Hunted: The Demon’s Forge Interview and Previews

Several more articles for inXile’s newly announced Hunted: The Demon’s Forge hit the web this evening, so I thought I’d do another quick round-up.

We start things off with an interview at GamerZines with creative director Michael Kaufman and inXile president Matthew Findley:

GZ: You say that, but this does seem a lot less like your typical dungeon crawler and more of a modern action shooter, albeit in a fantasy setting. Where do you position Hunted, as an RPG-meets-action game, or vice-versa?

MF: I wouldn’t even use the letters RPG to describe it, really. Dungeon crawl and RPG don’t mean the same thing – they do now – and what happened was we all made dungeon crawl games for years and all it was was ‘I walk through a dungeon, there’s a monster, fight, walk through dungeon, monster, fight’, and ultimately that was the birth of the RPG genre. So all of these hardcore RPGs were born, the Japanese RPGs, the Western RPGs and this dungeon crawl – the last one was like Hexen and Heretic in the mid-90s; those were shooters, they were fantasy setting and they looked like orcs and monsters but you were pretty much using a machine gun disguised as a fireball thrower, you know? This genre of the action game in the dungeon was sort of lost in time, and it’s too bad because dark fantasy is a great world.

Then we move to G4 for a preview:

Additionally, the spell ability system also encourages cooperative teamwork. As the game progresses, the heroes are awarded points to spend on abilities. For example, Levitate which lifts enemies into the air and holds them helpless and Hell Fire, the Hunted version of the classic Fireball. At any time, players can wield these spells against the enemies such as firing an Ice arrow at an opponent for your partner to shatter, but if a player uses Hell Fire on another player, the context changes. Now, that player becomes invulnerable to Fire and can now engage an otherwise powerful Fire-based foe. How this will work with an AI counterpart remains to be seen, but in practice with human-controlled characters, it’s quite powerful as the duo made short work of any baddies. Best of all, you can switch characters at special checkpoints sprinkled throughout the level, so if you get tired of playing one way, you can mix it up a bit.

Another preview comes to us from Total Video Games:

Essentially the second full project out of Brian Fargo’s inXile Entertainment studio (discounting the cancelled Hei$t), Hunted is attempting to resurrect the dungeon crawl RPG. Fargo, who founded the studio back in 2002, cut his teeth developing projects such as the original Bard’s Tale in the 80s, Wasteland in 1988 (for which inXile now holds the IP), the Ultima series with Richard Garriott, as well as work on Baldur’s Gate and the original Fallout series. Put another way, his CV reads like a who’s who of old-school RPGs. It’s no surprise, then, that inXile has grand ambitions to resurrect dungeon crawl gameplay; a style that’s been vaguely enveloped by contemporary MMOs in the aftermath of its multi-user dungeon (MUDs) heyday.

And then one last preview can be found at Video Games Daily:

Kaufmann drew a line under the idea of ‘˜co-op at a distance’. Characters can patch each other up wherever they are in an area, tossing healing vials with unfailing precision. This, he explained, will allow players to get the utmost out of some extremely attractive, grandiose Unreal-powered environments, exploring different routes and combat vectors. We’re a little worried that being able to heal at range could encourage players to split off and fight their own battles: those instances of teamwork between Ilara and Caddick we saw might have been engineered for the purposes of the demo. Don’t quote us on that till a hands-on opportunity arrives, though.