RPGWatch Feature - Dragon Commander Interview

While at GamesCom we had the opportunity to ask Swen Vincke from Larian some questions after the presentation of Dragon Commander. Here's a sample:

RPGWatch: What games would you compare Dragon Commander with?

Swen Vincke: I don’t have a clue. We started out making a game with dragons that was a very small project, a tryout. There were only 2 guys working on it. Then somebody put the slowdown thing in it, played it and felt: “Wow, this is fun”. The flying around really feels natural, both with a mouse and a controller.
We asked ourselves the question what to do with it? Let’s make a small DLC game. So we added missions… boring. This is the mission goal; destroy this or that… boring. To make missions interesting nowadays you need to have things happen every second. Huge things need to be happening and that was expensive. So we figured that if we made a game with dragons, because we like that combat mechanic, we need to have developments like we do in all the games. There needs to be some role-playing developments or character developments. But then we need something to develop against. So we put characters around it, added a storyline and quests.

But the missions still felt boring and why did it feel boring? Because you don’t get the feeling that you are in control over what you are doing. So that is where the strategy part came from. Being able to control what you are going to do. Once we had that in we rapidly had princesses, the fleets, the generals and the game worked. It is almost like the game is making itself.

Read it all here.