GreedFall – Jehanne Rousseau Interview

Jehanne Rousseau, the founder and CEO of Spiders Studio, recently had an opportunity to talk about her studio’s upcoming action-RPG GreedFall with Escapist Magazine. In particular, she mentioned her aspiration to “fill the void” left by BioWare’s Dragon Age and Mass Effect series. She also talked about GreedFall’s varied factions, the game’s lack of level scaling, its NPC companions, and more.

Here’s a couple of paragraphs to get you started:

Like many RPG fans, Spiders CEO Jehanne Rousseau loves BioWare’s classic Mass Effect, Dragon Age, and Knights of the Old Republic games but was disappointed by the developer’s recent work. She still hopes the company can return to its roots, but for now her team is working to make the games they want to play.

“We are creating them now not to replace [BioWare] but to fill the void in some ways,” Rousseau said. “We can’t really compare. We don’t have the same size teams and budget, but we really try to continue creating games we love. We hope that players will like it and that players that enjoyed playing story-driven RPGs like the games from BioWare will enjoy playing GreedFall.”

Set to release on Sept. 10, GreedFall is set in a fantasy world inspired by the 17th century colonization of the Americas by European powers. Rousseau said she chose the setting to emphasize exploration and politics.

“I didn’t want to do classical heroic fantasy, which is mostly inspired by medieval times, because I’ve seen too much of that,” she said. “I love Tolkien, but it’s a little overused and we wanted something new. Our art director began drawing some amazing costumes and landscapes with people with long coats. We were very quickly convinced and began creating this universe based on that.”