AusGamers: I find that games nowadays rarely seem to be single genre. So, every shooter you’re looking at nowadays has RPG mechanics, as a given. But when you go over to the RPG world, it’s a bit more difficult to find those obvious links to other genres, I mean, outside of the idea of an action-RPG. What sort of other genres or games specifically outside of the RPG realm are you looking to, and how will we see that evidenced in Inquisition?
Cameron: Great question, and putting me on the spot when I’m really tired.
AusGamers: You’re welcome.
Cameron: Influence comes in from all kinds of places. It could be movies: our art director is a big fan of Japanese movies and Renaissance art, so you get influence everywhere, and that’s just from the art side of things. From a game-design point of view, they could be, I’m trying to think, like operations at the war table, there are many games that have done this concept of, I have people working for me and I’m going to use this UI to order them to do things. And so when you look at that and you go, okay, well we have this big organisation that we lead, how do we lead them? And then how do we make it immersive, how do we make it part of the game world? Then you start thinking about, okay, what if you really were a commander and you had a war table, you could imagine, generals would have in medieval times, and then what would that mean? Okay, I can now order my people out, and then you start linking it back into other systems that you have, and that’s really where the iteration and the development comes from. So, for example, as a leader of the Inquisition, you can judge people. You have a throne, right? And you can sit on the throne and you can judge people, and a number of those judgements can actually lead to you making people serve you as an agent, so you judge them and say, ‘I’m not going to cut your head off, but you’re going to come work for me now.’ So they become agents, and by getting agents, you speed up or enhance some of the operations you can do at the war table, so all of these things link together in that way. We look at this influence in a variety of different ways. Sometimes, you’ll be sitting there at night playing a game, or sitting there in bed and go, ‘Shit, that was really cool fun,’ and then you start to follow it through and it takes on a life of its own now.
