DeathSpank Interview
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Now that DeathSpank is done and you can look back, how similar is it to what you initially intended to make?
RG: I think it's surprisingly close. Because, yeah, games really do change a lot, but my original vision for this game -- and it's been in my head for five years or so -- was "Monkey Island meets Diablo." That was really the catch-phrase for it, and I think it did that. It's got a lot of the humor and the dialogue; the way it tells story is from Monkey Island. It's got the nice action-RPG element that I really like from Diablo.
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In terms of quests and world exploration, how did you think about the balance between the extremes where you just line up the quests and players knock them down, and where you just have this huge world and players encounter quests as they stumble on them? Action RPGs have fallen at very different points on that spectrum in recent years.
RG: You want to give players enough of a feeling that they're not being just shoe-horned into an area. You want to allow them to roam. More importantly, you want to allow them to make mistakes. That's the key. You've got different monsters in different levels, and the monsters that are too high-level for you to really win a fight with -- their level numbers are red. We use those as soft gates. Then there are hard gates -- literal gates -- that are locked.
You have these hard monsters around to kind of push the player in the direction you want them to go, but you don't want to just block them off all the time, because there's a point where the player will realize this is artificial, and then it just becomes a linear game in their head. But if they just see some really hard monsters that they can't really fight their way through, it's just as "hard" as a hard gate, but it doesn't feel that way; it doesn't feel like you've tricked them.
