Dungeon Siege III Interviews

A pair of new interviews for Obsidian’s upcoming Dungeon Siege III have become available online. Destructoid asks about rumors that have been floating about that Dungeon Siege III’s co-op gives no XP for assists.

“Dungeon Siege III’s cooperative multiplayer mode is designed to be easily accessible and allow for a drop-in, drop-out multiplayer structure,” explained associate producer Nathan Davis. “To bring this vision to fruition while maintaining both the deep story-based experience of the game and the balance of characters versus enemies, your single player characters will be distinct from your multiplayer characters — however both can be persistently grown, equipped and adventured with over multiple game sessions.

“Co-op players can absolutely expect to have the loot and experience they gain in multiplayer games to be saved to their multiplayer characters … Achievements and Trophies earned in multiplayer are still saved to your profile as normal and there are additional awards that you can only receive from playing in a multiplayer co-operative game.”

Game Revolution has a solid interview with Feargus that mostly discusses Dungeon Siege III, before Feargus drops some more hints about upcoming titles.

GR: Another question I had on the subject of camera was do you think Dungeon Siege 3 might have been as successful if had an isometric view?

FU: I’ll let you in on a secret. Originally, DS3 was going to have a camera that didn’t spin. it was even more top down. What we started playing with was a camera that would be closer and to the character and further away. People want to see their character a lot, like when people are playing the game they’ll switch into the flatter camera in town and switch to the higher camera when they’re in combat. They do it on their own and kind of without thinking.

(…)

GR: Do you see another sequel, licensed game, or an original title coming out of Obsidian after DS3?

FU: There’s nothing that’s been moved forward, but we’d love to develop Dungeon Siege 4. On the flip side I think as a studio we have some original ideas and stories to tell. We have a great idea for a new world we’ve just started pitching to publishers and we have an older pitch that we really like called “Defiance” which is about a fantasy world where, basically, Sauron won. Everything isn’t happy in The Shire, they didn’t get the ring in the fire and the hobbits are all dead. We think that’s a cool pitch and we hope to have a publisher pick that up at some point.

We’re also working on an original IP XBLA game. so that hopefully will be out first quarter next year.

GR: I deal with so many of those, so I love seeing bigger developers explore that space.

FU: It’ll be an action RPG that’s focused on fun, not Dungeon Siege, it’s quite a bit different in a different genre with a different camera.

We also might throw our hat in the whole free-to-play thing. In the game industry there’s a lot of different opportunities for all different kinds of products.