Dragon Commander Interview

While I've billed it as a Dragon Commander interview, this new Q&A with Larian Studios' Swen Vincke on RPG Codex technically covers several other topics, including what more he can tell us about Project E, how much success they've enjoyed with Divinity II, his perceived bitterness toward publishers, his personal design philosophy, and where he draws his inspiration from.
7) You've said that you've finally discovered how dragon combat can work well in a game. What are the main differences between the dragon combat in Dragon Commander and Divinity II?

It's a mix of things - part of it started with the end of Divinity II: Flames Of Vengeance. It felt pretty good to have the illusion of being part of an entire fleet, using your dragon powers to gain the upper edge against impossible odds. But it was a rail experience, an and that wasn't cool. Anyways, from there it was a small leap (though it took us quite some time) to dragon combat in which you were both active in combat but also in charge of the fleet. The other part of it was Farhang, our lead designer, experimenting with bullet time and dragon combat. That somehow felt really good. And the third part was adding the ability to fly at extremely high speeds. When you combined all of it together, you had something that I thought played pretty well.

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9) Will there be character systems for both the human and the dragon form of the Dragon Knight? How does it compare to the systems used in your previous games? Can you reveal any specific details about it?

The human character development is a lot "softer" than the dragon and fleet development systems. Your player character develops by the choices he makes, and that's reflected in how your environment reacts to you. There's no skill tree or character stats as such. Obviously there's a lot of stat & state tracking in the background. Your dragon on the other hand as well as your fleet have full blown skill/upgrade trees.