Brian Mitsoda Interview

Grupo97 had the chance to talk with ex-Troika/Obsidian and founder of the indie studio Doublebear Productions Brian Mitsoda about his work on Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines and the upcoming indie zombie-themed turn-based RPG Dead State, and present us a meaty and in-depth piece. A snip on Dead State:

Dead State uses the Torque 3D graphics engine, which can be compiled on GNU / Linux. Have you ever considered a version of Dead State for this operating system?

Not really, no. But I guess the diplomatic answer everyone always gives is (we’ll consider it when the game is done) or something close to that.

Your work in Vampire Bloodlines is, in my opinion, brilliant. Can we expect to see something similar to the Malkavian dialogues in Dead State?

Not really. Malkavian insanity was part of the game world there’s not really an equivalent in Dead State. We’ll probably use extra lines to expand dialogue choices and reaction.

Isometric perspective, turn combats, morals, complex IA… We should be thankful that someone dares to engage in such a project. It seems that today only the first person is admitted, while the turn-based role games have almost disappeared, even though that system provided masterpieces like Fallout or Arcanum. Are we doomed to see how turn-based combats become a relic of the past?.

I don’t know if that’s the case. There are so many platforms out there and so many people making games. Isometric turn-based on PC has been lacking as of late, but I’ve played a few on consoles, like the Disgaea series. We went with isometric turn-based because we wanted to build a lot of different environments and maps (which takes much longer in third/first person) and we wanted the combat to be ruled by tactics rather than reflexes. I’ve said it before, but I think the tension in X-Com was a big influence on our game.

Thanks RPGWatch.