Soldak Entertainment Interview

Over the weekend, IndieRPGs.com published an interview they did with Soldak Entertainment’s Steven Peeler about the four action RPG titles they’ve created to date, where they draw their inspiration from, what they’re working on next, and more.

It’s a cliche in RPG plotlines that time is always of the essence: the player must act soon, or all will be lost! Except that it really won’t. The player can dawdle, fight wolves over and over, talk to every NPC in every town in the kingdom, perform every fetch quest, and just generally do nothing while the antagonist waits patiently for the player to get on with it. In opting for intensity and timed goals, are you trying to turn this dynamic on its head? Or is that just a pleasant side effect of your approach?

Yes, this is definitely one of the things that we have purposely changed in Din’s Curse and Depths of Peril. In most games when an NPC says solve this quest quick or we will all die, it really means nothing and the player knows it. There isn’t any emotional impact when everyone is 100% sure that the threat is a bluff. Well in DC and DoP there are no bluffs. When an NPC tells the player that an Orc uprising is planning on attacking the town, that’s really what he means. If nothing is done to stop them they will eventually attack the town and at least attempt to kill everyone. Once players realize that the threats are real, they feel actual pressure to stop that Orc uprising in time. Well that or they will feel the intensity of trying to quell an Orc town attack before everyone dies.

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What’s next for Soldak? Will you make another action RPG, or are you going to branch out?

We are still too early in the process of the next game to really say anything yet. Although, one of these days I’m pretty sure we will branch out some more. A turn based RPG, a more strategy focused game, a sci-fi game, or any number of other things are all possibilities.