RPG Dot talks to Planewalker Games
RPG Dot talks to Planewalker Games
Interview - posted by Vault Dweller on Thu 1 June 2006, 19:41:51
Tags: The Broken HourglassRPG Dot asked the Planewalker Games guys, better known for their modding work on the Infinity Engine games, <a href=http://www.rpgdot.com/index.php?hsaction=10053&ID=1226>some questions[/url] about recently announced The Broken Hourglass game. Here is a brief overview for the lazy ones:
Mechanically, The Broken Hourglass is an isometric 2D CRPG in a sword-and-sorcery setting, the Tolmiran Empire. Players will create a single protagonist character and assemble a party from characters in the gameworld. Together they will face down enemies, seek obscure artifacts of legend, mingle with townspeople, fight, lose, win, love, laugh, die.
...
It's certainly fair to say that we enjoy the style of gameplay that BG2 represents and think it's a valuable building block, yes. That would include aspects such as a character and party-focused story, a pace that encourages considered decisions (i.e., we're not producing a "twitch" game), real-time combat with auto- and manual pause events, and interaction with the gameworld aside from simply killing its inhabitants. That includes weaving romance into the game as well-many of the mods we developed were largely concerned with adding or expanding romances to BG2, and we think the presence of romance in that game has been a major part of its enduring success and popularity. So it's only natural that we would bring that forward into an original title as well.
...
A few weeks before the game begins, an unknown power took over the capitol building of Mal Nassrin, erecting a magical shield that prevents anyone from entering or exiting. A short time later, an entire neighborhood simply imploded in a massive explosion of unknown origin. And shortly after that, a magical dome appeared around the entire city perimeter. Everyone inside the city is trapped, and local authorities are at a loss to do much about the situation. To make matters worse, people have begun to see shadows of the past appear in the city, and reportedly their touch is deadly.
...
Mal Nassrin isn't a city brimming over with men of action and dashing heroines and so forth. It's not where you'd expect the beginning of the end of the world to start, and as such nobody's particularly prepared for the eventuality.
...
The Tolmiran Empire setting at this time in its history is also somewhat lighter on "monsters" than many other popular CRPG settings are. This has a number of implications, including the fact that "adventurer" is not the dime-a-dozen career choice you see in many fantasy settings. "Humanity is the enemy" is the slogan the world designers tried to adhere to when specifying the scenario's threats. So hordes of kobolds won't be burrowing into town any time soon--and if they did, there wouldn't be 20 adventuring parties spilling out of the town's taverns to intercept them. It's just not that kind of world.
...
Non-combat skills have their role as well. On the purely interactive side, we offer Haggling (affects store prices and can play a role in quest rewards as well), Diplomacy, and Manipulation-the "truthful" and "misleading" sides of the same coin. Stealth, carrying capacity, perception, lock and trap manipulation, and so forth are also available skills, derived from governing primary abilities as well as points spent directly. We support pickpocketing as well.
...
"Why" is that, simply put, it [real-time combat] seems to work pretty well for a pretty substantial segment of the player base. I'm not religious about real-time combat nor am I looking to demythologize turn-based CRPG combat. We simply looked at a structure that we felt worked quite well to convey epic action while still preserving hands-on options for the player, and said "Yes, let's do that."It's a long interview, so there is a lot more where it came from.
Mechanically, The Broken Hourglass is an isometric 2D CRPG in a sword-and-sorcery setting, the Tolmiran Empire. Players will create a single protagonist character and assemble a party from characters in the gameworld. Together they will face down enemies, seek obscure artifacts of legend, mingle with townspeople, fight, lose, win, love, laugh, die.
...
It's certainly fair to say that we enjoy the style of gameplay that BG2 represents and think it's a valuable building block, yes. That would include aspects such as a character and party-focused story, a pace that encourages considered decisions (i.e., we're not producing a "twitch" game), real-time combat with auto- and manual pause events, and interaction with the gameworld aside from simply killing its inhabitants. That includes weaving romance into the game as well-many of the mods we developed were largely concerned with adding or expanding romances to BG2, and we think the presence of romance in that game has been a major part of its enduring success and popularity. So it's only natural that we would bring that forward into an original title as well.
...
A few weeks before the game begins, an unknown power took over the capitol building of Mal Nassrin, erecting a magical shield that prevents anyone from entering or exiting. A short time later, an entire neighborhood simply imploded in a massive explosion of unknown origin. And shortly after that, a magical dome appeared around the entire city perimeter. Everyone inside the city is trapped, and local authorities are at a loss to do much about the situation. To make matters worse, people have begun to see shadows of the past appear in the city, and reportedly their touch is deadly.
...
Mal Nassrin isn't a city brimming over with men of action and dashing heroines and so forth. It's not where you'd expect the beginning of the end of the world to start, and as such nobody's particularly prepared for the eventuality.
...
The Tolmiran Empire setting at this time in its history is also somewhat lighter on "monsters" than many other popular CRPG settings are. This has a number of implications, including the fact that "adventurer" is not the dime-a-dozen career choice you see in many fantasy settings. "Humanity is the enemy" is the slogan the world designers tried to adhere to when specifying the scenario's threats. So hordes of kobolds won't be burrowing into town any time soon--and if they did, there wouldn't be 20 adventuring parties spilling out of the town's taverns to intercept them. It's just not that kind of world.
...
Non-combat skills have their role as well. On the purely interactive side, we offer Haggling (affects store prices and can play a role in quest rewards as well), Diplomacy, and Manipulation-the "truthful" and "misleading" sides of the same coin. Stealth, carrying capacity, perception, lock and trap manipulation, and so forth are also available skills, derived from governing primary abilities as well as points spent directly. We support pickpocketing as well.
...
"Why" is that, simply put, it [real-time combat] seems to work pretty well for a pretty substantial segment of the player base. I'm not religious about real-time combat nor am I looking to demythologize turn-based CRPG combat. We simply looked at a structure that we felt worked quite well to convey epic action while still preserving hands-on options for the player, and said "Yes, let's do that."
