Infinity Blade/Infinity Blade II Interview

Gamasutra recently chatted up ChAIR Entertainment's Donald Mustard about some of the new social features they've been adding to Infinity Blade II, how they promoted player skill in the original Infinity Blade, and the ambitions they have for integrating a more social experience in their future titles. An excerpt:
This concept -- of the player getting better -- is core to the appeal of the Infinity Blade series, he argues. In the first game, players would die in their early encounter with the God King -- but what they may not have realized is that when they beat him later, it was more about their own skill increasing, and less about stat boosts.

"We didn't pull any tricks," says Mustard. "It wasn't that we forced him to kill you."

"Your skill wasn't to the point you can beat him. But it was possible. By the time I was done making Infinity Blade, I could beat the God King on my first try, because I had the skill to do it."

...

"Inherently, as human beings, we are two things: we are inherently social, and we inherently want to progress," says Mustard.

"If you have an engaging core mechanic and you start to layer on top of it these other things we're talking about, like these social features, and these RPG mechanics where your player can grow over time, then you start to get it."

"The best games allow you to achieve true progression," says Mustard. "Social with progression starts, to me, to be what we want to achieve as human beings."