The Making of Dungeon Siege

Over at Rock, Paper, Shotgun Keiron Gillen has a writeup he did back before the original Dungeon Siege released. Something of a post-mortem, he and designer Chris Taylor discuss what makes the mostly traditional hack n' slasher unique. "Technologically speaking, the most distinctive element of Dungeon Siege was how it streamed its levels. Throughout the huge world, there wasn't a single loading pause. 'When you're in a fantasy game...' Chris reaches for a metaphor to explain why this is so important, 'Well, imagine if it's a movie, and if you have to change the film every ten minutes, you wouldn't be able to immerse yourself into the Fantasy. By eliminating loading screens we were able to keep people in the game, and much more immersed in this world. You become one with the game. You could melt into the monitor and the keyboard and the mouse.'"

Comments

Loading screens

[geekboy642]

Actually I've never wanted to melt into my keyboard and mouse. That seems like it may cause more harm than it helps.

Sarcasm aside, it seems like games are only going the other direction, with the notable exceptions of this game and EVE-Online. I could certainly appreciate more games thinking ahead. One big reason (in my opinion) that they don't is that modern games try to squeeze every erg of power out to drive ever more and more detailed graphics. If the glitz-obsessed gamers and companies could step back from the bleeding edge a notch or two, this "level streaming" thing would be a lot more common-place.

still going strong

[rucs_hack]

I still play dungeon siege 2, it's one of only two games I have installed, although the broken world expansion, while it add lots of niceness that makes the main game far better, is a bit small, just another chapter really.

I keep looking to see if dungeon siege 3 is ever coming. I thought this article appearing on slashdot was an indication of such an event, seems not though. Shame.

For More Technical Details...

[simon_clarkstone]

If you want the technical details, read The Continuous World of Dungeon Siege (a fascinating read).

To avoid floating-point problems and to allow continuous loading, the world was split up into nodes with specified transformations between them. This resulted in a world that often cannot be mapped, as it would pass through itself. There were also many tricks that were used to fit the huge number of objects in memory. Many things self-destruct, or disappear if out of sight for more that a few minutes.