The Bard's Tale Interview
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Q: We're loving humor, but what can you tell us about the "serious" stuff? Outline how quests work, what type of characters and creatures we'll come across, etc.
A: Of course one of the things we knew is that we couldn't get by on just humor and character, we had to make a solid RPG as well. The Bard will meet a lot of different NPC's in the course of his travels, when one of them has a task for him, they will mark it in his quest journal. The quest journal acts like a "to do" list of heroic tasks and is divided between major quests and side quests. Quests can be anything from investigating the Bugbear problem in the local cairn to breaking every barrel that you come across (like you weren't going to do that anyways!)
The Bard will fight many dangerous and sometimes bizarre foes on his travels. From zombies that not only throw their heads at you but try to entangle you in their entrails to a group of very angry villagers (The Bard always seems to leave angry villagers in his wake) there is no shortage of battle to be had in the game.
With the enemy AI we tried to give them all relatively simple behaviors that combined well with each other to provide interesting combat situations. So for instance you might encounter that aforementioned group of zombies and one variety will pull of its head and throw it at you, while another will try to grab you with its entrails and pull itself towards you, a third type will attempt to get close to you and hurl the contents of its stomach (along with the stomach itself) at you.
