Dungeon Siege 3 being developed by Obsidian

[taviow]

New trailer.

Looks better than the previous ones.

Also an interview: DS3 more stable than New Vegas.

Rich Taylor: Stability and being bug free are extremely high priorities on this project, and we actually talk about it internally constantly. The advantage here we have over, for example Fallout, is when we have a question about how something works, I walk 10 feet outside my office door and go talk to the programmer who wrote it.

That's a lot different than trying to get someone on a mailing list, or get someone on the phone who's in a different time zone or across the country. Those sort of things have made it possible for us to stabilise things and keep things working as well as we like.

It's really made a difference on the development of this project. We've been running on consoles on the 360 and the PlayStation pretty much throughout the length of the project, so we've been staying within memory budgets, mindful of performance issues. So there's no last minute, oh, does this actually run on the PS3? Or, are we stable on the 360?

We actually had one of our internal tools developers spend a lot of time engineering crash reporting into the engine so internally, literally when anyone runs into a crash the game will shut down, it will generate a report, it will provide a stack dump and it will put it into a database, and we can be very diligent about tracking those things and solving them.

So we actually almost never have mystery crashes where we're just stumped. That's a common thing that can plague games in development. It's like, well, we don't know why it crashed. It only happens in QA, or it only happens on non-programmer machines.

Here we have the advantage of, no matter who runs into a crash issue, we're able to get it up on the screen with a stack dump and look at it and peel back the information on it, and identify exactly what happened and get it fixed. That's been a change.

We also just recently finished introducing a memory utility that shows us what's going on in memory at all times on the consoles. We can see where our memory is going. If we're seeing a problem area we can immediately pull up some charts and spreadsheets and it will show us exactly where it is and we can go balance the numbers to fit within the console memory limitations.

Also for PC gamers:

Eurogamer: The game is multiplatform. Is the PC version different in any way?

Rich Taylor: Yeah. There are certain things that are more PC-centric. The input and the controls lean more towards the PC. On the console it controls like a console game. You control your character with the analogue stick and the camera with the other analogue stick, much like most other single-player controlled games are when they come out on the consoles.

On the PC, though, players expect to be able to click and move their character around with the mouse and click on enemies. We'll certainly have it control that way. The interfaces will be mostly the same. The stat comparison available on the console will also be there on the PC. And of course the PC lends itself to higher-resolution textures and visual presentation that we're happy to take advantage of where we can.

 

[Krynn72]

Wait what? This is the first game they worked on with their programmers been in house? Da fuk?

 

[Lucid]

Hardly a gameplay trailer but the interview itself has restored my interest in this game.
Glad that they're taking initiative with the PC version.

 

[Kyorisu]

Hardly a gameplay trailer but the interview itself has restored my interest in this game.
Glad that they're taking initiative with the PC version.

Yeah you can use a mouse. Amazing.

 

[Bad^Hat]

Don't forget higher resolutions! Talk about initiative.

 

[bam23]

but is it balanced for lean?

 

[Bad^Hat]

Well played.

 

[Lucid]

I was mostly noting that because the last time I saw or read anything about the game it looked like it controlled similarly to Dynasty Warriors or some other shitty Japanese button mashing hack and slash game.

gays

 

[Bad^Hat]

Good to know it's a sophisticated PC click mashing game rather than a shitty phoned-in consolized BUTTON mashing game. God forbid!

 

[Yorick]

The demo for this just came out a day or two ago, has anyone tried it yet?

 

[Shakermaker]

The demo for this just came out a day or two ago, has anyone tried it yet?

Downloaded it earlier today, but I haven't had a chance to play it yet. I am waiting for GT:TV to stop being interesting, but no success so far.

 

[morgs]

Had a quick play of the demo, seems like fun. The environments are nice, very pretty too. Especially distant plains below the mountain you are on. The combat is just random clicking in the enemies direction, changing stance to deal with different enemy types. The voice acting seems up to par, but the controls are a bit fiddly at first, especially when it comes to looting.

I'll probably pre-order for the free copies of the first two.

 

[ray_MAN]

Played the demo. It's not bad, but it's kind of quirky in terms of the controls and the interface isn't the best I've seen.

 

[taviow]

I liked it. I wish the camera/controls were better, but other than that I haven't come across any bugs at all (wtf), it runs well and there's more options to develop your character than I expected.

 

[Yorick]

Yeah I don't super love the way the menus are set up, but I've seen worse. It just seems like when running on a higher resolution, there's a lot of space wasted.

I also can't seem to find a full map? Is it just the minimap?

The camera is definitely touchy and rough, especially during combat. I'm going to try plugging in my 360 controller and seeing how it feels.

 

[Bad^Hat]

What a load of old arse. Controls suck, camera sucks, combat is weird, menus are cumbersome. The whole thing just feels so much less satisfying than before, and it's painfully obvious they developed it solely with consoles in mind, which is shit, frankly. I wouldn't say I counted it among my favourite franchises, but I really enjoyed the first two, and this feels like a slap in the face.

Kudos to them for trying to insert a proper story, but it's incredibly ill-placed in this kind of game, honestly. I was just clicking through and picking whichever option got me back to the action quickest, and I never do that in RPGs.