The Dark Eye: Demonicon Interview
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Strategy Informer: Did you create this dark tale to make a point? To show the industry that adult themes like this can work in a videogame? Or did you create it for your own sake?
Daniel Hessler: I don't think we are the ones teaching the industry anything, no. We're trying to tell a good story that fits the Shadowlands and the reality of what's happening here. The motivations and the actions of these characters need to be credible, and more than just Good or Bad classic fantasy decisions. This is my approach to a good story. You have to believe it, and if the world is cruel, then it should have dark themes. Even so, we will not show everything. The player will find hints to some of the moral extremities, and extreme acts that have or are taking place, but we do not, in fact we SHOULD not, show everything, even for the sake of narration.
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Strategy Informer: There's a lot of '˜shades of grey' in Demonicon, which is all well and good at the beginning, but what would you say to those gamers who, after many hours of making tough choices, simply want to be the obviously .ood' or obviously '˜bad' guy for a little bit?
Daniel Hessler: Good or bad is a question of priority. Each decision you make has its good aspects and its bad aspects. It's not that you're choosing between rubbish decisions, all decision have good and bad aspects to them. You can still cling to classic moral ideas, like those presented by the old Gods, or questionable ideas presented by new gods... you can find some of these classic framing's in the game. There's the City Guard, for example, and the Smugglers, and you can choose to support either side. If your priority is to be classically good, then you can stick with that but every good action has consequences. This is what I mean when I talked about credible and believable characters you decide yourself what is good and what is bad.
Normally, we'd accompany an interview like this with a preview. In fact we were given the opportunity to go hands-on with the game, and played through the first hour or so, plus some bits later in the game using pre-made saves. Unfortunately, we're sad to report that the game still needs a fair bit of work. The core mechanics are there, all the content, individual system etc... are all created and are all present, but there are A LOT of technical issues to work out. Probably doesn't help that we were trying the 360 build for the first time, which obviously has to deal with the platform's limitations. We were unable to get some time with the PC build.
