Gilbert wishes he'd made "battling a little more intellectual" in DeathSpank

Ron Gilbert has said if he could do DeathSpank all over again, he would have made combat in the game more like a puzzle.

Speaking with Wired, Gilbert said doing so would have made battling "more intellectual" instead of just hacking things to bits.

"I probably would have made battling a little more intellectual, so it wasn’t just about hacking through a bunch of enemies, but more like treating combat as if it was a puzzle to be solved," he said.

"It shouldn’t be about beating your head against it. It should be about assessing the situation — asking, ‘what tools do I have?’. You might say, ‘Hey, I can crowd-control people or maybe for this particular thing I need to get some ice-resistant armor.'

"Really just turning them into puzzles. I think that might have helped people a little bit with not just having to button-mash their way through battles."

Gilbert said Dragon Age: Origins is an example of what he means by "intellectual" combat.

“I really like the intellectual component to the combat in Dragon Age," he said. "The RPG stuff fits a little more with the adventure game, puzzle-solving pieces of the game. Not in its turn-based nature. More of the intellectual element.

"You see a little bit of that intellectual component come out in the game, but not a lot. I would probably have spent a lot more time making that stuff come out a little better."

Regardless, we loved DeathSpank and its sequel Thongs of Virtue despite all the repetition.

Both games are out now on PSN and XBL, and Steam - with Mac users getting both on December 14.