GB Feature: Dungeon Siege III Interview

Throughout the week, I’m going to be publishing an assortment of content from the Dungeon Siege III and Deus Ex: Human Revolution press event I attended earlier this month, and I thought I’d get things rolling with a nifty little interview I conducted with Square Enix’s David Hoffman. In it, we talk about their collaboration with Obsidian Entertainment, how they managed to get a hold of the Dungeon Siege IP, whether there are other RPG franchises they’ve looked into purchasing, and more. A sampling:

GB: How did the original collaboration with Gas Powered Games come about? Did Square approach Gas Powered Games and express interest in the Dungeon Siege license, or was it something that GPG was shopping around and Square jumped on it?

David: Actually, myself, and I guess Square as a whole – we approached Gas Powered Games initially, though we didn’t approach them initially for Dungeon Siege. We just approached them because we wanted to meet them, and we wanted to talk about what we might be able to do together, and to see if it made sense for Square from a western perspective. They seemed like very well-respected developers, they had done some great titles, and we were pretty excited to interact with Gas Powered, and we actually started the relationship not with Dungeon Siege, but with Supreme Commander 2. And subsequently we also purchased that IP as well, so we own that.

We felt that Gas Powered’s core strength was real-time strategy games. And that’s one of the things that people ask me sometimes, (Well, why did you take Dungeon Siege away from Gas Powered?) And it’s like, (Well, we really didn’t take it away from Gas Powered; we mutually agreed with Gas Powered that their core strength is RTS and that they should continue building on that. And we’ve had a great experience with Supreme Commander 2 and with the DLC expansion that was released for it, and we’re still in communication with them and we’re still looking at options with them as well. But we felt that, (Hey, Obsidian would be great with an action RPG,) and here we are.