Chris Taylor Interview

Dungeon Siege Vault has posted an interview with Gas Powered Games’ Chris Taylor, talking about CRPGs in general and where Dungeon Siege fits in:

Jonric: It has been suggested that there’s a trend for games of all types to blend in elements from other genres so that we are seeing more hybrids and fewer “pure” titles in any genre. How do you feel about this, and do you feel it’s applicable to Dungeon Siege?

Chris Taylor: I think that some things don’t mix, but quite a few of these elements mix nicely. For example, the only thing that we really took from RTS is better party control. We’re not trying to mix an RTS and an RPG together into one game – that would be a crazy way to look at it. We just realized that RTS games have the best interface for controlling a lot of different units, so we borrowed a bunch of those ideas. In Dungeon Siege, we allow the player to just click on the character they want to control, or they can lasso-select a group, or they can assign the group to a hot key for quick re-selection. The characters can be set to automatically defend themselves, or told to do nothing at all. These are all logical ideas that come straight from RTS, but blend beautifully into the RPG when you need to manage an eight-character party. I don’t know what will happen next for sure, but I think that it may be really cool to see some RTS games adopt some of the cool character development that is popular in RPGs. Who knows what will happen next?

Included in the interview are some more of those awesome-looking screenshots we’ve been getting accustomed to seeing for the game.