We reported about The Dwarves last month, when it launched its Kickstarter campaign. It's a fantasy RPG being developed by German studio KING Art Games, which you may know for successful Kickstarter projects like Battle Worlds: Kronos and The Book of Unwritten Tales 2.
The base goal on Kickstarter has been reached and now, while the project seeks additional funding for stretch goals in the last days of its campaign, we're publishing an exclusive interview with Marco Rosenberg (Narrative Designer at KING Art) to bring you additional details on The Dwarves. Enjoy and take a look at the latest gameplay video embedded below.
- First of all, The Dwarves is based on the novel by Markus Heitz. The first question that comes to mind is whether the story will be essentially the same or not, and if not, how are you changing it?
- The basic story is based on the novel, but there are additional locations, characters and side-quests that enhance the story. The player is faced with decisions that have far-reaching consequences, even though some plot points and the ending are pre-determined by the novel.
- The crowd combat system certainly looks cool, however it seems like fighting masses of orcs could become stale after a while. Are there battles against few, but powerful enemies in The Dwarves?
- We don’t want to go into too much detail yet, but yes, there will of course be more variation in enemies and battles, for example huge enemies like ogres or a mighty golem. Also the missions vary from defending a city to destroying catapults to prevent them from destroying your battlements.
- What can you tell us about the RPG system of the game? Will it be possible to customize a certain character in many different ways through skills?
- Prior to each battle you pick four characters from your current group. All the companions that Tungdil meets in the book, will also be in the game.
Each hero can level up and you can regularly choose between different upgrades or new abilities. Before each battle you not only choose which heroes to take with you, but also which attacks those heroes will be equipped with.
- What kind of dialogue system are you preparing for The Dwarves? Will it allow multiple decisions leading to different plot developments and endings?
- We have multiple choice dialogues in the game and the answers you choose can influence events in the story, having consequences both small and far-reaching.
- Among the stretch goals we can find the "coop pack". It literally says that you'd add a "local coop" option to the game, allowing up to four players to participate; however, I wanted to clarify what this means. I think that it would be amazing to play The Dwarves online with a group of friends - will this be possible?
- Officially the coop mode would be just local, which means that you can play with more than one person on one computer. However, there are 3rd party solutions by Playstation 4 and Nvidia that players could use to play local coop online with remote friends.
- Are you going to support DX12 and if so, in which way?
- Regarding DX12: We depend heavily on what Unity supports. Unfortunately, it doesn’t support DX12 yet. Maybe it will become relevant for our next game.
- If you added online coop to the game, would you try and support cross-play between PC & PS4 and/or PC & XB1?
- We’re currently not planning online co-op, just local co-op as one of the possible Stretch Goals, so we haven’t thought about cross-platform co-op yet.
- Thank you for your time and good luck!
About the author: With over two decades of experience in gaming journalism, Alessio Palumbo has led the gaming vertical at Wccftech since August 2015. He started working at a young age for Italian websites like Everyeye.it, Gamestar.it, Nextgame.it, and Multiplayer.it before kickstarting the indie English-language publication Worlds Factory as its founder and Editor in Chief. In the last decade, he has coordinated the overall output of Wccftech's gaming section, managed PR relations, assigned reviews, produced daily news coverage, edited gaming content as needed, and delivered game reviews. Arguably, his trademark content is the long series of exclusive developer interviews that have been cited by Wikipedia and by the biggest news media and gaming publications. His passion for technology also makes him knowledgeable when it comes to gaming hardware and tech. His favorite genres include RPGs, MMORPGs, and action/adventure games.
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