Welcome to our first installment of a monthly Q&A with the U6P crew. I had the chance to interview Sabre Edge about their remake project and will continue this one a monthly basis.

Teich Dragon: Since Dungeon Siege has been released a lot of people expressed their concerns that an Ultima remake wouldn’t be possible with that “Hack ‘n’ Slash” engine. What do you think about these issues?

Sabre Edge: It is very possible to remake Ultima within the Siege Engine. Dungeon Siege was designed to be hack n’ slash. That is the direction Chris Taylor wanted to take his game and it turned out exactly how he planned it. That is a design issue though. The beauty of the level of modability in DS is that we can have a totally different design in place and the engine will still be suitable to pull off all the game mechanics and graphic creation that we require.

Teich Dragon: Now that the DS editor has been released, what is your first impression?

Sabre Edge: I wouldn’t say the editor has been “fully” released at this point. What we have now is a full fledged beta complete with bugs and uncertainty. My impression of the editor is that it has a pretty steep learning curve. It will take some real effort on the part of our world builders to become proficient with it but I am very confident they will do so.

Teich Dragon: Dungeon Siege doesn’t offer an overwhelming NPC interactivity. What are your plans to change this for U6P? And furthermore is this possible with the editor?

Sabre Edge: The top priority of both our Programming and Dialogue departments is to get a fully functional clickable Keyword system (a la Ultima 7) working in the Siege Engine. I believe it might be possible in through skrit in a limited capacity, but not to the extent we want with specific quest flags, dynamic states, and party member specific dialogue. Our goal is to build the dialogue engine within an external .DLL file. Hopefully GPG will include adequate I/O for the .DLLs to accomplish this goal.

Teich Dragon: There seems to be a little “lack” of musicians for U6P, at least only one musician is mentioned on the team page. How does the overall music progress? Will there be more people on the team?

Sabre Edge: It is our team’s belief that it is best to have only one person head up the music department. This person is responsible for the musical theme of the project. It is typical in the entertainment industry to have only one person in charge of the score/soundtrack of a production, be it a movie, game, television series. That way the mood and tone will be consistent throughout. We are very confident in Tanq’s ability to do this for it.

Teich Dragon: The 2D artwork we have seen so far (especially in the “trading” cards) is more than wonderful. Do you feel the 3D artists can compete with such a perfect style of “Ultima” artwork?

Sabre Edge: The 3D models in the Siege Engine will have to be created within the specifications of the engine. It wouldn’t be feasible to have the level of detail that is shown in the 2D cards be reflected in the 3D engine. There is an optimal poly count that each model should be within and we are trying to stay within those ranges. The 2D quality of the cards will show up in the party member portraits as well as the dialogue windows of NPCs.