Drakensang Interview: From Fable to Fallout

Drakensang Interview – BioWare and Fallout 3

bt: At the moment Gothic 4 is being talked about and The Witcher has just been re-released as The Witcher: Enhanced Edition. What do you think that Drakensang has to make it sound out?

CW: Well, we’ll be supporting the game with patches but we don’t have plans to do an expansion like with The Witcher. We’re confident with how stable the game is now.

What we do have though is a unique setting, a beautiful world. Gothic 4 is aiming for very late 2009 at a guess, The Witcher has been out for more than a year now, so there’s a gap there for us to fill. People who loved things like Baldur’s Gate and who loved the very classical RPG gameplay have a bit of a gap right now too – so they should have a look at this.

bt: You don’t tend to see so many fantasy RPGs any more. BioWare for example did Baldur’s Gate but since then it has done Mass Effect and KOTOR and gone very sci-fi. Do you think the RPG market is moving on and leaving fantasy behind?


CW: No, no. For us, we think it’s an opportunity as there’s still a big demand for classic fantasy games. Gamers have been in love with these types of games for a long time and they are still in love with them. BioWare has moved elsewhere, but there’s still a demand for fantasy RPGs and we see that in the sales figures and comments.

BA: There’s a demand for linear, story-led RPGs too. The problem with the open-world RPG approach that BioWare has been toying with is that you can’t really tell as dense or as good a story as you have to spread the content very thinly if you have a large world.

Most of the time you have this feeling, or at least I do when I play these games, that there’s not enough diversity in the environments. We can use our game to explore all manner of different areas, cultures, quests, side-stories and that’s something you can’t do as well if you have just one big, giant sandbox because the game starts to look like a patchwork or have huge areas of emptiness. I had this with Fallout 3, for example. I liked it and I was very excited about it but I was sometimes wandering around going ‘Hello? Is anyone there?’ and the next quest-giver was miles and miles away. It was a lot of grind and meaningless combat to get over to there a lot of the time.


I think the open, sandbox RPG style will work someday when the budget is big enough and you can properly fill the space you have. Right now that isn’t going to happen with this financial situation though. So, I think sticking to this linear and story-led concept is a better path for us and something that gamers can appreciate.

bt: How does the combat in Drakensang work then? You mentioned in the presentation that I was a round-based mechanic displayed in real-time. Why approach it in that way?

BA: We didn’t want to cater just to that one type of player who likes just turn-based or just real-time games. In the end, if you’re honest, all gamers like the chance to be strategic if it’s all getting a bit too much and tell their squad to go here, do that, shoot him and so on. At the same time though, the action shouldn’t just be all strategic. It isn’t Battle Chess, you want the chance to be spontaneous with some enemies.

That was always a pain with some of the old turn-based games. Fallout is a game I really love to play, but it isn’t fun when you have some stupid rat creeping along three squares a turn. So, we chose to combine both options and let players tackle it as they want.