Spelljammer: Pirates of Realmspace and Deathlord Interview/Retrospective
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Like world exploration, dungeon exploration in Deathlord is top-down. Personally I like to think of it as a hardcore Wizardry-style dungeon romp "translated" into a top-down view. The ingenuity of Deathlord's design is to make this translation flow really well despite the obvious difficulties involved in bringing such elements as chutes, traps, teleports, environmental hazards and secret doors over from a first-person to a top-down perspective. Together with 128 unique monsters, the dungeons will make sure to test the abilities of your characters quite thoroughly. As someone who plays CRPGs not least for well-designed dungeons, I feel that Deathlord's dungeon design belongs to the best top-down dungeon design in the history of the genre. Most dungeons have a unique and memorable theme, and their design is as unforgiving as it is inventive and clever. You won't make it far without accurately mapping them out, and some secrets are only noticeable when you study the map. To an enthusiastic dungeon crawler, Deathlord is one of the ultimate games.
Apart from the character development and the location and dungeon design, another high point of Deathlord is how exploration is presented. There are no quest objectives, or quests at all. There is only the starting clue that Deathlord, the game's villain, gives you - seven words, six items, and a challenge to find them - and an overwhelmingly huge world into which you're thrown. No one ever leads you by the nose or holds your hand. There is barely even any idle NPC chatter. Each clue only begets further clues, and it is exclusively up to you and your power of observation to decypher them, put them together, and ultimately have them lead you to and through the final dungeon. The clues are not just obscure, but often difficult to find as well. There are many places, such as prisons, private houses or closed off institutions, that you can't just wander inside; you'll have to break into them, with the consequence of fighting the entire town guard that come springing at you. However, you might learn valuable clues if you do take the risk - all the greater originally, when playing the game on the Apple II or C64 and not on an emulator, given the permadeath.
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Another CRPG you were involved with, as director and designer, was Spelljammer: Pirates of Realmspace, published by SSI in 1992. How did it happen that you started working on a Spelljammer CRPG? At the time, how did you feel about switching to the Spelljammer setting?
I was working on some other titles for SSI and they asked if I was interested in doing something with Spelljammer, and after some research I felt it had a lot of potential. It was an RPG where you weren't limited to a single fantasy setting. If you wanted to change the rules for your setting, you could just go somewhere else. Theoretically you could to that before by plane travelling, but Spelljammer made the journey itself more of an adventure.
Spelljammer is a pretty divisive and unorthodox CRPG, generating mixed reception to this day. What were you trying to achieve with it, design-wise? How faithful did you want the game to be to the pen and paper Spelljammer, and what were the guidelines you had in mind for translating the latter to the computer?
I was thinking less about staying true to pen and paper mechanics and more about how to make the product a fun experience on the computer while staying true to the core setting.
Spelljammer features two different combat systems; one for space battles and one for squad battles. How did you go about designing the two of them, and why did you decide to make space combat real-time instead of turn-based?
Space combat was made real time to try and create more of the excitement to having a space battle. I felt that the real-time combat would be more fun than a computer-based version of moving chits around on a hex map. The crew battles posed some interesting challenges in creating a way for large crews to fight while still feeling like you were had heroic characters involved in the battle.
