Din's Curse - Interview @ Iron Tower

Vince D. Weller has interviewed fellow indie developer Steven Peeler on the ITS forums.  The questions start out talking about Soldak's background and choices but quickly focus on Din's Curse:

9. The press-release boldly claims that "your choices truly impact the game". Care to elaborate and give this very demanding audience some examples? I'm a big fan of choices & consequences, but I'm not sure how well this concept fits the action genre.

I have tried to build this game as much as possible to give you meaningful choices. Here are some examples.
 
Just simply going down another level in the dungeon is a big choice. Each level down the monsters and traps get harder so it is simply more dangerous. This isn’t surprising or anything; however you have no instant gate and can’t abuse the save/resume system to get back into town. The farther into a dungeon level you adventure, the farther you are from the last gate to home (well until you find the next gate). This gets even more interesting if you are playing a hardcore character.

Let me give you a good quest example also. The town leaders have found out that Azrael seems to be planning something. You don’t know what he is planning, but a Death Knight probably isn’t planning a tea party. You really do have to decide if dealing with Azrael is important to do now or if you have better things to do at the moment. Sometimes like in this example you don’t have too much information to work with. In this particular example, Azrael is planning on raiding the town. If you don’t kill him, he will send his minions into town for a quick raid and he will probably keep raiding the town till the town is dead or he is. Considering NPCs can die, this is very dangerous for you. Completing quests for dead NPCs doesn’t work very well. It’s also hard to sell and buy items from dead vendors.

Even a simple chest presents a potentially difficult choice. Each chest tells you what kind of trap you think is protecting it and what the chance you are correct is. Both of these are based on your character’s perception. Some traps are pretty nasty like the pit trap. So if you find a chest that you think has a pit trap on it and you are already deeper in the dungeon than you feel comfortable, will you open the chest and risk getting dropped to a lower level?

In related news, the very first screens have been revealed at the official site.