WT - Have there been any particularly difficult obstacles you've had to overcome while converting the original to a siegelet? If so, can you elaborate?


IF - Yes, definitely. There have been more difficulties than I'd care to think about. *laughs* The biggest one that comes to mind is simply that Dungeon Siege was designed as what you might call a "railroad shooter": you run through a never-ending, linear gauntlet of increasingly-powerful monsters, kill them and loot, and get stronger. That's it. Good mindless fun, yes, but a far cry from the open-ended story/dialogue-based world of an Ultima. Trying to drag the engine kicking and screaming along with us in our vision has been a wild ride. We've custom coded our dialogue system, ship/horse travel system, and combat rule-set entirely from scratch, and those three items alone have taken a tremendous amount of time and effort. Hat's off to Starr Kline, our lead programmer, on his brilliant work in those areas.