Carbine Studios Interview
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Ten Ton Hammer: To be honest, I've been a huge fan of your previous works at Troika Games, especially the Arcanum and Vampire titles. How are you going to use your experience with Troika and Interplay to help you create the world that Carbine Studios is working on? Are you keen to try your hand at a "fantasy" MMO sort of experience, since you haven't touched that genre since the Temple of Elemental Evil?
Tim Cain: My Carbine MMO is a brand-new MMO, and we are making both the IP and the engine from scratch. I've done that twice before, once with Fallout at Interplay and again with Arcanum at Troika. So I feel well prepared to do it a third time here at Carbine. And its genre won't strictly be fantasy, since I think we've seen that done enough.
Ten Ton Hammer: One of the fundamental aspects of both Arcanum and Vampire was their focus on story and how a user's experience could truly change with the decisions they make in the game. Up to this point, few MMORPGs have really been able to merge interactive storytelling with massive gameplay. Is Carbine going to try and change this unfortunate industry standard? What are your thoughts on this process?
Tim: I think a lot of MMO's miss an opportunity by emphasizing quests, raiding and PvP at the expense of any meaningful plot line. One of my goals with my game is tell a great story, with a different story for each player faction. And some of the side plots have choice points where the player can decide whether to proceed in different ways (and these choice points will be clearly marked, since there are no save games in MMO's). We can mix things up with class, race and tradeskill-specific quests, so players really can explore the world differently.
