J: As far as how many party members there are have you said or disclosed anything?

ML: Total no, no we haven’t disclosed the absolute total, there’s some surprises floating around for you, and there certainly enough to form two full parties. The thing is that some players will have different experiences. It’s possible to miss the Dog, you can leave Lothering and not get Llaina.

J: I’ve already noticed that a couple of people next to me have a different people available then I do.

ML: That’s interesting, yeah, and which places you go to you tend to meet new potential followers as well too, so you’ll end up with some of them joining earlier or later and that’ll change kind of the way they feel and the way the react to you too.

J: As far as where you go, when, is that left to the player for the most part?

ML: It is. The game has a system basically called persistent scaling, so what this does is it has a world where we can scale within a range so you don’t end with spaces where you come back at level 24 and everything’s just as tough as it was when I was here at level 12. Instead the game remembers when you visit places and what level you were at here, so it’s possible to go into a dungeon or something and it’s too tough. So go out and do one of the other big plots, and the dungeon will be “Oh, I’ve got better equipment and stuff I’m ready to deal with this challenge.” So as a result, the game is adjusting itself to you which it has to do to allow you to wander freely, yet at the same time it’s doing it the smart way so it’s not trivializing your experience.

J: So it’s possible to enter an area that is too tough to beat?

ML: There are some areas that are harder than others, and I wouldn’t say they’re impossible to beat, but they’re going to demand your "A" game. Similarly if you go after the High Dragon at level 12 you may have a very hard time of it, so at that point you’d probably want to come back at closer to level 18 or so and have leveled up a few times and have found some fire resistance equipment for instance. Those kinds of things I think are very gratifying as a player to spot something, know that something is there for you and to come back and deal with it later. Because when you do get the thrill of victory, you know that you achieved something you couldn’t before and that to me is actually very exciting. It’s partly why with our combats, some of them are just go ahead and charge in, but there are some that are tougher that are by design. You need to think about a little bit. So the player charges in and gets wiped out, usually there’s an auto save just before, so he goes “okay, maybe I’ll try opening with a Blizzard so they’ll get frozen and fall down, what would that do?” and suddenly the change of tactics, when that works, that’s when the game is just singing for you.