Dungeon Siege III Interview

Dungeon Siege III producer Nathan Davis fields another fistful of questions about the action RPG sequel in a brief Q&A that’s emerged over at Raw DLC. A sampling:

Obsidian has progressively moved further and further away from the squad-based games. Do you feel like these games are now dying off?

No I don’t think they are dead. We had the chance to do this kind of game style and we opted for something a bit more personal. A lot of the reasoning for moving away from that was so that we could play to the strength of consoles. When a game is made for PC the system allows for a lot more micromanagement. A lot of, (Pause the game, move here, cast this here.) And though it’s been done for consoles before, it’s really difficult to make it work well. We felt that since we were rebooting the franchise, we wanted the experience to be rewarding no matter what you play it on. The action RPG style just felt right.

How much of the original titles are there in this? Does it have a lot of fan service or are you kind of restarting the lore?

From a gameplay stance we have done a lot of changes with it and because there is a decent number of changes between Dungeon Siege I and II, we don’t feel like that will effect anyone that greatly. But from a lore standpoint we took everything that existed. We had a really good level of base material to work from: we had this world of Ehb, there are goblins, there used to be krug, there was a vast number of enemies to work with, there was this level of magic in the world. All the hard stuff was already done, but the great thing was that it was open enough so that we could really mould it into our own thing.