Feargus Urquhart Interview

RPGVault has conducted another interview with Feargus Urquhart of Black Isle Studios, talking mostly about CRPGs in general and where he’d like to see Black Isle in the coming years:

Jonric: Since you’ve touched on how games evolve at Black Isle, what evolutionary developments during the past five to 10 years do you consider particularly significant within the CRPG genre in general?

Feargus Urquhart: The most significant thing about the evolution of the CRPG genre is that it has been getting closer to the use of more up to date technology than in years past. I think this has really helped broaden the group of people who are interested in playing them. Most CRPG players will say that that they don’t need the most modern graphics – they just want gameplay. However, when an RPG is delivered that is not more visually stunning than other games that may have come out in the last six months, then the game can be received fairly lukewarmly.

Also, I think that we’ve seen a greater deal of actual role-playing added to a lot of the CRPGs in the past few years. Most of the early CRPGs like Bard’s Tale, Might & Magic, and Wizardry were pretty much dungeon crawls with very little interaction with other NPCs in the game world. One of the biggest draws of the original Fallout was that a lot of the NPCs in the game world had something to say and acted in some small ways like real people. This was advanced even more by Torment and the Baldur’s Gate series, particularly BG II, in that characters in a player’s party had personalities as well. These things have helped players feel that the game worlds are more alive and drawn them into the games to a greater degree.