Chris Taylor Interview

ComputerAndVideoGames.com was able to track down Chris Taylor of Gas Powered Games at Microsoft’s London office to ask several questions about the game everyone’s talking about, Dungeon Siege. Here’s a snippet:

Interfaces for RPGs especially are really important. Can you tell us about what you’ve done in this area for Dungeon Siege?

Chris: Well, the whole screen is really customisable, for example I can grab the bar at the bottom and put it at the top, you can minimize your compass and move your character portrait around if you so desire or even shrink it. We’ve really studied the way people play, and we looked at the different styles, and we basically built the game interface to handle every style.

What people may not realise or appreciate is that in some games you, for example, click on this potion, release the mouse button and have it stuck on the cursor and then you click to drop it. Or some you click down and hold, drag and release. We’ve implemented both systems so that people, whatever they go to do, it works just exactly the way they think it should. People who have seen the game have thought, “Gosh, why aren’t all games made this way!” and even for us it was like, “Hey, what kind of discovery have we made!”