Talking Dungeons & Dragons: Tactics for PSP

You know us, we're a little reserved. For instance, sometimes there are games we feel we should shout about, but we don't. That doesn't mean we don't eagerly look forward to them, though – in fact, if you read between the lines, you can usually easily pick this sentiment out.

One such game is Dungeons & Dragons: Tactics. With its release now almost upon us (for those of you living in the US), and because we're quietly confident this could be one of the best PSP titles this year, we thought it was time for a little more exposure.

As such, we fired off a set of questions to Lawrence Liberty, the game's producer at Atari. Here's what he had to say.

Lawrence Liberty: This was a challenging project in a number of ways. The greatest design challenge in implementing the latest D&D rules on the PSP was finding a way to clearly present such rich, verbose source material in the limited screen real estate that the platform affords.

From a technical perspective, the multiplayer component proved the most difficult to execute. From a project management and quality-assurance standpoint, the sheer size and scope of the single-player campaign was intimidating. As you can see, it was not easy to cram all of this onto a UMD, but we succeeded.

I think the team at Kuju have done a remarkable job in capturing the feel of the pen and paper game, perhaps better than any previous CRPG implementation of D&D. The fact that it is on a handheld makes the achievement all the more remarkable.

The main reason this happened is that the scope of the title was not fully appreciated until it was too late. This is a deep 40- to 60-hour RPG. Stabilising the multiplayer game proved to be the most difficult and time-consuming aspect of the production effort, and perfecting that component has been the focus of our development effort for the past six months.

Unfortunately, downloadable content was something that we were forced to shelve (at least for our first effort). The upside is that we included the content that we were planning to provide on the disk.

The PSP is a terrific platform from a technical perspective. It has an outstanding development environment and a solid hardware abstraction layer. Complaints are minor: faster loading times would be much appreciated, you could always use more RAM, and it would have been nice to have access to the full clock speed (something that Sony only recently allowed with a PSP software update).

We did not have any specific problems with the design of the control scheme. However, it was a challenge shoehorning a complex game onto the PSP, but in the end we were happy with the results.

Achieving multiplayer stability was the most difficult part of D&D Tactics' development.

We are really happy with the way the game captures the feel of pen and paper Dungeons & Dragons. It should be great fun for fans who have played and enjoyed D&D, or anyone who appreciates a great tactical adventure.