Dark Envoy Interview

Krzysztof Monkiewicz, the founder of Event Horizon, recently had a chat with The Escapist Magazine that focused on his studio’s upcoming “sci-fantasy” RPG Dark Envoy. If you’d like to learn more about that game’s setting, story, and systems, you should definitely check it out.

Here’s a couple of sample questions:

Talk me through Dark Envoy’s gameplay loop. What will players be doing in-between travel and combat?

Krzysztof Monkiewicz: The things that RPG players love! To start, we have an extensive and authentic combat system that relies heavily on the player’s party setup. Players can spend hours customizing their builds and optimizing the stats of each party member if they want to. They are able to manage their equipment by upgrading it or creating new ones through crafting and enchanting systems, which are intuitive to manage but give players new options for building their party.

To give the player a break from numbers and statistics, there are plenty of interesting story elements to discover and take part in. But companions are not just numbers to balance, as they have their own agendas and stories to tell.

Overall we aim for the gameplay loop to be dynamic and focused on combat, with story elements woven in-between, where all the other systems feed in to strengthen this idea.

[…]

Dark Envoy was originally set to feature turn-based combat but switched over to real-time combat (with slow or pause). Why did Event Horizon decide to switch combat styles?

Krzysztof Monkiewicz: We like to experiment a lot. The project kept getting bigger and bigger as we were adding new and interesting mechanics. At some point, we realized that turn-based not only became repetitive, but our best ideas didn’t exactly work with it. We developed a real-time prototype, and all of a sudden it clicked with us. Gameplay became much more dynamic and exciting, creating more depth.