Game of Thrones - Interview @ Rock, Paper, Shotgun

RPS has an excellent interview with Sylvain Sechi and Thomas Veauclin of Cyanide, talking about Game of Thrones. Apparently the game has been through (console) certification so they can't change it now, so the team has moved on to DLC. They also discuss the long pre-production phase where they experimented with a number of different approaches:

RPS: How much does what you’ve got now resemble what you started sketching out three years ago?

Sylvain Sechi: At the very beginning we were going into a bit more open game, a bit less linear, but since we wanted a very very strong story, and also we went into engine limitation, we are using Unreal technology for the game, which is really a game made for linear game, a bit less for Sandbox, which actually was not Sandbox was just a bit more open. So we used a bit the openbox, sandbox aspect to focus more on the story, and I think it was a very good choice because that’s really what the game is about; very very strong story content. It was very close to what we had expected first.

Thomas Veauclin: We tried a lot of things at the beginning in the story in the script, and the game is depending on what we would like to tell and to write, we tried a story with only one character, we tried a story with lots of characters, lots of heroes. Each time it had an impact directly on what we have to make, what we have to realise, and we tried, we tried, we tried, we tried. One thing we tried was to put a lot of things of the books in the game, a lot of characters, a lot of places. At the time ‘What are we talking about? What is the story? What is the relation with the player?’

One thing that was very important to us was to create a new story, we didn’t want to tell a story with high level problem of the king, of the queen, and you’re a nobody. You were the hero, so there are lots of things in the world and you will be totally pushed by the world and by the story of the novels and history in the game. The player is the centre of his adventure, of course, and of the game. So we put a lot of time to write, write, write again, write again, to the background of the character and of the heroes, of your heroes and of all the other characters who could impact on your heroes directly. So, we tried a lot of things.

Sylvain Sechi: From a writing perspective Thomas is talking about, writing the story, we tried a lot of things. We dropped at least ten different scenarios we did not think at the end were good enough; we re-wrote, re-wrote, re-wrote it. Eventually, each time we would get closer to what we wanted to achieve. Kind of like creating a child on top of dead bodies, and then you get higher and higher and then you get really  … not perfect, but at least really what we wanted to do.