Neal Hallford Interview

GameSpy has conducted an interview with Neal Hallford, the man in charge of story development on Gas Powered Games’ upcoming Dungeon Siege. Check it out:

GameSpy: Which came first, the story or the gameplay? Or were they developed simultaneously?

Neal Hallford: Most of the big game objectives were pretty much nailed down when I came on board, so most of my job was to try and thread all these interesting ideas together into a cohesive whole. The rest of the team would give me something like, “okay, so the player’s got to reach the town of Glacern,” and then I’d hammer out a reasonable reason why the player would be going there based on the larger plot of the game. But aside from the main spine, Chris gave me a lot of freedom to create absolutely new stuff, and I threw in a few dozen quests that weren’t really things he’d asked me to do originally, but when he saw what I had done, he decided he liked the directions I had gone in and they became part of the design.