Project RPB Interview

RPG Vault had the chance to chat with Piranha Bytes' Michael Hoge about their newly unveiled RPG at this week's Leipzig Games Convention.
Q: What kind of gamer do you regard as your core target audience? In other words, to whom will it most strongly appeal?

A: It will probably appeal most to the gamers who liked the Gothic series, because those are the games many of the people we employ have been working on for the past few years. And in spite of creating a new gameworld, we still believe in certain design ideas (like not putting to much emphasis on character stats), certain storytelling mechanisms (like using chapters to divide the story and mark the main turning points), and the need to create a living world (to make it a believable one).

In order to achieve this, we have decided to rather create a compact world... to be able to make the setting feel more dense than to try to create a huge world that will feel empty in comparison. So, I think our new game will appeal to gamers who'd rather enjoy a kind of "handmade" adventure RPG with a dense storyline than a "classical" RPG in a vast world with more generic content.