Curious Expedition - Interview @ Giantbomb

Giantbomb have played the roguelike Curious Expedition and decided to interview the developers.

On its surface, The Curious Expedition is a bright & colorful vision of exploring "because it's there". However, the subtext of the game gets quite disturbing with villages being destroyed and valleys being laid to waste just so an explorer can get a statue of himself built. (Explorers unleash disastrous curses when they steal treasures from shrines like volcanoes, chasms, and black holes.) Would you rather have the game seen as a celebration of exploration or a condemnation of it?

The fact that you ask this question is very satisfying to me, because it is exactly what we want the players to ask themselves. I don't want to give a definitive answer to that because it should be up to the players to make up their own minds. If the answer to this question would be too obvious I would say we would have failed in making an interesting game. We don't want to make a straight educational game, but if players reflect on their own doing within the game world, that is very welcome to us and we put a lot of thought into aiming for this effect.

Is trying to strike a balance between "exploit natives" and "respect natives" a factor in game balancing? Or is that affected more by trying to make sure there's a variety of ways to win? Back in the spring alpha builds, the easiest way to win was to steal everything that wasn't nailed down. Did you consider keeping "exploit" an easier way to win than "respect" in order to drive a point home?

Yes, your last point was actually our intention from the very start. The thought that even if you have good intentions, it is hard not to get corrupted. I was actually a bit surprised to see how many people picked up on that and asked for other ways to win the game. That's why we've been working also on giving more peaceful players more variety and chances to win the game. In the end there will still be a certain bias though as we feel it's important to the overall statement.

Thanks Eye.