Knights of the Chalice Interview

RPG Codex interviews Heroic Fantasy Games’ Pierre Begue about their excellent indie RPG Knights of the Chalice.  An excerpt: 

KotC received quite some acclaim among the hardcore RPG crowd, it scored 3rd place in the RPG Watch GOTY 2009 Poll, outperforming AAA titles such as Drakensang or Kings Bounty: Armored Princess and it also won the Gamebanshee Indie RPG of the Year 2009 Award. What do you think about that?

It’s great that Knights of the Chalice received such a good reception from the CRPG websites. The problem with a lot of AAA titles is that they focus on 3D graphics to the detriment of almost everything else, like the AI, ease of use, player choices and tactical aspects. Often they are just too damn slow, in their loading times or walk animations. So a game can easily have a large budget combined with a poor entertainment value. That’s why I hardly ever buy games. I was offered a copy of Crysis a few months ago and I have yet to open it. I was interested in Drakensang initially, due to the great ruleset. However, watching a gameplay video changed my mind. Movement seems too slow and the camera control seems terrible. It doesn’t matter to me that the game looks great, it shouldn’t make me wait and it should center on the action without me having to fight with the camera.

(…)

Is there something you can already reveal about your plans for a sequel?

I can say that I’m going to work as much on the game mechanics as on module-creation tools. The tools should be easy to use and accessible from within the game. They should allow the creation of an adventure using any image as a background. Player-created modules could be made available for free. The best ones could be sold on the website as premium modules.