Warhorse Studios RPG Interview

The RPG Codex has an interview with Warhorse Studios’ Dan Vávra on the developer’s upcoming but as-of-yet-unannounced open-world RPG. We’ve known about it for quite a while, but judging by the fact that they aren’t done with its prototype yet, it will take a while more:

Warhorse Studios got the attention of the RPG community by announcing the licensing of CryEngine 3 to develop an ambitious open-world RPG. For the purpose of this interview, I’ll just call the game “Warhorse RPG”. While the game remains unannounced, what can you tell us about the state of it? There was a video leaked from a presentation of yours not too long ago, showing some really impressive visuals. Should we expect big announcements this year?

If everything goes well, the game might be announced this year. We are currently finishing the prototype of the game, which our future depends on. I am quite happy with what we have. We managed to do most of the stuff we planned and I think that the result is impressive, but its not up to me to decide that. Those who will pay for the rest of the development will have to decide if it’s good enough.

Speaking of paying for development… What are your thoughts on crowdfunding, or pre-orders, as means to at least partially fund a game? Recently, there has been talk of Larian Studios going that route to raise some additional funds for their projects.

I think it’s great that people can finance projects, which no producer would fund, and make them possible. There are lots of risks, because a lot of Kickstarter projects will probably fail, will not be finished or will be crappy, but those are risks worth taking.

Warhorse Studios personnel have quite a bit of past experience working on ‘realistic’ titles. Not only in terms of gameplay realism, but also game world realism. It sounds like that’s your approach for Warhorse RPG as well. What does game world realism entail when creating a fictional medieval world? Have you forced any must-read literature or must-see movies on the team?

I have studied a lot of literature about our period over the past few years, but perhaps I should say that I have studied it for my whole life, because I love history and it’s my hobby. I was drawing pictures of medieval castles and epic battles with my grandparents when I was 5. I visited almost all castles in Bohemia as a kid and we have lots of them. Also, since I studied at art school, I learned about history of art and architecture. Another person who has very thorough knowledge about the period is our concept artist, who is almost pedantic about historic accuracy. Our lead designer Viktor Bocan has studied a lot about combat and weapons. So it’s mostly the three of us who tell other people how it should be.

One time, one of our graphic artists was creating a model of a pie. It looked absolutely photorealistic. But it had icing sugar on top. So I told him that it’s great, but that regular people didn’t use sugar that much and icing sugar didn’t exist. He was not happy. And if that’s not enough, we consult a lot of stuff with three historians people who do living history and fencers.