Dungeon Siege 3 - Interview @ GameBanshee

GameBanshee sent over the first of four Dungeon Siege 3 interviews they have from a recent press trip. Square Enix' Director of Business Development, David Hoffman, answers this first batch of questions with a focus on the origin of the development:

GB: Was the Dungeon Siege IP specifically what you were looking for initially? Or were you originally hammering out ideas to see what would be the best fit for a partnership?

David: We did not talk about Dungeon Siege originally. Obsidian had – I don’t know how much they want to me say, but – they had a very, very cool original design, and I was personally pretty excited about it. And that’s what we were talking about at first, and then it just kind of naturally evolved into an opportunity that came about within Square between Square and GPG to acquire the Dungeon Siege IP, and it seemed almost like a natural fit to say, “You know what? The original idea is fantastic, but I think we can mitigate risk and have a lot of success if we instead build Dungeon Siege III."

And to Obsidian’s point of view, I think they were very excited about DSIII. And because DSIII fit their proprietary engine and what it was really designed to do, which was to build an action RPG with a dungeon-crawling emphasis.