Arcania: A Gothic Tale Interview

XboxMessiah had the opportunity to fire off a batch of questions to JoWooD about Arcania: A Gothic Tale, including how the RPG stands up to The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. The first few questions really aren’t worth reading, so I’ll skip ahead a bit:

Q: From what we’ve read, ArcaniA: A Gothic Tale is an open world game. Is there a definite ending to the game or is it one of those games that you can play, and I quote, (for the rest of your natural born life)?

ArcaniA is an epic tale. We have a big opening and a terrific ending. Everything in between will be as open as we can, without putting too many restrictions to the gameplay.

ArcaniA is cut into five regions. Each region is completely open in the way that you can do what you want in the way you want, but you have to go from one region to another and you will not be able to come back either. As we want the game to always be interesting, it makes no sense to leave the first region open when you’ve completed everything and you’re too powerful for the region enemies (we are not going to pop up 35lvl boar just to keep some players active). We don’t think this is really interesting and it might destroy the authentic world which we want to create for ArcaniA. We might reopen regions with some serious story develpment in addons.

The artists have created the world entirely by hand. They have placed each tree and each rock themselves. Nothing is random. The designers have also placed every NPC or monster themselves. They programmed their daily routines and the way they react to the hero. Because of that, we are able to create a very dense atmosphere which leads to a believable, realistic world.