Hunted: The Demon's Forge Interview
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Co-Optimus: You stated in an interview with IGN that, as a dungeon crawler, you wanted Hunted to be (something where it's a sensory experience,) as opposed to the kinds of experiences you get with jRPGs or Mass Effect. Could you describe that a bit more? Is this experience related to the puzzles that players can solve in addition to fighting off hordes of terrible beasties?
Brian: If we go back to the original games of Wizardry, Stonekeep, or even Hexen, they all worked on capturing the experience of crawling around in a dungeon, finding secret doors and battling through hordes of monsters while avoiding traps. Some of these games were straight up RPG while others were more action-oriented games. As good as the graphics were at that time, you really needed to stretch your imagination in order to have them feel real. They certainly didn't hold up to the animation you'd see in a movie for example.But here in the year 2010, the hardware has gotten so powerful that you don't have to suspend your disbelief as much because things look incredible on the game consoles. This is what I mean by bringing the essence of the dungeon crawl back.
With Hunted, we could have taken a hardcore RPG, but we decided it should be more action oriented. That being said, we did decide to create experiences, such as the game's puzzles, that are off the critical path that bring more depth to the experience. We're able to make as many puzzles as we want and we can make them as difficult as we want because we don't force the players to complete them in order to have fun playing the main quest.
