Dave Georgeson on Mage Knight: Apocalypse
Feature
Inspired by the Mage Knight trading card game, Apocalypse looks to unleash a whole new experience on Mage Knight fans. We talk to Dave Georgeson to find out what the game is about.
Hooked Gamers: Hi, thanks for joining us for this interview. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself and your role in the team?
Dave: My name is Dave Georgeson. I’m a Sr. Producer for NBGA, helping to bring Mage Knight: Apocalypse (MKA) to fruition. Much of my responsibilities revolved around the storyline and the gameflow through the various quests and missions.
Hooked Gamers: The roots of Mage Knight: Apocalypse comes from the Mage Knight trading card game. How easy or hard is it to make a computer game based on a card game?
Hooked Gamers: While we can see how the card game can be inspirational, especially for the ambiance and graphics, we can imagine some downsides as well. Does it restrict you in any way?
Dave: Some licenses are definitely restrictive in that manner. But “Mage Knight” is not. The world is huge and varied. It ranges from pure elemental mages that work to protect the “natural order” to civilizations that combine technology and magic together to create vast floating fortresses and war golems. There are very few restrictions in the world’s background and we could make games in this Land for a very long time…as long as the gamers want us to make them.
Hooked Gamers: Mage Knight: Apocalypse has a strong focus on its storyline which develops as you play the game. Can you give us some examples of how new developments in the storyline present itself to you?
Dave: Sure. We use an approach that I call "distributed storytelling". We definitely still use cutscenes to tell really critical elements of the story (stuff that we absolutely want the players to notice and remember), but we also use a lot of other mechanisms.
Players can click on NPCs to enter into voluntary dialogs. NPCs with dialogs will supplement the critical info with additional information, bringing elements of the Land to light for the players and otherwise fleshing out the feeling that the world is alive.
But perhaps my favorite storytelling comes from the NPC sidekicks that accompany you on your quest. They talk to each other frequently, commenting on elements of the world as you walk by them, warning each other of dire situations, and more. By using “sound balloons” (word balloons with sound files that play at the same time that they appear), we can keep tossing additional color and flavor into the game as you progress without stopping the action.
And lastly, the NPCs of the world often have things that they say whether the player interacts with them or not. All of these mechanisms are used to continuously feed information to the player with a minimum disruption to the action, keeping the pace and drama of the epic moving and told in such a way that players naturally understand the storyline without having to sit through hours of achingly boring cutscenes.
Hooked Gamers: We see a trend for some genres to decrease the time one needs to finish the game. While some gamers like to play the shorter games, many others don't. How long would you say the average player will need to finish the game?
Dave: MKA is quite a bit longer than some other recent games. We started out shooting for 25 hours of gameplay to play through just the single-player campaign one time. But we overshot that figure considerably, and the game is more like 30-40 hours to complete the game one time.
Then add the fact that you can take your characters online and play the scenarios cooperatively with other players, the fact that everything in the game scales up dynamically to keep the challenges fresh, and the fact that it takes many more hours than a single-play through of the saga to max out your character…and there’s a lot more gameplay than even that 30-40 hour estimate of play.
In other words, it’s big.