Puzzle Quest: Galactrix Interview

Destructoid managed to corner Infinite Interactive’s Steve Fawkner for a lengthy interview about the storyline and mechanics in Puzzle Quest: Galactrix, as well as the differences between the new sci-fi title and Challenge of the Warlords.

Did you find that more people who played Puzzle Quest were more of the hardcore gamers than the casual gamers?

Steve: It’s a hard demographic to pin down, because it has a very broad appeal. It didn’t get the real casual people, the ones who will never go beyond their Bejewled. They didn’t come on board. They just wanted to match the gems and were like “Why do we have to cast these spells? Why do we have to sit through dialogue?” Those people are never going to play those Puzzle Quest games, and I’m OK with that. There’s plenty of other people who will play it.

We got the casual people who are maybe one step up from that, who were just looking for a little bit more. And we got a lot of hardcore people who used this as their first indtroduction to casual games, and it was just kind of really cool. These guys had never played Bejeweled before. And now they were all out to play it, because it was wrapped in an RPG.

Nick: Right, you put a dragon in there and everything is OK.

Steve: Right. At the other end of the spectrum, we missed the really hardcore people who won’t touch it because it has a casual element. But we got that really big group in the middle which was great. I think they’ll cope pretty well with the hexes.

An interesting thing that we saw was that the more casual the player — because there’s two elements in Galactrix — one is where you’re matching hexes, and the other is the new gravity rules — so when you remove a gem, gems fall in the direction of the last move. So you’re refreshing the board from all different directions. What was great that we found was the more hardcore the person was, the faster they’d pick up on the mechanics. So we tried to put the tutorial in there that shows you what happens there. At the very casual end of the spectrum, people like my mother, they don’t get how the gems fall in. But, they don’t care how the gems fall in. All she knows is you’re making matches, gems keep falling, and you keep playing. So the real casual people don’t care about that rule, they’re just making matches and watching lights go off.