The Shadow Sun Interview
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Digitally Downloaded is featuring an interview with Ossian Studios' Alan Miranda, quizzing the ex-BioWare designer about the development of The Shadow Sun, the possibility of it spawning a franchise, whether we might see it on PC and other platforms in the future, and more. Some questions and their answers:
DD: Where did the idea for The Shadow Sun come from?
AM: Having worked on numerous fantasy stories for our previous games, we knew we wanted to create something deeper and more intriguing than a story backdrop of a war or an obvious menace like an undead horde overrunning a kingdom.
So we put our heads together and developed the idea for a shadow that was slowly creeping across the face of the sun. It seemed like a great premise for a world in peril - an epic backdrop for the fantasy stories we wanted to tell. It was mysterious and Lovecraftian in its otherworldliness.
In terms of story and lore, our lead designer, Luke Scull, had some initial thoughts on the style of world The Shadow Sun would become. It would have a rougher edge to it, similar to what we did for our unreleased Witcher expansion, Scars of Betrayal, but still have the sense of high adventure that we had done in our Dungeons & Dragons games. Luke, being the big fantasy reader that he is (and now fantasy author in his own right!) drew inspiration from the Malazan and A Song of Ice and Fire novels. That rougher edge reminded me very much of Robert E. Howard's Conan stories, with their setting of early human civilizations and magic being a rare power wielded by few, so that became my own inspiration for the game.
In early 2010, I began creating a massive amount of background lore, such as maps, histories, creatures, etc., and showing these to Luke. He was already building a rough storyline, so the two merged together in a very organic way to become the story you see in the final game.
DD: The game seems loosely based on Arabian mythology; it's a theme that we wish would be explored in games more often! Were there any difficulties around the theme that perhaps explain why we don't see many other games with this kind of setting?
AM: It's not so much Arabian as it is ancient middle-eastern, like the Babylonian and Sumerian civilizations. It's true that most RPGs stick with the Northern European fantasy setting of castles and knights, and probably do so because it's a safer bet sales-wise. In our case, our world is huge, and it does in fact have a northern region like Northern Europe, but we were setting our first game in the southern deserts, so its flavour had to be unique to that region.
The original inspiration for that kind of locale (deserts, palm trees, jungles, etc.) actually came from our ideas for Neverwinter Nights 2. Towards the end of working with the NWN2 franchise, we had started imagining an expansion that took place in the south of the Forgotten Realms. But when NWN2 dried up from Atari in early 2009, those burgeoning ideas carried over into TSS.
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DD: What are some of your longer-term plans for Ossian Studios?
AM: After having poured so much effort into the lore of The Shadow Sun, it makes the most sense to keep building on that. So we'd like to continue making games set in that world and potentially have them reach across all platforms (mobile/PC/console). We have ideas but we won't be talking about them just yet.
