Arkane Studios Q&A on Arx Fatalis

Ferrago quiz the developers...

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Ferrago: I gather this game is Arkane Studios debut title, what have you learned as such from the development experience?

Raphael: We’ve worked on other games in the past, but this one has been more challenging than anything we have done before. In fact I'm not sure we'd have done it if we knew it was that hard when we started with such a small team and budget. To answer your question more precisely, we've learned how to handle a huge project, we created our own engine and tools and managed many contractors. Its been pretty tough going but we have come though it and learned a great deal more about organisation and programming techniques. Given our experience at the start of the project combined with the vision we have of creating a game that was inspired by many elements for the Ultima series we are very pleased with the result. The great thing is that we have received a great deal of critical acclaim for Arx Fatalis, learnt a great deal and have a strong development team!

Ferrago: Why did you choose the first-person perspective for this RPG – what benefit does it lend to the game?

Raphael: In one word: immersion.

The game I feel created one of the most immersive environments was Ultima Underworld, then there was the first Doom, then System Shock, then Thief. From our point of view, pleasure in a RPG is very much linked to this feeling of being at one with your character, this is why we decided that we should not make Arx Fatalis a 3rd person game.

Ferrago: How have other successful RPG’s following a similar approach influenced you? Games such as Deus Ex.

Raphael: Absolutely, as I mentioned in your previous question, Arx belongs to the 1st person RPG genre, so Deus Ex is definitely the type of game we like. Even if we don't have the 1st person Shooter component (unlike Deus Ex) I think we've been heavily influenced by the 'Looking Glass' style overall. In fact we were so impressed with the work from Looking Glass we managed to have some of the team from Thief and Underworld working with us on the English dialogue writing, speech recording, and audio atmospheres.

Ferrago: What will the balance of fighting, dialogue, puzzling and exploration in Arx Fatalis be?

Raphael: We hope gamers will find Arx Fatalis a very well balanced game. We worked on a 'rhythm' so that gameplay will consistently offer variety. When we wrote the internal game design document, we decided to implement a system that uses 3 colours highlighting the texts: each colour represented Action, Dialogue or Thinking. This was a good way for us to 'visualise' if the balance was right whilst we were still in the early stages of development.

On the top of that, most situations gamers will find themselves in will have numerous solutions, so you can really tailor the game to how you want to play and in the style which you prefer the most.