion animal doing half the damage for me I don’t need to press so many number keys. Get to it, my furry friend.

Dungeon Siege III delivers on this front, at least. My stocking-wearing gunwoman can summon a spectral hound to antagonise foes while she snipes them from afar. On top of that, one of the AI-controlled companions (only one of which you can have with you at any one time) can summon a flaming> hound. It’s doggy carnage out there.

Obsidian lead designer Nathaniel Chapman has stated in an interview with Eurogamer that the developers are currently working on a patch to improve the PC version of Dungeon Siege 3‘s keyboard and mouse controls. I’ve yet to play the PC version of DS3, but I was witness to Alec’s agitated bellowing about the PC controls (among other things), so I’m going to go ahead an assume that this is a good thing.
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