ZRPG Interview

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Written by BuckGB on August 2nd, 2010

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We already have pretty detailed info about the stats and skills in the game. But how do You increase these skills? Do You have use-based system or one that use experience points? If the second one, what kind of accomplishments will be awarded with experience?

Skills are bought with skill points. Stat points are rare, earned when the player earns a certain amount of skill points. Our experience system gives skill points for completing objectives, not for just running around killing things. There are perks every few skill levels, as well as a few hidden perks that require the player to play creatively to uncover them.

For example, you might come across a hospital while traveling and suddenly have an objective to explore it OR one of your companions might know about the hospital, tell you its location, and suggest you get supplies there. You could get skill points for exploring the hospital. You might also get a few more if you collected a certain amount of medical items while in the hospital. Another ally might have asked you to try and find a certain medicine from a clinic, hospital, or pharmacy, so if you find that, you might earn even more skill points from that hospital. There are a lot of way to earn skill points or earn credit toward an eventual skill point.

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While most of the RPGs and most of the modern games never let You fail so much that it won't be possible to continue after resorting to the most recent save, some of the titles You list as the main source of influence (X-Com, JA2) did. A couple of screwed missions against aliens meant a player lost experienced soldiers, lost equipment and financial sources are cut so it was difficult to rebuild. Will it be similar in ZRPG?

Yes, definitely. If you lose assets and allies, you will have a harder time, but on the other hand, you can still get out there and try to replace them - though we have a finite number of allies and resources in the world. I think the game is about hard choices, and I think that the setting will help reinforce rather than frustrate players when they lose people or allies get infected or they make enemies of one of the tougher groups. To be fair, we have allies warn players when actions have repercussions and we give players an "unconsciousness" buffer when someone hits 0 HP in order to let the player try to save them before they die/get killed, but there's definitely a lot of risk/reward involved in our game. Because of some of the randomness, I think players can expect the game throwing some different stuff at them on each playthrough, similar to Civilization or X-Com. We also have several levels of difficulty that will let players choose the amount of risk they feel comfortable with.

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