KD: Where do you think many developers have gone wrong in trying to bring hardcore PC RPG franchises to consoles, and how did you solve that challenge?
NC: I think one mistake that a lot of developers make is that they try to take the mechanics that work on the PC and just directly map them onto a console controller. Then when you inevitably hit the fact that the console controller just doesn’t have enough buttons to support the variety of input that you have on a computer game you just start cutting. Like, “We have to simplify the number of spells, we have to simplify the mechanics, we have to cut down the amount of stuff that we let the player do.” Then I think you end up losing part of what makes the games interesting, which is the ability to choose between those different options. You want to have all those different options available because if you do there are situations where one option is best or another one is best. So you end up, I think, watering down the experience if you take that route. That was one thing that motivated our development of the stance system in Dungeon Siege 3, which is basically that you hit a button and it swaps you to a different stance and the face buttons get mapped to new abilities, because we wanted to have a lot of abilities available for the player to use at any one time without having to go through any menus to remap them or anything like that. So with one hit of a button you now have three new abilities available. It’s sort of akin to hitting Shift on the keyboard and now all your keys do something slightly different. That was one of the examples of how we tried to keep the complexity of a PC RPG while molding it onto the console controller instead of just cutting stuff from the PC RPGs to make it work on the consoles.
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