The Dwarves Interview
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With less than two days to go on the game's Kickstarter campaign, the editors over at RPGWatch have wrangled up a two-part interview with KING Art Games creative director Jan Theysen about their upcoming RPG, The Dwarves. You'll want to check out part one when you have time, but for now I'll do some quoting from part two:
RPGWatch: Let's quickly talk about a couple of other things before get to combat. What are the quests like? Typical fetch quests?
Jan Theysen: No. (laughs) The idea is basically that you don't have many small quests but rather a couple of big ones. At the beginning of the game, for example, your quest is to find somebody who is supposed to be at a certain location, but then it turns out he is not there and you have to find him and so on. This is your quest for 2 hours or so. Then you have this big world map with let's say 100 waypoints and you can do whatever you want. You can choose when to pursue this quest, when to look for him, but you can also travel around and deal with other things. And the world map, again, is evolving, so new threats might appear or different things might happen. So it's up to you when you do that. When this quest, this one big point in the main quest, is finally solved, there is another big quest. The idea is to give the players basic directions but not to really take them by their hand and tell them now do this, now do that . it's basically (Okay, sooner or later you should look into this, but here is the world have fun).
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RPGWatch: Is there character interaction outside of combat too?
Jan Theysen: Sure. When you're on the world map or in the non-combat parts of the game, characters interact with each other. So if, for example, you're traveling the world map, two characters might be getting into an argument over something and you have to decide with side you want to support, if any. Such verbal conflicts and their resolutions help cement or erode friendship between characters. This has consequences during combat. If there is a character and I'm always on his side, I completed a quest for him and we have a really good friendship, these characters might become a good (combat couple). If one gets action points back, the other might get some of those points as well, because both are emotionally invested in what's happening to their friend.
RPGWatch: Action points?
Jan Theysen: I forgot to mention that all the special abilities and special powers cost action points. Every hero character has a certain amount of action points and he looses them as soon as he uses one of his special abilities, but of course there are also ways to gain points back. It might be over time, each X seconds I get one action point back, but it might also be such that one character gets an action point back for each kill, and one character might get action points for something else.
This enables tactics like this: I want to get kills with character C because he gets action points back for that. So I coordinate my combat party to make C's attack most effective. Maybe character A fights against the enemies, then character B might stun them and finally character C might use a special ability to go for multiple kills. And because he is the one who gets action points back when he kills somebody, his special ability is basically without any costs.
We are implementing these things at the moment. It's obviously something we have to figure out when it comes to balancing. We don't want a pure action game, but on the other hand we also don't want to make it too complex or too hard to get your head around. So we have to balance this and find a nice flow.
