Dungeon Siege III Preview and Interview

Should you be looking to brush up on your Dungeon Siege III knowledge this morning, you can do so with the help of this tiny preview on Gamer Gaia…

The kingdom of Ehb is in turmoil once again. The 10th legionnaires responsible for protecting the kingdom during The War of the Legions established a new kingdom at the end of the war. All seemed to be going well as the 10th legion provided protection while leaving the ruling up to a monarchy. For years the legion and the monarchy shared favor within the kingdom. That is until their king of Ehb was murdered 30 years ago. The assassination was instantly cast upon the legion by Jyene Kassynder. The citizens of Ehb turned their backs to the legion and began to systematically exterminate them from the kingdom.

The Legion help hold the kingdom together, but since their disappearance, the land has separated into smaller states. The monarchs were spared and allowed to flee to the mountain of Glitterdelve while Jeyne was left to control the church and the land.

…and this new interview with George Ziets and Rich Taylor on AtomicGamer:

AG: I played a decent amount of DS1 back in the day, but I remember almost nothing about the story. I imagine most people who played it back then are the same – how do you build on lore that no one remembers?

GZ: One of the issues with DS1 – I’ve played through it a number of times, I did actually play it back when it came out; I played it again for this title. There’s a couple of things that can be said about the fiction and the narrative in DS1. There actually is a narrative there, it’s just very difficult to wrap your head around, because the way they presented it, a lot of it was in the lore books. Some of it was in lore books that didn’t make it into the game, and some of it, you can piece together what’s going on. But in the main narrative, if all you’re doing is hacking monsters and then every once in a while you might get a brief narrative drop that you may or may not read, it doesn’t come up clearly to a lot of players.

We played through it very carefully and also read [Gas Powered Games’] bible, and had [Dungeon Siege creator] Chris Taylor give us some information and a lot of the backstory. There actually is a narrative there. They have a ton of little lore books in there, and we did lore books as well. I actually wrote quite a number of them, and one of the lore books has the story of Dungeon Siege 1.

The story was fairly simple and definitely linear in DS1. The background fiction was also there, but again it didn’t come through to players all that well, and that’s another thing that we really tried to remedy in this game. They had a richer fiction that was presented, so we tried to take what they had. I wrote this hundred-some page document to expand their lore and take the foundation they had, blow it out and have a much richer world. You will get a sense of that as you play through [Dungeon Siege 3]. There will be a lot of references, things that you’ll find out more about [from other characters], some where you will find a lore book and it tells you more about that group of people. And then there will be references to things that just suggest a larger world, kind of like they do in Star Wars, and other universes that have lots of fiction. We intentionally did that to make the world feel like it’s a bigger place, and there’s a lot more going on than just what you’re seeing.