IGNPC: Just to get started... How about a brief outline of the game, i.e., what made you want to do it, how was it pitched, and what was your general plan (design-wise)?

Chris Taylor: Our goal was to make a much better game in almost every way, and make a huge number of improvements based on the feedback we received from the first game. These include a much richer and character-driven story, less combat automation with more spectacular spells, deeper and more lush world design, an arbitrary teleportation system, better multiplayer support (we switched to GameSpy), more side quests with puzzles, better monster and party AI, more depth and choices for the player to make on a continual basis (enchantable items and the incantation shrines for example), multiple characters in a multiplayer game, and a full multiplayer save feature. There are more, but that hits a bunch of the areas we wanted to improve… and then we added more stuff like Pets, dual wield, a powerful story-scripting system, special effects engine that supports shaders, and all the while, we wanted to maintain a good min-spec, so the game could run on a lot more systems than DS1 could when it launched.