In the future, will you switch to a different game engine, such as Unreal Engine, instead of Unity?
We are already developing at least one project with Unreal Engine, but we wouldn't want our giant expertise in Unity to be wasted. Most likely we'll continue using both, for different projects.
Do you plan to focus on cRPGs exclusively or are you branching out to other genres? If the answer is yes, to which?
We do plan to experiment with neighbouring genres. In fact, we are already doing so with some of our future projects. They will still be true to the "narrative-driven with complex mechanics" formula though.
Also don't worry, we are not moving away from traditional isometric cRPGs either. Development of the next game in this genre with design philosophy familiar to the 3 previous games, is already in progress.
In alpha version of RT, overall game balance and system was more closer to TT version, stuff like righteous fury (crit in later version), psyker powers not being limited to staves, armor value and overall numbers being lower. What was reason for changing it to more homebrewed system that ended up being far more problematic and still persists in form of dlc 1 classes and items (executioner and chainsaws being prime suspects)
Answered by our Game Designer Inanky: Alpha version of Rogue Trader was a much more focused experience, consisting of a small part of the overall game. It allowed to test different things, some of which actually worked well, some of which worked seemingly well.
The problem is, when you try to scale those things and decisions to the whole game - lots of cracks show up.
Some of the systems just didn’t work for a 80+ hour experience.
Some of the systems, while scaled, didn’t give the overall feeling of the space power fantasy of Warhammer40k.
Some of the systems, while scaled, turned out just, well, bad.
And that’s the reality of game development - you can learn that some things just don’t work much later into development, and you have to change a lot of stuff.
Yes, some of the decisions were probably wrong, but they were all made for reasons, important ones at that. It’s not like we just one day decided to change everything for worse (god no, nobody likes to change anything, it’s SO MUCH work)!
I love the writing for Nok-Nok and the monstrous races. How do you go about writing their... not just "bad," but almost childish grammar? Do you start with a normal sentence, then convert it? Does someone on the team just have a knack for it?
The credit for Nok-Nok goes to Chris Avellone. And Paizo, who invented the goblin speech you see in some Adventure Paths. But we did write quite a few different monsters ourselves, too.
I'm still surprised that Kingmaker and WotR were your two first games as Owlcat. What made you guys decide to tackle Pathfinder as well as make two (now three) of your first games utterly enormous experiences?
The studio was founded by a group of veterans of the industry, who worked on games such as Skyforge, Allods Online, Silent Storm and Heroes of Might and Magic V. A quite solid basement!
We wanted to make a game of our dreams. Pathfinder was loved and regularly played by the majority of the team those days (and largely still is!), and folks at Paizo were absolutely amazing. So it was a natural choice.
roguetrader.owlcat.games
