This PlanetDungeonSiege Forums thread features a huge post from Gas Powered Games' Chris Taylor as well as another GPG employee with further explanations of the reasons behind the just-announced delay in the release date for Dungeon Siege (story). The posts refute any "conspiracy theories" that have been presented, and mentions the continuous 3D world, multi-character party balance, multiplayer issues, and more among the factors that are contributing to the delay. Chris also explains why they didn't offer a more concrete updated release date than "2002," and mentions that he will attempt to spend more time on the forums in the future helping address concerns that people are expressing. Thanks Paranoid Jack. Here's a bit from Chris' post:

When we started Gas Powered Games we shot for the moon. Ironically we never actually got all the things into the game that we wanted, far from it, but we got the real important stuff in and now we are trying to finish it all, and it's a huge task, much bigger than anything that any one of us could have imagined. Around the office I joke by saying, who's idea was this? They should be shot! I am actually glad we are doing an RPG, especially now that we are past all the hard stuff. Our days are spent fixing bugs, playing the game, talking about little things that we could do to make the game better. Studying playtest reports to see what confused people, or got them lost, or anything at all that interfered with them having a fun time, and then set to work to get those changes incorporated into the game for the next build. It's really the best time of the project, it's just taking way longer than we thought.