Dungeon Siege 3 - Interview @ RPS

Chris Taylor (the Gas Powered Games' Chris Taylor) has been interviewed at Rock, Paper, Shotgun about Dungeon Siege 3.  As a consultant only, he often doesn't have much to say about the game directly but he does make some interesting comments on game length and other issues:

RPS: So! How do you feel about Dungeon Siege, looking back on it?

CT: I think we made a game that was bigger than it needed to be, and that delivered more hours of gameplay than people technically wanted. It’s important that people get through a game. If somebody stops playing because of the sheer, daunting size of it, they don’t advertise the game to their friends, which is a really interesting byproduct of game completion.

Think about a game that you don’t get all the way through. You don’t talk about it. But the game you get all the way through in 8 hours, you come to the office on Monday and say “Yeah, I got through this, this and this.” “How was it?” “Pretty good.” “Can I borrow it? Ah, I’m gonna pick up a copy on my way home.”

But when you don’t finish a game, these kinds of conversations don’t happen. You don’t market it to your friends.

RPS: I guess if you don’t finish a game, you don’t finish it for a reason, so the last taste in your mouth…

CT: Is the quitting taste.

RPS: Yeah. You don’t finish it because, say-

CT: The end level boss was too hard.

RPS: And when that happens, you don’t say “Hey man! You have to play this game. It’s probably good. I don’t know.”

CT: Exactly. “I wouldn’t know because I haven’t finished it, but you should go buy it.

While we're on this game, PC Gamer has a short preview:

The technology is impressive. The dungeon they’re fighting through is miles deep. You can see it spiralling down into the depths. Each little goblin that gets knocked off the ledge can be seen pinwheeling into the river below. This isn’t an off-the-shelf tech solution like the Unreal engine: this is developer Obsidian finally flexing their technical muscles.