Hunted: The Demon's Forge Interviews
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IGN: So, Elara the Elf. Do you not think that she'd get a bit cold? She's not wearing very much.
Brian Fargo: We do not think that. Did you know the elves have this amazing temperature control? Most people don't know that. She's actually quite warm, and would like to take off what she is wearing if she could. In Germany they were actually thinking they could have her topless.
IGN: Good answer. That's knowledge that must only come when you've got a lot of experience in developing RPGs.
Brian Fargo: Yup. It's a little-known fact about elven blood. Not everyone knows that.
(...)
IGN: It's interesting that when you were showing off Hunted: The Demon's Forge earlier, you were very much talking about the dungeon crawls of yore. The action itself is very modern though, very Gears of War. Are you trying to make a game that will appeal to modern action gamers as well as the older crowd?The BethBlog also interviews Brian Fargo in a personal introduction/profile kind of way.
Brian Fargo: Here's how I look at it. The dungeon crawls themselves had become action-orientated in the nineties. They really all had. Then it bifurcated: there was the Japanese RPG, and I wasn't going to make one of those, and then there was KOTOR and Mass Effect - which are cool but I didn't want to make one of those either. I loved the dungeon crawl. So, what's the best platform for that basically?
In Hunted there are elements that people will know, like secret doors and magic mouths [famous chattering lips found in The Bard's Tale and referenced in Hunted through vast talking faces hewn in rock], but you have to recognise that people playing games in the year 2010 have different tastes. We wanted to do something where it's a sensory experience, so that right away leads me towards something that's a little more action-orientated. Again, this generation is comfortable with that, so it didn't need to be a hardcore RPG.
At the beginning you're right, you'll see the cover system and you'll compare it to Gears of War we're not shying away from it but that's because we want you to get the controls and start playing right away. We then start slowly taking you somewhere else. With Gears you're running, you're running, you're running but that's not what we want to do. We can do big set-pieces and all that, but there's the exploration, discovery and puzzles.
Now, we won't make you get stuck, that's another thing that's changed: in the nineties if you had a puzzle and you got stuck you were stuck. You could only call customer service if you wanted to proceed! Now we can give you a puzzle, and we can make it hard, but there has to be a reward we can't ever let you get stuck. We're just recognising the differences, philosophically speaking, of today.
What games have you been involved in since?
I have been fortunate to have worked on so many games in my career. I founded Interplay and now I have started a new company, inXile Entertainment.
My first big hit was the Bard's Tale back in 1985. And, I either produced or executive produced Wasteland, Battle Chess, Castles, Stonekeep, Baldur's Gate, Fallout, Redneck Rampage, the Interplay Star Trek games as well as many others during my career at Interplay.
inXile was formed in 2002 and we produced the Bard's Tale re-imagining and helped popularize Line Rider, Fantastic Contraption and Impossible Quiz. We have also now revealed Hunted: The Demon's Forge a fresh take on the dungeon crawlers we grew up on which we are developing with Bethesda Softworks.
