Talisman: Prologue Interview
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"So what we've done is, and our programmer Carl has designed this, is come up with this idea of a quest system. So the first release of Talisman is actually a game called Prologue, and effectively what we've done is create quests for each of the characters. Basically the game is focused at this stage on single player challenges to introduce players to all the characters and all the special abilities that the characters have. So that's Prologue, that's the starting point. It's like 50 quests with all the characters and you sort of work your way through. And you're given specific challenges, you're basically playing the board.
"It introduces all the cards, it introduces the way that the different characters work and gives you a really deep understanding of the game. At the same time we're working on the multiplayer version, and what we're going to do is look at how we execute the multiplayer version. Whether it will be instantly just a straightforward adaptation of the real board game, we're looking at different ways of doing it, different scenarios according to how players want to play it. So that's where we're at at the moment."
Talisman was, like so many of the borderline collaborative/competitive board games, always a tight balance of diplomacy, keeping fellow players onside until the tables had turned to your advantage, turning on them at the perfect moment to augment a triumph with the crushing humiliation of your peers. It sounds like Prologue is going to be purely single player focused, so is Whiteford comfident that it'll retain its charms?
"Asynchronous play is definitely an option," he explains. "Again, because we're doing the quests at the moment, you could design an asynchronous game where rather than just a turn you have to complete a set of objectives first before you pass it over to the next player. So it doesn't necessarily have to be one turn per go, it could be 'here's part of a quest', and that you actually leave something for the other player to pick up and go forward with, and that can vary depending on your outcome.
"So we can start to work with the potential of the game and that particular environment, the asynchronous play. Of course there'll be AI, and there'll be pass to play as well, so if you're in a room and you want to play a game, if you want to play a full game if you can do that, but if you wanted to play a quest based game which was shorter with a couple of you we're looking at things like co-operative questing where you actually help each other to do a certain type of objectives.
