Dragon Commander - Interview @ RPGCodex

RPGCodex has an interview with Larian Studios founder Swen Vincke. Swen talks Dragon Commander as well as Choice & Consequence, his design philosophy as well as other topics. Here's a snippet:

12) I agree C&C has become a bit of a buzzword as of late. Well, having real options in each quest sure sounds good. You've never focused on C&C in your previous games; what caused this change in design direction on your part?

 

I actually always wanted to have deep integration of choice & consequence in our games, but for some reason (well actually a whole list of reasons), we never managed to do it correctly. So this time, we made sure from day 1 that this wasn't going to happen again, and we made the choice & consequence mechanics so fundamental to the game, that we don't have any err... choice in the matter. We also took our time to prepare the implementation of this properly, an advantage of the self-funded development approach.

 

13) You also said that the limitation of branching is the visualization of consequences. Could you elaborate on this? How does the need for cinematic representation in modern games influence your job as a designer?

 

Funny that you ask this - I just wrote a piece on my blog about that. The limitation is the performance acting - if we go full voice, full motion and facial capture - obviously the more dialogue is in the game, the higher the cost, and that's a limiting factor. The RPG systems we now have in place, after doing this for over 10 years, allow us to script pretty much anything we can think off, but showing it all cinematically, that's always going to require quite a lot of effort, and the question is, how far do we go and how much money do we put in it. All the money we put in that, we can't use for anything else.