1. Since you are making an RPG, what's your definition of a role-playing game? What features are important to you and why?
Jan Lechner: My understanding of an RPG is that it presents a world to the player, in which he can take on a certain role that he can act out accordingly. What’s important is that any restrictions and options are grounded in the logic of the game world and are not left unexplained.
Even if I decide to play a mage, the game should allow me to take a powerful sword in hand and try to use it. And such options need to lead to logical consequences, so ideally my mage can hurt himself with a warrior’s broadsword or at least have serious problems when it comes to a fight.
In a role-playing game, the player should always have the opportunity to define his role himself, within a certain framework. That means, I need to be able to behave in different ways with regard my character as well as my surroundings. And again here, it is important that the restrictions that I’m subject to are explained logically within the game world.
Such different behavior should also elicit different reactions from the environment and thus in turn influence my decisions.
I don’t expect a role-playing game to allow me to anything and everything I can think up – a good RPG prevents me from thinking up impossible things to do in the first place.
2. In several interviews you've described Drakensang as "something like Baldur's Gate in 3D". I'm curious, why Baldur's Gate? Why not "another DSA game!" or "something like the well loved and influental Realms of Arkania games"?
Bernd Beyreuther: When we arrived at the description “Baldur’s Gate in 3D”, this was at the end of a long and intensive game design process. At no time, did we think “we’re gonna make a clone of this or that game”. In fact, we spent several months, collecting and reviewing the game design aspects for – what we consider – a *proper* role-playing game. We asked fans and gamers for their opinions and played many different RPGs.
We found a number of features that were – and still are – very important to us: a party, dynamic combat with a round-based ruleset, a certain complexity in skills, strong and memorable characters, dynamic dialogues and a whole bunch more.
The old RoA games were not homogeneous in terms of the gameplay, which was a consequence of the technical restrictions of the time: We moved through 3D-cities that were bereft of people. Everything was displayed from the first-person perspective, but you never got to see your party. For combat, it switched over to a rigid isometric perspective etc.
Therefore our objective can hardly be described as “Realms of Arkania in 3D”. Our project is just better described as a “Baldur’s Gate in 3D”. But this does not mean, that we took more inspiration from one than the other.
