Flagship Studios Interview

eToyChest had the chance to talk with Flagship’s Bill Roper at this year’s E3, revealing some general information about their publishing agreement and upcoming RPG. An excerpt to follow:

Q: The concept art for the game you guys are working on seems to fluctuate from high fantasy and mysticism to post-apocalyptic wastelands. I hate to pigeonhole you guys, but could you maybe nail us down to a genre or era at least?

A: Well, other than RPG, no, but I think that you’re hitting a lot of the right levels when you’re talking about what’s there. We’re playing with a lot of different looks, we don’t want to just do the same thing everyone’s done before. We don’t want to go the same worlds, we don’t want to have the same settings, so we’ve been playing with a lot of different looks and feels, and how we can integrate monsters and characters into it. One of the things that’s been exciting for us is realizing that we’re going to get to create something new again. I loved working on the Starcraft stuff, the Warcraft and Diablo stuff, an nurturing and growing it, but at the same time it was ‘Okay, what’s the next thing we could make, what’s the next crazy idea we could throw out there, what’s the next world we could build, what are the next myths and characters and legends we can create within the game?” And we’re still doing a lot of that now, we’re still experimenting, coming up with different ideas, figuring out how we can integrate the different concepts into the world.

Yeah, there are definitely elements of magic there, elements of technology, sometimes it looks sci-fi, sometimes it looks post-apocalyptic, sometimes it looks like straight-up fantasy. One of the things we’re doing right now is seeing which of those directions we like, and we really like to push the envelope. You can kind of think of the art direction as a big circle overlaid on a graph that has different genres and feels, and we’re kind of moving the circle around right now. We’re kind of at the stage where we’re going ‘Yeah, we like a little of this, a little of that, maybe skew the circle over this way a little bit, now we catch a little of this over here…’ and the end result is something that gives us something with a look and a feel that has a really unique flavor but still lets us build the kind of game we want to build. We don’t want to make something that feels schizophrenic, but at the same time we want to try and find a way where we can incorporate a couple of different ideas, different genres, and kind of use them in the new world that we’re building. I think that’s what the concept art so far is reflective of, is trying this mix of a little magic, a little technology, set in a post-apocalyptic type of thing, where it’s not the standard lush green fields. And that’s a part of it, too, is that you want to move past where you were, pushing new things and just basically trying to pick the things that we thought looked coolest of all the stuff that’s being brought to the show.