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[IMG News]

Rock, Paper, Shotgun has posted an interview with Chris Taylor and Brian Reynolds about the making of the original Dungeon Siege. The article/postmortem examines the successes and failures of the process as well as the origins of the game's setting and style.

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.”

This attention to detail lead to innovations across the game, from large scale elements like the streaming to detail like being able to resell items for full price and the ever-handy equipment-carrying mules. Not that attention to these places didn’t have a cost. “What we were unfortunately unable to do was working on the story, the characters backgrounds, the depth of the world… because we had built the technology and had to quickly build the game on top of the technology,” Chris elaborates, “These are very discrete stages. So it was hard to do, especially at a start-up company, building a new team from scratch with a crazy new technology and all of our tools”.

The full article is available at the link provided below.

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