Dark Messiah of Might and Magic Q&A

1Up has published a two-page Q&A with Arkane Studios' Raphael Colantonio and Julien Roby, quizzing the CEO and designer about their upcoming first-person action RPG, Dark Messiah of Might and Magic. Here's a quick teaser:
Q: How do you make a game that's not too much of an RPG, but not too much action?

A: We tried to make the RPG thing as transparent as we can, so that it becomes a rich layer instead of becoming an obstacle to players who prefer easier-to-access games. We're trying to get the best of both worlds, which is an easy, accessible experience where you really feel you and your character are in phase about what you want to do and how you want to do it. But with this rich layer of RPG, which is kind of invisible so we don't bring any obstacles in the gameplay.

The other thing is that it's objective-driven, which makes it a real RPG really. This game is objective-driven, and it's really about what you do, and not how you do it. Because of that we reward the player not on how many kills you get, but the fact that you reached that point. So if the objective is to get to Room A to get some kind of item, we don't really care as designers if you broke through the door, or killed the NPC and grabbed the key, or if you stole the key, or if you found some beam and climbed on top of it and skipped half the location -- it's totally fine. We want to reward the player on the objective.