Crimson Alliance Interview

GameShark got the chance to speak to Certain Affinity’s president and creative director Max Hoberman and published the results of their chat, the subject being, of course, Certain Affinity’s upcoming XBLA hack’n’slash Crimson Alliance. What the title brings on the table for the hack’n’slash genre, the progression mechanics, the co-op and more all get touched upon in this interview. Here’s a sampling:

Between Daggerdale, Dungeon Siege III and the upcoming Torchlight 2, players have a lot of dungeon crawling options at their disposal. What does Crimson Alliance bring to the table to make itself stand out?

Crimson Alliance is very different from most post-Diablo dungeon crawlers. We really focus on giving the player explosive, fast action that’s designed for the console from the get go. While thematically we have swords, dungeons, crypts and other elements of fantasy RPG gaming that our players love, the moment-to-moment gameplay is much more akin to something like Gauntlet Legends than it is to something like Torchlight. Our focus on co-op multiplayer, either on the same couch or over Xbox LIVE, also really sets us apart from some other dungeon crawlers.

The notion of stats being tied to loot is really interesting; however it also ratchets up the need for loot to get progressively more awesome. How do you design a system that keeps players interested in loot drops but also keeps player progression at the right pace?

We use gold as a way of carefully gating what a player can own. You have to explore the world to find shops where you can buy the most powerful items and as you might guess, these are sometimes on the other side of very difficult encounters. So there’s a lot of player pacing built in to the design of the item system and the game world. A player who explores everything, finds all of the secret areas, gets gold bonuses, takes advantage of co-op abilities and so on, can definitely get ahead of the curve!