As Legends was designed for beginning characters, you can't import your existing high-powered Dungeon Siege character, so you're basically starting from scratch once again. It's a fairly standard setup that quickly sets up the game, but it provides little motivation to keep you churning through the dungeons. Naturally, your job is to neutralize this threat, and along the way you must discover whatever happened to your parents, who left you behind years ago. The campaign story in Legends should sound familiar to PC role-playing fans: An ancient evil has reawakened and seized the McGuffin it needs to take over the world. You still control a party of characters, slay monsters left and right, pick up lots of loot and gear, and then repeat the process over and over again. Mad Doc played it safe with the expansion by sticking to the original formula and offering the obligatory new campaign, creatures, and items that are expected in an add-on. Since Gas Powered Games and creator Chris Taylor are busy working on Dungeon Siege II, Mad Doc Software (Star Trek: Armada II and Empire Earth: The Art of Conquest) handled the yeoman's work on Legends of Aranna.
In essence, Dungeon Siege basically felt like the rail shooter of Diablo clones, with the added disadvantage that you weren't really doing anything besides watching your characters do all the cool stuff while you were left to smash ton of crates. It didn't help that the levels were designed in a way that limited any sense of exploration or adventure, as most of them were just narrow, linear paths that you couldn't stray from. Since the AI handles most of the combat, by default, it's easy to feel like you're not doing much.in terms of actually doing anything. Some of the grumbling about Dungeon Siege stemmed from the fact that, while it's hardly a bad game, it is one that can get old quickly, depending on how much control you hand over to the AI. Legends is a 15- to 20-hour long expansion that packs more of the same type of dungeon-crawling gameplay from the original-with an emphasis on the "crawling" part. However, if you were expecting Dungeon Siege: Legends of Aranna to shatter the status quo, you're going to be disappointed. At any rate, clearly the game had some room for improvement, and one would hope that the significant time that elapsed between the original release and the release of the game's first expansion pack would have been spent addressing some of these issues. Microsoft's highly anticipated 3D Diablo-killer met with completely different reactions from different players, some of whom were highly impressed by the game's visuals and advanced artificial intelligence, and some of whom felt the game went overboard with the AI-which ended up doing most of work without direct involvement from the player. More than a year and a half after its release, Dungeon Siege is still a game that provokes a mixed response from gamers.