DeathSpank Preview, Interview, and Media
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A little something from the preview:
Throughout the story, you'll discover main and side quests, listed as Important and Unimportant tasks in your Quest Log. As you might imagine, some of these feel much like classic adventure game puzzles. In one situation, you run across a farmer who wants to grow top vegetables, and in order to help, you have to track down different types of exotic manure, one being Unicorn Poop. In another situation, you want to get a sword from recurring character Eubrick the Retired, who requests a taco in trade, so you have to go to a taco stand and ask for the ingredients he wants, but the taco stand isn't allowed to make an "extra spicy" one because of a lawsuit, so you have to track down a special plant and combine it with the taco in your inventory. (And yes, there will be a hint system -- "certainly a more robust one than what you?d have in a classic adventure game," says Gilbert.)
DeathSpank's storytelling seems to follow the Monkey Island rules -- it's slightly edgy, but not crude; you'll find cut-scenes, but most of the story shows up in-game; and the dialogue is there to feel like a normal conversation, rather than a series of choices that telegraph the good/evil results. You'll even find a Pirate Village as one of the many locations on the in-game map, and a pirate ship that you can use to explore off-land, because, as Gilbert says, "It's just not a game without pirates, right?"
And a bit from the Q&A:
1UP: You were talking about how for a lot of the dialogue choices, you wanted to make sure they weren't just "good" or "bad," and that they felt like actual conversations. What kind of differences will players see in the world based on things they choose? Or will they?
RG: Yeah, I think the difference is... I don't want to say that it's subtle because that's not really the right word. But the thing that I don't like about a lot of the dialogues in games recently is I do feel like I'm choosing things off of a menu. It's like, "Oh, that's the good choice" and that's going to cause this to happen, or "Oh, that's the bad choice" and that's going to cause this to happen. So, I think what there is is there's more subtlety going on when you have conversations with people and you're exploring these dialogue trees. And I think that's what really good dialogue trees are about -- it's about exploration. It's about getting into a conversation with somebody and exploring their story through these dialogues.
And the way I think really good dialogue comes out is when you get done with this conversation with this person, and in some ways you felt like you had an actual conversation. You weren't just picking from menus and saying the same thing over and over again, having them respond with the same canned response a second time, but really varying all of those things... You know, you talk with someone about this and later on you discover, "Hey, now they're actually doing something a little different." But I think for that stuff to work it has to be subtle, because if it's not subtle gamers will start to meta-game it. They will start to look at the trees and they will start go, "Oh, you know what? I need to get this person to do this." So now they're making choices about the meta-game; they're not really making choices about experiencing the artistic nature of it all.
