Dragon Commander Interview

RPGWatch offers an interview with Larian Studios’ Swen Vincke on the recently announced Dragon Commander, which has also been showcased at GamesCom. The piece elaborates on how the project came to be, why it’s set in the past of the Divinity setting’s timeline, what kind of multiplayer modes the game will feature, whether it will be moddable and much more. Here’s a few excerpts:

RPGWatch: What games would you compare Dragon Commander with?

Swen Vincke: I don’t have a clue. We started out making a game with dragons that was a very small project, a tryout. There were only 2 guys working on it. Then somebody put the slowdown thing in it, played it and felt: (Wow, this is fun). The flying around really feels natural, both with a mouse and a controller. We asked ourselves the question what to do with it? Let’s make a small DLC game. So we added missions. boring. This is the mission goal; destroy this or that. boring. To make missions interesting nowadays you need to have things happen every second. Huge things need to be happening and that was expensive. So we figured that if we made a game with dragons, because we like that combat mechanic, we need to have developments like we do in all the games. There needs to be some role-playing developments or character developments. But then we need something to develop against. So we put characters around it, added a storyline and quests. But the missions still felt boring and why did it feel boring? Because you don’t get the feeling that you are in control over what you are doing. So that is where the strategy part came from. Being able to control what you are going to do. Once we had that in we rapidly had princesses, the fleets, the generals and the game worked. It is almost like the game is making itself.

(…)

RPGWatch: What are the RPG elements in Dragon Commander?

Swen: I define the RPGness by FUME. Freedom, Universe, Motivation and the Enemy. The freedom to develop yourself and to make choices and face the consequences. We’ll probably do OK there. The universe is the Divinity universe. The motivation is defined by the story line, the quests, the character arcs. Enemies there are sufficiently. The one thing we are not doing and we also do not know how to bring it in there is the exploration part. I think it will still feel as a comfortable game to a lot of role players. There will also be role players who will not like it, but we cannot please everybody. Then again there will be other players who will be introduced to the Divinity universe as well.