Legends of Eisenwald Interview

With 15 days to go and $38,814 raised as of this writing, it looks like the Legends of Eisenwald Kickstarter project has good chances to reach its funding goal of $50,000, making this recent interview with PC Games Hardware all the more interesting in light of that. Here’s a couple of snippets:

PCGH: Have you talked to game publishers before Kickstarter? If so, did they reject the game? What was the reason to go for Kickstarter?

Alexander Dergay: Yes we talked to several publishers in the past, it was quite a while before going to Kickstarter. It’s not that they didn’t like our game but they wanted to see more “get back to us when you are close to alpha”. Then we show a close to alpha version and they say “we would like to see a little more”. At the same time we didn’t like many conditions that were offered to us, so when we had a chance not to go to publishers, we decided to use it. We have to say we didn’t talk to many of them. After receiving these responses we felt a bit discouraged and once we found out about Kickstarter we started preparing our launch.

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PCGH: If the game succeeds at Kickstarter, what are the plans for digital distribution?

Alexander Dergay: All of us use Steam and we really like it. We are not that far yet to submit our game to Steam as they require beta version for their submission process but we really hope that our game will be accepted. Because steam is the largest digital distributor and it’s user base is very big we think our game can find a good audience there. We will look at other digital distributors too as Steam contracts are not exclusive, another good thing about them.

PCGH: You often mention KB The Legend or Disciples as kind of inspiration for Eisenwald. It seems that this genre is dominated by Russian developers. Coincidence or not?

Alexander Dergay: As strange as it might seem we were not inspired by Russian variations of King’s Bounty and Disciples. Discord Times was released 4 years before King’s Bounty: The Legend. We already mentioned that our inspiration was King’s Bounty of 1990 that was created by John Van Caneghem. When we talk about Disciples, our favorite game from that series is Disciples 2 that was developed by the Canadian studio Strategy First. To be honest, “Russian” Disciples 3 rather disappointed us since its developers discarded an original combat system.