PSLS: Given the amount of optional side-quests available, how are you approaching them so that they do not become repetitive?
M: The cool thing about how we design quests is that you would think that there would be a team for main-quest and a team for side-quest, but that is totally not the case. We spend equal amount of time and effort on making the side-quests as we do making the main-quests, they get the same treatment, they are not lower or anything. That also applies to quests that are much smaller than you average side-quest, we have them on all scales. So, none of them feel repetitive. If you think about it, its not like we came up with a huge world and then decided that we needed to fill it with content and half way through decided that that we are really done now, but we still have this part of the world left and we need to fill it.
No, basically, what happened was that we made the story and the quest and everything, and that basically dictated the size of the world. So, the size that we have in the game is really out of necessity, this is how large we wanted it to be. So, you shouldn’t find a lot of repetition, but what you do find is something different, while it may sound like a weakness, it really is a strength. You may find quests that do start out as something you may recognize from other games, like where you go ‘oh yeah, this is a typical fetch quest, I have to find this guy’s hidden treasure’, but when you do it, it kind of takes this twist and something absolutely different happens. At the end of it you may get to make some morally ambivalent choices, where you are unclear as to how it manifests.
