GB Feature: Leonard Boyarsky Interview

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Written by BuckGB on October 11th, 2004

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GB: Do you feel that multiplayer is of great importance when creating this type of RPG, or do you think that fans of this type of game are looking for a strong single player experience only? Also, would you rather see the player controlling an entire party or a solo character?

Leon: In RPG development, multiplayer is almost always a completely separate game (unless you just let people play the role of a (hero's) followers). The only time I think it makes sense is if you're making an action oriented RPG whose action stands on its own without the RPG aspects, as adding real RPG elements to a multiplayer game (story, the ability to change the world, etc) is a whole independent dev cycle of its own. So, if I have my choice, in a game like the hypothetical Post Apocalyptic game we're talking about, I'd either want no multiplayer so we could simply concentrate on a great single player game, or an almost totally independent team developing the multiplayer alongside the single player game.

As far as the control of your party members, I think we're leaning towards giving the player the control of his followers during combat, if he wants it. I personally like the Fallout style where your followers are independent entities, but a lot of fans (and people who work at Troika) prefer the ability to control their party members. This is all conjecture at this point, however.

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