Dungeon Siege 3 - Interviews @ Mods Reloaded, CVG
 

Obsidian's Nathaniel Chapman has been interviewed at Mods Reloaded about Dungeon Siege 3. Here's a quote on story and dialogue that sounds interesting:
It appears to be a canned interview, because exactly the same content is also at CVG.
More information.

Conversation and dialog is one of obsidian's strong points. I know many hated it in NWN 2 but I loved the conversations. On a side note inst the engine being used the same one they made for nwn2?

No, not at all. NWN2 was modified from NWN - it's old and I would assume they'd have to pay BioWare some fees. They made a new engine, which was first going to be used on Alien RPG.

I have the new pcgamer mag and it shows a preview of characters that look exactly like the engine used in NWN 2. If I recall the engine used in NWN 2 was there own engine. Maybe they redid it and made it better.

Or maybe not. I didn't just make my post up, you know.

From producer Nathan Davis:

http://content.usatoday.com/communit…on-siege-iii/1

…Whereas for NWN2:

http://au.gamespot.com/pc/rpg/neverw…w_6104913.html

Obsidian did write a new renderer for NWN2 but there was still BioWare code - I don't think it's worth arguing where the old stops and the new starts. The new version of the Aurora engine was called Electron, whereas this is an entirely new engine they made from scratch, called Onyx. I'm sure using some of the same artists might lead to some similarities you're seeing.

Unfortunately, Obsidian's approach to NWN2 all but eliminated the modding community for it.

They were way too focused on the singleplayer campaign, and obviously didn't plan well for the toolset and multiplayer features.

Not a big suprise, given the critique NWN1 got for its OC - but I think it was a huge mistake to go blind to overcome that. They also spent far too much effort redoing the interface, which was - in my opinion - significantly worse than the excellent NWN interface.

Sad, but at least the campaign was better than the first game.

Your probably right as I said some of the game characters look like the npcs from NWN 2. I just thought it might be a new engine based off the electron toolset. To me if you make a new engine shouldn't the graphics be different? That all I'm going on the topic.

I always loved the NWN ring interface and I think it should be used more (ToEE had a similar one).

Yeah, I never understood the heavy criticism of the NWN interface. It was very powerful and user-friendly in my mind. You had a TON of hotbars per default, and every single action could be dragged to one and have it be immediately accessible.

Maybe some people thought they had to use the ring interface for common actions? That's the only explanation I can come up with for the negative feedback.

It was also very clean and had smart transparency, and so on.

Most of the powerful strides forward of NWN took a backseat in NWN2. I was really saddened by that, as I thought NWN2 would be "NWN perfected".

Instead, it was just another traditional CRPG - all but ignoring the powerful multiplayer/DM stuff of the prequel.

Ahhh, man. You had to remind me of Alien RPG. I was really looking forward to that game. Almost forgot about it till now ;)

Don't talk about the Alien RPG.

I'll start to cry…

A common misconception, people place more responsibility for how the characters look on the engine than they should. Truthfully, the art department is as much, if not more, responsible.

Engines determine raw polygon pushing power and which gfx shaders/techniques you can use, such as bump maps and dynamic shadows. Not how the art looks, the shape of the mesh and the texture maps.

Your statement is like someone saying they've bought a new car and someone else says 'I dunno hey, I've seen it and it's red, which was the same colour as their previous car. Based on the colour, I think they're lying and it's the same car.'

I see the same arguments about Oblivion/Skyrim : "I hope they aren't using the same engine, I don't want to see Oblivion potato faces". That had nothing to do with the engine. The engine is just rendering the polygons (mathematical data exported by the art application) that the artists create. A new engine would render those meshes in a nearly identical way (possibly with better lighting fx / shadows).

It was very user friendly. It was also pretty much hard coded.

NWN2 opened up almost every aspect of the game to modders, including the UI.

The toolset was also far more powerful, and they addressed so many of NWN's shortcomings. The problem was only that NWN was almost idiot proof and people were still running NWN servers far longer than people had anticipated.

But the UI didn't really need it - in my opinion.

There's nothing wrong with making the toolset powerful. There's something wrong with making it much harder to produce satisfactory content.

NWN succeeded so well in this way, BECAUSE it was idiot proof. The more people who're able to be creative - the better.

The simplistic tile-based structure might not have looked great, but it worked.

I played DS1 and preferred it to DS2 because of the more controllable combat strategy placement method of follower characters than DS2's flat out 'attack-hack-n-slash' style. After DS2 release many gamers remarked on the nice improved user interface and that the journal system in DS2 was very neatly done…i remarked at that time (back at rpgdot) that the interface could definitely be utilised further as it felt just right for a more intensive dialogue branching system in the future. I'm glad we will have DS3 with an improved dialogue structure, i just hope the dialogue branching has cut-off points with no going back (unless saved game reload) with either good or bad (or even covert) consequences……a more role playing feeling.

There is always something positive to say about keeping things as simple as possible in the tool arena. Shouldn't have to be a 3d CAD graphics artist to create a campaign, but it's great to have that as an option, but it should not be a must.

I was one of those that complained about the radial UI. :p I absolutely hated it for my spellcasters. Way too many clicks to find spells and not enough quickslots for all the spells (and items) I liked to cast. The quickcast bar was a vast improvement.

I can't say that unequivocally about the rest of the UI.

Getting rid of the inventory tetris was a big plus for me, but the tiny and hard to read/distinguish inventory item icons made inventory management worse! The basic objective to make inventory management easier was somehow lost on the devs.

Of course, camera control and automation was absolutely terrible, and much too complicated to customize to make it bareable.

One area Bioware (or Atari or whoever controlled this part) failed is that they never properly leveraged the massive amount of people willing to create content for the game. Yes, they had a handful of premium modules, but why not open an app store and let people sell their own content through them? They could have made a fortune, and people would have been even more motivated to make great modules.

Great idea. I'm surprised they hadn't thought of it.

I though the UI and overall interface was vastly superior in NWN2, about the only thing I missed was the inventory (I like tetris damnit). I don't really mind radial menus per say but I really, really disliked how it was implemented in NWN1. It's an all-round pretty terrible game I think, somewhat saved by modding (and even then it's hard to find *really* good mods).

As for DS3, I'm not really sold on the gameplay yet, we'll see. But the game's environs looks fricking gorgeous, very vibrant and colorful. But yeah… like I said, not sold on the gameplay yet and from what I've seen of DS overall (which is admittedly not much), it looks a bit like a snoozefest.

Yeah, but would that have worked years later? I suspect Obsidian was damned either way and the success of NWN was a moment in time. If NWN2 hadn't introduced height-maps, which made it take longer to build locations, it would have been slammed for being ugly. It's also hard to estimate how many people felt they had "been there, done that" and just plain moved on from NWN modding.

I'm not trying to take away from BioWare's success or excuse Obsidian any mistakes but I think it was inevitable.

I think an upgraded simplistic tile paradigm would work, and they could have made height maps and the other upgrades "more optional" - as in reserved for those who wanted to use them, and had the necessary skillset.

I tried making maps in both editors - and I honestly don't recall the details, except that I had a VERY hard time doing anything in the NWN2 toolset. I just couldn't make things look right. I don't remember if it was possible to generate "normal" NWN1 tile-maps - but I don't think it was laid out to facilitate that.

Another issue was the performance upon release, which was very poor. I remember having a very powerful machine, and the game still ran extremely slow. I almost gave up playing it entirely, but it was fixed relatively soon after.

I understand why they did what they did, but I really don't think they did it well. If they wanted the average modder to make maps using advanced tools and graphics, they should have done much more to make that manageable. I think the modding community speaks for itself, actually.

NWN wasn't very pretty even when released, but it worked well as a toolset and "adventure construction set" - and most players accepted the weaknesses - because they could finally play something resembling a real D&D table session.

This is also my opinion.

In my opinion, the creative parts come from those who are rather *not* "techies" … And vice versa.

So, this means, in my (personal) opinion, that the hrder it is to mod something - which means the more tech knowledge is needed - the less the creatives get o work with it, but rather the techies - which - in my opinion - results in very, very good technical quality of a mod - but in the orst case a total lack of content in term of storytelling.

And I think I remember a member of Obsidian saying in an interview posted here somewhere saying that they actually wanted to increase the technical quality of the mods … And the reverse of it means that they weren't interested in better quality in terms of storytelling …

But this is only my personal opinion.