1/ Never played Dungeon Siege. It's works much like Priston Tale, or Diablo. (not surprising as most of the developers are the original Diablo creators)
2/ Well it depends really. Quests vary in length, and are fun providing you with large amounts of EXP. You can still go off killing monsters for smaller experience, there are more than enough near the start to keep any adventurer busy.
While the Exploration killing won't get your levels up quickly, the Main Quest will.
You can easily get Level 3-4 within an hour. Level 10 shouldn't take more than 4-5 hours of gameplay.. but that's if your set on just leveling up though. The worlds are huge and completely linked.
In terms of fun with trading, and battling I think the game is on-par with Final Fantasy. It's good on your own, but much quicker in a party. To that effect though your experience isn't cut based on your party... Instead you all get what you would if you'd beaten a creature on it's own. So I think that is better, especially when your trying to level at 15-20.
This all said, as you go up in level an experience, so do the monsters in the area your in. So you'll be able to level up slightly quicker than other games.
Still I think that if your trying to go up higher than 30, it's going to start taking ALOT to achieve. The balance is there to make sure that gamers who play day'n'night, won't have a completely unfair advantage. Something I've often found to be an issue given I tend to only play these games for an hour or so a night.
To give you a rough idea of the total time, I played almost non-stop over the weekend of the beta's.. from Level 1 I was able to get to Level 20... that was like over 3 weeks worth of my regular play time though.
3/ A LOT. More districts will appear the more players that are online. Each area tend to hold something like 50-60 people. Even at 09:00 GMT (this is on release day which is like 2hr in to release servers going live) there were a good 8 European Districts.
4/ Excellent, it was bloody good even on 56K during the Beta. Cable though I've not experienced any lag, even when heavy downloads are going on in the background.
The game automatically updates areas as your playing, so the game engine updates are only minor. Often it's done in-game too so all you have to do is restart the game.
Your signature has been erased by a mod. Please resize it to under 600x120. Thanks!
