GB Feature: Dungeon Siege III Interview

After transcribing like a madman for several days in a row now, I’m able to bring you the third of four interviews I conducted during my time at Square Enix’s recent Dungeon Siege III press event. This time around, it’s creative lead George Ziets in the hotseat:

GB: It seems like you’ve really elaborated on the existing lore, while also adding in quite a bit of new material. Did you run into any roadblocks when fleshing out the story, perhaps from Square Enix, Gas Powered Games, or even Chris Taylor himself?

George: No, actually – I’ve worked on a lot of IP games. I’ve worked on The Lord of the Rings Online, Dungeons & Dragons Online, Neverwinter Nights – all sorts of different IPs I’ve worked with. There have been other situations where it was quite difficult to get things over the wall. This was really easy, and I’m not just saying that. This was actually a very nice situation.

About a year and a half ago, in 2009, I wrote this sucker [pointing to a hefty lore booklet], which is in fact, this isn’t even all of it, but this is 100-some pages of expanded lore, and we sent that off to Chris Taylor. I will say that when I work on a license, I’m not a fan of going into a license and being like, (I’m going to completely change everything.) I really like to get to know the license and not violate any of the original stuff. Just expand on what’s there. So I did that on Dungeon Siege III, and I wrote this very long document, it went off to Chris Taylor, and it’s like, (Oh God. Please don’t make me rewrite that whole thing.) And the comments that came back were very minor.

He liked it. The guys at Gas Powered Games liked it. They were easy to please. They had a few comments and they kind of guided us a little bit, but other than that, I think it was great. So no, not really. Not really a lot of problems in that regard.