Children of War: Blood and Snow Interviews

There are a couple of new interviews with Shadowforge's Ryan Lamb about their Kickstarter campaign for an isometric RPG called Children of War: Blood and Snow, and while the campaign is relatively slow-moving in terms of pledges, hopefully these Q&As will help spark some interest. First up is an audio interview with Only SP that's accompanied by text write-ups like this one:

In our recent interview with Ryan Lamb of Shadowforge Studios, he revealed that the RPG's open world is now currently measuring at (20km by 20km). Considering that the size of other triple A projects can hit up to 10 to 15 km squared, Blood and Snow's world is a pretty big one.

In case you didn't know, Blood and Snow is an upcoming 2D isometric RPG fantasy game that is set to rival the likes of other isometric games like Diablo or Torchlight but instead, it keeps (the gamepad in mind) instead of just focusing on the mouse and keyboard alone. Lamb has also described the game as playing more like (a fighting game) than a traditional point-and-click adventure. In terms of the world regions, the game starts out in a (Pacific Northwest) style forest and graduates into a more Alpine region and then into an (arctic/glacial) setting as you venture north.The game will also feature (dark caves, deep mines and treacherous dungeons).

It seems that variety is key here as the environments will change gradually as you travel throughout the world, which is a good thing to help alleviate the boredom of seeing the same type of environments over and over like many other RPGs.


And then a little something from RPGWatch's Q&A:

RPGWatch: How will the single-player, and Co-Op side of the game be different? I know most Co-Op RPGs tend to be story-lite, and suffer due to multi-player.

Ryan Lamb: The game is being designed to scale with party size so that a player who prefers to play solo can have just as good of an experience as the team-oriented players and also so that anyone can jump back into their game without having to worry about whether or not their friends can play. Rewards will be scaled too and this will factor fairly for both types of players because of how we handle statistics. Gear can be deconstructed and the points in that gear redistributed to other gear. This allows the player to keep any gear they like the look of while upgrading stats to keep up with level. It also means that even with slightly lesser rewards for solo players that it takes them a bit longer but that they can obtain the same level of gear as team-based players. Fair for all! As far as questing together goes, we're all about freedom and chaos and so as the dialogue system currently sits, whenever a choice has to be made in quest dialogue, the engine makes a virtual dice role to determine who gets to make the decision and everyone in the party has to live with that decision. This stems from our background playing tabletop RPGs like D&D and the amazing, frustrating, humorous and exciting experience of having to live with the decisions of your party members, whether you like them or not.