14

Add to My News

Story by Brenna Hillier

Tue, Feb 08, 2011 | 22:23 GMT

Obsidian talks Dungeon Siege III’s PC-centricity, stability issues

Project director Rich Taylor has said the multiplatform Dungeon Siege III will include “PC-centric” features not seen in the console version, and that eliminating crashes and bugs are “extremely high priorities” for the game’s development.

The Obsidian staffer told Eurogamer that the PC version of Dungeon Siege III will not be a straight-up console port.

“There are certain things that are more PC-centric,” he said. “The input and the controls lean more towards the PC.

“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.

“… 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.”

Obsidian’s last project was the near-proverbially unstable and buggy Fallout: New Vegas, and the studio is working to shuck that negative association.

“Stability and being bug free are extremely high priorities on this project, and we actually talk about it internally constantly,” Taylor said.

He added, “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.”

Obsidian’s own engine, Onyx, has allowed the team to develop simultaneously on all platforms, reducing the chance of last-minute, platform-specific errors. But they’ve also implemented a robust error reporting system.

“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,” Taylor explained.

“No one wants to run into a crash. We’re gamers, too. … And when you run into a crash and it disrupts your experience, that’s not fun for anyone. We understand that. That’s why as the project director on this game I’m very militant about us addressing the crashes and memory issues.”

Thanks, Blue.