Dungeon Siege 3 - Interviews with Feargus and Nathan Davis

Gamestm.co.uk talked with Feargus Urquhart about Dungeon Siege, a new IP and - Fallout. The interview also covers history of Obsidian as well as the games Obsidian has made - and much more. Here's his answer when asked about how the game compares to say Diablo:

It’s an odd thing, I would say. It’s almost unfair not to say that RPGs over the course of the years have been dumbed down for consoles. But, I wouldn’t say that I would necessarily make a PC role-playing game the same way that I would have made one fifteen years ago either.

A company I used to work for was Black Isle Studios and a PC game I worked on was Icewind Dale, which required you to roll six whole second-edition D&D characters before you could even start playing the game. No one would get through character creation nowadays. You know, people back then loved it, and there are still people that would love that, but I think the thing is when it comes to the console, and maybe all gamers, it has to be accessible, people have to be led into it. And so, my best answer is that the game is easy to get into, and then we ramp up the complexity and sort of add the layers of the RPG system as you play, and that is how we approach things now with the modern console gamer as compared to PC games fifteen years ago.

The rest of the interview is really illuminating to read, especially since he also answers questions like what Obsidian have learned from working with various publishers during the years.

Gaming Illustrated also did an interview with Nathan Davis, Associate Producer at Obsidian.

GI: So with this game there are four present characters, you build them up. It’s not open ended as get to make your own guy and you start as a peon. How big was the tug of war in putting that into the game and what’s the payoff?

ND: Well the payoff is that each character plays really well. They have interesting things they can do, they look great, they have really cool visual effects. Just game play wise you’re not going to make a bad character. You’re not going to screw up doing something, it’s going to be something that’s a really fun build no matter what you do. However I will say that within each of those characters there is a lot of customization. You can actually customize each of your abilities to work exactly how you want them to work and I think that ended up being pretty successful. So no matter what you do, when you pick up a controller and play the game you’re going to have fun.