Dungeon Siege III Interview

Shacknews interviews Obsidian CEO Feargus Urquhart about Dungeon Siege III, focusing on considerations made when rebooting a “well-liked” franchise, and the difficulties in bringing the experience to consoles.

Shack: What was the lead development platform for Dungeon Siege 3?

Urquhart: Every night, we get all three builds [PC, 360, PS3]. The challenge with a role-playing game a lot of the time is that we don’t control everything that the player can do or want to do at a certain point in time. We don’t know all the abilities that the player is going to choose. We know what they could choose, but we don’t know [what they will choose]. We don’t know what the combination of what’s going on with their friends and their abilities. So, we do have to focus a little bit on: “How do we make this all run on a console?”

If there was a lead, I’d say – not from the standpoint of having the experience be fun or not – but we did have to focus on how do we make this all work in 512 megs of RAM. I would say that console [sic] has been the lead. We don’t start with the PC, and then make it work on the console.