Dungeon Siege III Interview

After nabbing some time with Obsidian Entertainment CEO Feargus Urquhart during the Dungeon Siege III press event earlier this month, Siliconera has conjured up the results of their interview. On the lack of character creation options:

Since were talking about classes can you talk about how you balanced them and while these are “protoclasses” there are only four of them.

We wanted to make it easy when a player started. If you have seven classes laid out in front of someone, there aren’t really seven core classes in a role playing game. You have a melee character, you have a range character, you have a damage character, and a healer. I guess damage and range are similar. Once you start adding more classes what you are really adding a lot of the time is basically multi-classes. So, you’re adding classes that are half of this or a third of this and two-thirds of that. We didn’t want to complicate that for people. That’s why we started with what I said, these protoclasses that you can change as you go.

That’s kind of how we came up with the four. On top of that with the whole male/female thing, because Anjali can be more melee versus sort of spell-y, if you want. If someone wants to play a more melee female character than she can play that role. We tried to think about it that way what are the kind of roles people want to play? What are the sexes people want to play? Ultimately, we wanted to also make sure each of the classes felt unique from the standpoint of animations, items, abilities, and all kind of that stuff.