Dungeon Siege 3 - Interview @ AtomicGamer

AtomicGamer has an interview with Obsidian's George Ziets and, later, Rich Taylor on Dungeon Siege III. George focuses on the writing and the conversation with Rich wanders onto broader cRPG topics:

AG: There have been so many RPGs, especially first games in a series, that try to build lore. One of those ways is with lore books that are really long. Morrowind did that. Then there are games like Mass Effect, where you get it more by talking to characters, with long dialogue trees you can optionally dig into. Where's the mix in DS3 between reading books and character exposition?

GZ: A lot of the lore that you get, you won't see a ton of it in conversation. I know Obsidian has a history of some very long conversation trees, and there are a few in this game, but we tried to keep them more direct and more to the point, so you'll get more suggestions of the lore. You might ask a character at the beginning of the game, you'll see the Lescanzi mercenaries coming after you. At some point in that sequence you can ask a couple characters about those guys, and they'll give you their perspective on them. You get a suggestion of what those guys are, enough for the casual player to be like, "ok, that's who they are". We also have some lore books that talk a lot more about it, and there are a couple places where you meet some Lescanzi NPCs that give you more of a suggestion. But if you just focus on the dialogue, we really tried to keep it more about the story and driving the narrative forward, whereas the extra stuff can be suggested in dialogue but we go into it in more detail in lore books.

That was the balance we tried to strike in this particular game. It's not so much based on a principle or "the way we want to do things now", but this style of game is much more action-oriented, and we wanted to keep the dialogue as a result a little more spare and focus more on the action so action players don't have to sit through the dialogue and read and read just to understand what's going on.