A Dungeon Siege interview with Producer Darren Baker from Gas Powered Games is online at IGN.PC now. Snip, snip:
IGNPC: It's been said that great care has been placed in crafting believable dwellings for the multitude of monsters that inhabit Dungeon Siege. Can you all elaborate on this some?
Darren Baker: With Dungeon Siege we want to immerse the player in an environment that is as natural and alive as possible. When a player comes across a group of Krug, for instance, they might find a few tents set up, a campfire with Krugs gathered around cooking their dinner, and others patrolling the perimeter of the camp. In dungeons there are places where they gather, eat, and sleep, complete with cots, closets, and footlockers. Another example is the Droog who reside in a custom-built cliff village based on the Pueblo Indian dwellings in the southwestern United States. Not all creatures are there to do harm, either, as we've included other creatures in Dungeon Siege that live out their lives peacefully such as dogs, chickens, deer, and butterflies that live in deep forests, around towns, and farms.
IGNPC: With monsters being more directly linked with their environments, how has it been handling the extra cross-departmental work and communication that must be necessary for this to be accomplished? Does level design influence monster creation, or is it vice versa?
Darren Baker: It's some of both. When we began planning Dungeon Siege, we decided early on that there were a number of environment types we wanted to include in the game. We came up with a list of areas, such as Farmland, Mine, Arctic, Forest, Desert, Swamp, etc. Thus, we created monsters to fit those environments. There were also a number of critters created that seemed to fit a certain mood, so on the level design side we tried to build regions that provided an appropriate setting for these. |
Dungeon Siege Interview at IGN.PC
