Interview: Chris Taylor gets deep on Dungeon Siege II

"Dungeon Siege II is a game you'll really be able to sink your teeth into," says Chris Taylor as he begins to demo the sequel to 2002's hit action-RPG. While the original Dungeon Siege attracted high review scores and went on to sell over a million copies, this statement of intent from the founder of Gas Powered Games should make many fans breathe a sigh of relief.

The first Dungeon Siege found favour by streamlining the fiddly features of the RPG experience, but it possibly streamlined too much. Fans complained that the automated combat reduced fighting and levelling up to a relatively passive experience, and the lack of a decent storyline gave others no incentive to keep adventuring.

But Chris Taylor and his team at the Washington State-based developer have definitely taken these criticisms on board. "Dungeon Siege II represents one of the highest density experiences you'll ever get in a box," he says, before estimating that the finished game will push over 70 hours of gameplay.

And if you're going to be sitting in front of your monitor for that long it's lucky that there's actually a storyline in Dungeon Siege II. An evil force has discovered a long lost power, and unless you do something about it the world will be destroyed. This means you actually have a reason to progress through the game, learning more about the world of Aranna and interacting with over 250 NPCs with spoken dialogue.

Then there's the enhanced combat system. While the first Dungeon Siege was, in Taylor's own words, an RTSFRPG ("That's a Real Time Strategy Fantasy Role Playing Game") where the player told his heroes who to attack and then sat back, Dungeon Siege II encourages much more aggressive mouse clicking. Your allies are still intelligently automated, but you have much more control over who you attack, when you attack, and how you attack.

This new concentration on active combat is bolstered by enhanced skill trees that let you customise your characters' abilities more than ever, and Hero Powers that let you bust out earth-shattering special moves. You can even buy an elemental pet that you can train and develop into a potent killing machine by feeding it unwanted loot - a weirdly cute and Pokemon-esque feature that Taylor hopes will also endear the game to a female audience. "Women love to feed enchanted helmets to ice elementals," he says with more than a little mischief.

With so many changes to the Dungeon Siege formula up for discussion - and even the prospect of an upcoming Hollywood adaptation of the first game - we settled down with Chris Taylor to get the drop on why he had to make some changes, why Dungeon Siege II could be the last big single-player RPG and why he won't ever abandon PC development for consoles.

You've always been very open about addressing the criticisms people levelled at the first Dungeon Siege game. Do you feel you've been able to sort out all the problems for Dungeon Siege II?

Chris Taylor: As a developer it's an unfortunate thing that you always, always have to make some compromises because there's simply not enough money on the planet to develop the ultimate game. But we've come very close. We had to draw the line at some point with features, but we've polished and tweaked everything and worked very hard at getting the production values up. In fact, I'd say this is the closest to perfection I've ever come on any game I've done! If you look at everything I've done over the past 17 years, Dungeon Siege II absolutely represents the very highest quality of product in terms of craftsmanship and polish that I've ever been involved with.

Sounds like you're extremely pleased with the results...

Chris Taylor: Oh yeah, I feel great. I just wish it hadn't taken me 17 years to get here! But unfortunately it takes a lot of money to test games - up to a million dollars - and my first game, Hard Ball 2, was a $100,000 game! With Dungeon Siege II we've had team after team of people testing everything from hardware to usability to focus research and the beta test. It's been an amazing effort from hundreds and hundreds of people.

What's the one thing about Dungeon Siege II that you'd pick out and say, "I'm really proud of what we've done there..."?

Chris Taylor: Probably the combat. We've gotten a lot closer to making the combat feel really good. The party is very cohesive - they don't wander off and do their own thing as much. You feel really focussed in combat and you can use all the magic and Hero Powers to blast your way through in a very satisfying way.

The combat is a far more active rather than passive experience in Dungeon Siege II. Did you feel that it was important to have the player moving around the screen and clicking the mouse button a lot?

Chris Taylor: It is very important in combat, and in hindsight we wish we could've gotten closer to that with the first Dungeon Siege. But funnily enough, we had a lot of people from our beta tests telling us they really liked the combat automation in Dungeon Siege 1, so we did include some options that let those people tailor the experience to how they want. Our primary aim is to take the game to both sets of people - the players who want to click, click, click; and the players who want to enjoy more automation. I think we've been able to do that.

So are you saying that you haven't totally changed the combat system, but left it more customisable for individual players?

Chris Taylor: The game, as it comes out of the box with the default settings, is how we want people to play it. But yes, for the people who want to be a little more casual and a little more laid back, we've added some options for them to increase automation. Having said that, there's a school of thought in game development that too many options can ruin a game, and I don't disagree with that.

One of the biggest criticisms of the first Dungeon Siege was the fairly non-existent storyline. How have you addressed that problem with DS2?

Chris Taylor: I think we've still got some way to go in telling a truly original and dynamic and interesting stories, but we've done a great job in telling a videogame story. This is not film, you don't have the same tools available. This is a medium where people are interacting with things all the time. But our story is so much better than the first Dungeon Siege story.

You yourself said that you weren't a fan of deep videogame storylines...

Chris Taylor: No, that's not quite right. I'm not a fan of lots of talking in videogames. I'm more a fan of the Hollywood style of storytelling, the 'show-me-don't-tell-me' idea. But in a videogame, that means a tremendous amount of cost. Look at George Lucas' movies. Every shot's a special effects shot, so that's a wonderful 'show me' movie. But when his movies get into the dialogue the audience groans and asks for more 'show me' stuff. But that costs money, and when you're talking about a game with 70-plus hours of gameplay you're going to have to get some dialogue in there or you're never going to get the game done.

Was it quite hard for you personally to admit that Dungeon Siege II needed more of a concentration on storyline?

Chris Taylor: Well, I went through some personal growth where I came around to a realisation about what storyline gives the player. On top of that, it's amazing how much fun it is to go into a room and say, "okay, we've got to come up with a really interesting backstory and fictional universe," and then put the game inside that. It actually makes the whole design job easier, so I've come around!

So how would you explain Dungeon Siege II's storyline to RPG fans?

Chris Taylor: There's a problem with action-RPG games, and that's the cliché of the evil that has arisen and is sweeping across the land. That's omnipresent in the genre. But the nature of the game dictates that you have to kill everything from A-Z. You don't have a drama story or a love story. You just have to kill every damn thing. And why would one person be motivated to do that unless someone evil has pissed you off and you have to kill everything. We toyed with the idea of having your enemy be the 'good' guy, but that just confused people. So it's a cliché, but we've worked really hard to pull it off in a fresh and satisfying way.

The first Dungeon Siege had a nice line in subtle humour. Are you planning to continue this in DS2 or work in some satire on the RPG genre?

Chris Taylor: The writer of the first Dungeon Siege was Neil Halford and he did bake a lot of humour under the surface of the game. It was interesting seeing people react to that, but with Dungeon Siege II we're going for a much darker atmosphere. We're telling a much more serious story about our hero and the plight that they are enduring. The thing about comedy is that it's very hard to write without it shaping the entire game experience. You can't do both - look at Brian Fargo's The Bard's Tale, which choose comedy as the direction for the entire game. We wanted to make our whole experience darker, more gritty, and something that drew you in more. It's hard to bring all that in and bring comedy in too.

You mentioned that you think Dungeon Siege II will be one of the last big single-player RPGs. Why?

Chris Taylor: I don't think we'll see a game that's this big again. We're looking at over 70 hours of gameplay with Dungeon Siege II, but it's getting harder and harder to deliver that many hours of gameplay. This might be the last big RPG before you start looking at 20 or 30 hours, maximum.

Why? As the next-gen comes in and the graphics get more advanced, artist time for texturing and animating a figure goes from one week to three or four weeks. A monster no longer has 14,000 polygons - he has a million polygons! There are normal maps, texture maps, environment maps, all these shaders to code and all this complexity to think about. That has a knock-on effect on the hours of gameplay people will be able to put in there. The costs will still go up, maybe 20, 30 or 40 per cent every year, but the content of the games will shrink down.

You also spoke of how you were keen to stick to developing for PC only. Why?

Chris Taylor: I want to keep artistic control and I like the relationship developing for PC gives me with my customer. My customer can go online, go to my website, and download stuff from me. He can give me comments and feedback and I can build a real relationship there. I don't have a publisher who controls a platform, or who charges a fee, or who plays big brother by auditing my creative and auditing my content. I love the future of PC gaming because my customer and I can get much closer, and that's a very exciting proposition for me.

We had suspicions you might be working on 360 projects...

Chris Taylor: No. I can categorically state that we are not working on Xbox 360 projects.

How's the Dungeon Siege movie coming along?

Chris Taylor: We've got a great script and we've made the initial cast announcements. Jason Statham, Leelee Sobieski and Ron Perlman are in there. Ron is playing Norick will provide some of the comic elements. And we've got Burt Reynolds in there as King Konreid. It's great to have such a seasoned Hollywood actor on board.

So it's an interesting cast and we're talking about big budget, the last numbers I heard were between $50 and $60 million, which sound about right. We've also got Tony Ching choreographing the fight scenes. He worked on movies like House of the Flying Daggers and Hero. And they're building the sets up in British Columbia and we've been up to see them building props, which is very exciting.

The director, Uwe Boll, has a pretty poor reputation. Can he pull it off?

Chris Taylor: A lot of people ask me that question because of his previous films. I say that this is a real chance for him to prove himself because he has such a big budget. After this project people will be able to draw proper conclusions about where his skill as a director lies. It looks like there's every chance for an interesting film and I'm sure we'll all be waiting with baited breath on opening night.

Dungeon Siege II will be available for PC in September and the Dungeon Siege movie is expected to hit cinemas next year.

Graeme Boyd