Chris Taylor Talks Dungeon Siege II Details

Thanks to GameSpy for its overview of the changes and interview with Gas Powered Games boss Chris Taylor regarding PC action RPG sequel Dungeon Siege II, due out via Microsoft later in 2004. Taylor, lead designer of the classic RTS Total Annihilation, discusses the original Dungeon Siege ("Overall the response was very positive, and most criticism was offered as a call for features in a sequel"), and reveals features for the sequel including (Phantasy Star Online mag-like?) "exotic pets", of which he explains: "You can buy these and develop them by feeding them different items you find in the world."

Comments

Translation:

[WinnipegDragon]

So it's basically the same game, but prettier and the pack mule has been replaced by a more dangerous animal.

How about this. Make me care about the character, the storyline, and give me more than four skills to improve on and then we can talk. The first game in this series made Diablo seem like a deep RPG...

Exotic pets eating items? reminds me of something

[*weasel]

It reminds of the classiest 'garbage collection' design I encountered in early gaming.

Back in the day there was a frickin awesome game, Alternate Reality, published by Datasoft. Being an very old game, and having fixed memory limits, the developer had to keep players from hoarding too many items.

Thereby 'the devourer' was added to the game. It was a mean-and-nasty that would track down and attack the player. During combat, the devourer would eat random items from the player's pack.

The thing is, (unknown to me at the time) the devourer only came out when the player was getting dangerously close to the item limit.

Sure, you could eventually get powerful enough to fend one off before you lost an item - but another would always come.

It was just a real classy, practical design solution to a hardware limitation.

Though this has only tangential bearing on Dungeon Siege at best - Damn I loved that game.

(There were in fact 2 connected AR games, of a larger planned series. The City, and The Dungeon were the released games. I played primarily The Dungeon, and am only certain of the devourer in that context. I'm not certain if it was present in The City.)