Carbine Studios Interview

GameSpot conducted an interview with three of the Carbine Studios co-founders, a development studio that recently walked into the spotlight by being acquired by NCSoft. Two questions of interest:
GS: Carbine's site has some interesting artwork that's got a fantasy/sci-fi look, with a sword-and-sorcery theme but characters are wearing bandoliers and pistols. Is that indicative of your first project?

JG:
The art is indicative, but we're not talking a ton about the game yet because, in part, we're still in development. And we're also sort of planning our reveals on that. We're definitely letting the art speak for itself right now. We're also a fan of inventing our genres and/or crossing genres, as WOW does to an extent and some of our other games have done to an extent. But we're also into opening up some new areas where we can have some freedom to create, as opposed to working with established clichés. We're giving the creative team more interesting avenues to explore than just your traditional high fantasy or whatever...it's not, "Hey, we want to be different because we need a new genre for a business tactic." The types of choices we're making are more to do with what the creative team wants to do--where they want to take the setting and the stories and the creatures and the characters. And that's kind of how you derive some of those elements that you see in that artwork.

GS: Speaking of the creative, a lot of the Fallout fans were interested to hear that Tim Cain will be involved in the project. What has he been bringing to the game?

JG:
Tim's kind of a triple threat because he is a super nice, experienced guy to work with who's seen all sorts of cool projects--from some of what I consider to be the best role-playing games of all time across a whole slew of genres. He's also a killer programmer, and he's also a top-notch designer. That's like, three good hires in one for Tim. And he's a friend of ours. He's worked with a number of the studio's founders before. So what he brings to the court is all of that. I think a lot of the same sensibilities led into the Fallout design and some of the neat aspects of that are making their way into this, especially as he codes systems that he coded in Fallout. On top of that, he's a great manager. We probably underpay him, actually. We'll go give him a raise after this talk.