The Fantasy Art of Dungeon Siege and the Legends of Aranna Expansion - Mods, Cheats, and Resources

The Fantasy Art of Dungeon Siege

The Fantasy Art of Dungeon Siege II

Use Cheat Codes: Using these, you can avoid playing the game and instead focus on wearing cool gear and setting up your heroic poses for screenshots. The only one you really only need is "+drdeath". When in the game, press ENTER to bring up the console, then enter '+drdeath'. You will get maximized stats, which will allow you to equip just about everything in the game.

If you are taking pictures of only characters under your control, you may also want to experiment with "+minjooky" and "+maxjooky", which shrink or gigantize your character, respectively.

Treasure Island: This boring map lays out every official item in Dungeon Siege and Legends of Aranna. While there isn't any sort of scenic backdrop, it does offer immense convenience in outfitting a character to take a portrait, as some of the items are not available to players in-game and you'd otherwise have to make your own mod to access them.

In unmodified Dungeon Siege, items are generally randomly generated in stores or as loot, so it's chancy whether you'll see a particular piece or not. This mod simply takes the chance out of it.

You'll also quickly discover that although there is a lot of nice fantasy art for the inventory icons, when equipped, the actual items often fall far short of the detail. See the screenshot below for an illustration of this. Also, many items are simply re-colourings of a basic model.

To overcome any prerequisites for using a particular item on Treasure Island, use the cheat code "+drdeath".

Once you're outfitted, you can wander off into a nearby clearing on Treasure Island to either conquer, or be fried by, giant killer chickens. (I'm NOT joking.)

See Far LOA Camera Mod: Without this mod, you'll be staring down at your character from an angle due to the camera restrictions. Nowadays, the processing power required by Dungeon Siege is trivial, and releasing the camera will likely not put any strain on your computer compared to the computing power widely available in 2002 when it was first released.

If you've extended the maximum view distance too much, the game might fail to load certain areas (especially those cluttered with a lot of objects or terrain features) quickly enough, and corrupt its map in memory. Don't save your game--Just restart Dungeon Siege, and reduce the maximum view distance.

When taking your shots, keep an eye out for things you were not meant to see, however, such as the underside of the tower roof in the screenshot below. (Also note the hideous 'toadstool cap' hat on the man -- not all Dungeon Siege fantasy art is stylish!).

Some Tips:

Use the Cursor: The cursor won't show up in a screenshot, but hovering the cover over a particular character will causing them to be brighter, regardless of what local lightning should dictate. For example, the anime girl in the below screenshot appears brighter because I had the cursor on her.

Turn Off the Green Ring: When a character is selected, there is a green ring underneath them, and it will normally show up in screenshots. Turn it off by going to Options, and looking under the Video tab for Character Selection Ring.

Turn off the GUI: When you take a screenshot, you will also get the Graphical User Interface, like the compass in the top right. To turn it off, use the command "-gui". This works just like a cheat. Once you turn it off, you will also not be able to see the command line box when you press ENTER. It's still there, though, so you can re-enable the GUI by typing blindly: ENTER to open the command line box, then type in "+gui" and ENTER to re-enable the GUI.

Command Line Options: In directory that Dungeon Siege was installed, there will be a Readme.rtf file. Scroll down to Section F: Gameplay and Multiplayer Issues and browse the command line options. In particular, you may want to use the "height=xxxx" and "width=xxxx" options to force the game to use a certain resolution not otherwise supported, especially if you have a widescreen monitor. Also try "aa_screenshots=true", to get better screenshots. Anti-Aliasing is a process used to make smooth lines and edges.