The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing II Interview

There’s a new interview with Neocore Games’ Viktor Juhász and Orsolya Toth over at IncGamers this afternoon, with the entirety of the Q&A devoted to their upcoming The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing sequel. A sampling, as you might have expected:

IG: In The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing II you’ve previously mentioned a darker and more deeper story with a new carnival area, could you expand upon this if more details have now been fleshed out?

Viktor: The first adventure already introduced some parts of Old Borgova, and this time we are going to venture deeper into the ancient downtown, where everything is more traditional and more. well, gothic. One of this forgotten corners is the dark carnival, a hideout for some strange creatures, and it ties the story straight into the mystical past of Borgovia that we had only mentioned briefly in the first game, the true story of the vampire lords who ruled the land for centuries. and their secrets.

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IG: Any new monster types and AI enhancements you can share with us?

Viktor: Although Van Helsing II continues the previous adventure, in most regards it’s more like a completely new game, so we can assure you that the monsters we are planning to unleash on our esteemed hunter are all brand new. Apart from some familiar creatures from the first game, we have literally dozens of new creatures waiting for Van Helsing both monsters created by the Weird Science and some old-fashioned fiends. And yes, they are all really angry.

Orsolya: That’s right, we’ll have tons of new monsters, now including vampires too as a lot of players were missing them from the first game. There are some nice monster concepts on the game’s Facebook page already if you want to have a sneak peek. We didn’t really plan to enhance the enemy AI further in the sequel. With our strong ties to the RTS genre one must imagine that we’d force an advanced enemy AI into an action RPG and create monsters that use tactics, evade attacks with good dynamics, step out of the range of AoE spells or go round the zone of damage.

Well, to be honest, we actually tried to do that but it was simply not fun that way. So we decided to stick to the good old monster groups of the genre who just attack you if you come into sight or hit them. But we did not give up entirely on the thought yet: in the sequel we’d rather think of the AI as an advanced unit ability. We plan to add more monster groups who will have the special (ability) of being more clever than others they’ll think sensibly as a group and combine their skill, for example. In the first game we only used this for some boss fights but in the sequel we’ll see this more often to spice up the slash parade.