The Making of Dungeon Siege

Over at Rock, Paper, Shotgun Keiron Gillen has a writeup he did back before the original Dungeon Siege released. Something of a post-mortem, he and designer Chris Taylor discuss what makes the mostly traditional hack n' slasher unique. "Technologically speaking, the most distinctive element of Dungeon Siege was how it streamed its levels. Throughout the huge world, there wasn't a single loading pause. 'When you're in a fantasy game...' Chris reaches for a metaphor to explain why this is so important, 'Well, imagine if it's a movie, and if you have to change the film every ten minutes, you wouldn't be able to immerse yourself into the Fantasy. By eliminating loading screens we were able to keep people in the game, and much more immersed in this world. You become one with the game. You could melt into the monitor and the keyboard and the mouse.'"

Loading screens

[geekboy642]

Actually I've never wanted to melt into my keyboard and mouse. That seems like it may cause more harm than it helps.

Sarcasm aside, it seems like games are only going the other direction, with the notable exceptions of this game and EVE-Online. I could certainly appreciate more games thinking ahead. One big reason (in my opinion) that they don't is that modern games try to squeeze every erg of power out to drive ever more and more detailed graphics. If the glitz-obsessed gamers and companies could step back

Re:

[IndieKid]

World of Warcraft is a pretty good example of how loading screens can be (mostly) avoided. The game world is huge and you can travel from zone to zone seamlessly.

Actually there are loading screens between the three 'continents' (Outland isn't really a continent), and between the main zones and instances, but even then the loading is pretty quick. I guess Blizzard thought the lack of loading screens (and hence a more immersive world) was more important than bleeding edge graphics.

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[ucblockhead]

Blizzard first did that with Diablo II. The original Diablo had loading screens, but I recall during the Diablo II beta period that Blizzard crowed about how they'd figured out a way to do away with them entirely. They mostly did. You could move through massive areas quite fluidly.

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[Emetophobe]

One thing I always liked about the GTA series was the relative lack of loading screens. In GTA 3 I believe you only ever saw loading screens when switching between the 3 main islands. Vice City was similar, only there was 2 main islands and 1 loading screen between them. I don't remember seeing any loading screens in San Andreas. I always found the world more immersive in GTA for that reason (aside from minior issues like cars and pedestrians disappearing when they went out of view and you turned around and

That shouldn't be a problem.

[SanityInAnarchy]

On the PS3, maybe. Blu-Ray is actually slower, relative to the capacity of the disk, than DVD. Thus, a Blu-Ray game anywhere near full is going to spend a lot more time loading than a DVD game near-full.

But elsewhere... Take a look, next time, at what your computer's actually doing when it loads a level. In particular, watch your hard drive light. (If you have one; Mac enthusiasts need not apply.) Best-case scenario: The light is on steady, or nearly, which means the game is loading as fast as the disk can

No loading screens, just long waits...

[Splurch]

Loading screen or not, it still had long wait periods where you would travel down a descending elevator or something. They just masked the load screens, didn't really remove them.

Re:No loading screens, just long waits...

[I'll Provide The War]

This is the same technique that Metroid Prime has used. Large areas are connected by small hallways to allow the next area to begin loading. Sometimes you reach the next door before the area behind it is loaded and it refuses to open for several seconds. The same thing still occurs on the 3rd installation for the Wii released last week. It actually seems like a bug if you do not know why the doors fail to always open immediately.

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[damium]

Another loading mask I've seen games use is short cut-scenes that happen to be timed to just longer than the next level needs to load.

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[Toridas]

Loading screen or not, it still had long wait periods where you would travel down a descending elevator or something. They just masked the load screens, didn't really remove them.

I never noticed this. With elevators the screen just faded to black, the elevator went up or down, then the new level faded in. It happened pretty quickly.

By eliminating loading screens we were able to keep people in the game, and much more immersed in this world.

Yeah, too bad the world was incredibly linear and with one narrow corridor you could follow through the whole game.

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[JoelKatz]

"Yeah, too bad the world was incredibly linear and with one narrow corridor you could follow through the whole game."

That's always a delicate balance in a game. The flipside of this is having to search the entire world to find the one little switch, door, or object that you missed the first time through with no idea where it could possibly be.

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[Paolone]

The flipside of this is having to search the entire world to find the one little switch, door, or object that you missed the first time through with no idea where it could possibly be.

No, what are you describing is a tree you are forced deeply to "go on". What GP and me want is a game that allows you to get there in more than one way. I found Dungeon Siege terribly boring, but then NOX spoiled me happy (not that it's not linear, but i find its gameplay extremely more varied).

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[SQLGuru]

Other than a few instances where you needed specifc skills to pass a barrier, you could pretty much load up on distance fighters and healers.....set the healers to auto heal and send in the guns.....very boring.....no sense of freedom. Even the side quests were pretty much "along the way". DSII got a little better where you had to keep going back to some key cities, but even then, mostly linear, forward moving.

Layne

VM

[Detritus]

I thought that's what virtual memory was for. You build a huge world and page bits of it in and out as needed.

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[damium]

For many games building the world all at once from the data is just not possible. Not only would it take too long to build but many times it would fill up available virtual memory and still not be done.

still going strong

[rucs_hack]

I still play dungeon siege 2, it's one of only two games I have installed, although the broken world expansion, while it add lots of niceness that makes the main game far better, is a bit small, just another chapter really.

I keep looking to see if dungeon siege 3 is ever coming. I thought this article appearing on slashdot was an indication of such an event, seems not though. Shame.

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[kv9]

I keep looking to see if dungeon siege 3 is ever coming.

kinda [spacesiege.com]

Awesome!

[rucs_hack]

Thanks for the link

Dungeon Siege the movie!

[DrXym]

Directed by Uwe Boll. This cinematic turd has been sitting in the can for a couple of years now but apparently it's being sent out to die in January. The theatrical cut is 120 minutes. Real masochists with have to wait for the 165 minute extended edition on DVD.

I always felt that the leveling system was best.

[B5_geek]

The level loading screen have never been an issue for me (not including all the wasted years trying to play D&D and Ultima on my C64). What I do truly love in DS was the way that it handled leveling.

I know that it wasn't the first to 'invent' "If you primarily hack your way through battles, then your strength will increase." style of advancement; it felt the most natural.

Yes the game was too linear, yes the game had a few major bugs that allowed for level advancement at stupid speed. But I liked it.

Re:I always felt that the leveling system was best

[blahplusplus]

"Yes the game was too linear, yes the game had a few major bugs that allowed for level advancement at stupid speed. But I liked it."

The original DS was alright, the 2nd kinda sucked. I think the real big issue is that it should play more like diablo then baldurs gate. I mean in DS2 they had special moves and everything but it felt unnatural to use them becaue you simply couldn't turn off "auto" attack.

That and Dungeon Sieges cheap attempt at ripping off Diablo's awesome item generation system without the

Boring

[Blakey Rat]

I would just like to say that Dungeon Seige is the most boring game I've ever purchased.

It also had a very strange plotline, wherein you kill a giant killer dragon and you think the game is over (oh thank God it's finally over!) only to find out you need to keep going another few hours. The ACTUAL boss of the game is "just some guy" in a dungeon, I beat him without even realizing I was beating the game, then it ended. Weird.

On second thought, Doom 3 does that also: you kill the big monster in hell (oh thank

For More Technical Details...

[simon_clarkstone]

If you want the technical details, read The Continuous World of Dungeon Siege [drizzle.com] (a fascinating read).

To avoid floating-point problems and to allow continuous loading, the world was split up into nodes with specified transformations between them. This resulted in a world that often cannot be mapped, as it would pass through itself. There were also many tricks that were used to fit the huge number of objects in memory. Many things self-destruct, or disappear if out of sight for more that a few minutes.

(Enter asinine subject you think is witty here.)

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

The Making of Dungeon Siege

Interviewer: So, how did you guys go about making Dungeon Siege?

Dungeon Siege Developer: Copied Diablo and slapped it in a true 3D engine.

Interviewer: Thanks! Next up on our show, how Morgan Webb, tall and dark, can be so hot face-on, but have such a damned scary profile.