Full-time? I assume you have many students in your team, right?
Yes, most members of the core-team are. Some of us are working in small indie-studios part-time, though. And, of course, a lot of the voluntary contributors (such as lectors, or 3D Artists) have their own jobs.
That's exactly how I felt too. I don't know if it was intended, but Nehrim reminded me a lot of the earlier Gothics.
Yes, that was more or less intended.
Since Piranhia Bytes are quite renowned in Germany, most of us played the Gothic series in our teens. I think that in terms of atmosphere, their games have always been brilliant.
Are you going to continue developing your Nehrim-Enderal world or do you have ideas for completely new game or world?
We'll most likely develop a new world. There are several reasons for that:
1.) The universe was created in 2003 by a couple of teenagers. Though some of the ideas are interesting, there are a lot of lore inconsistencies and pre-mature concepts, which were never fully thought through. Especially in Enderal, where we invested quite some time into fleshing out the lore and bringing it to a professional level, this turned out to be quite troublesome.
2.) We've only recently started with creating the necessary bureaucratic structures, such as creating NDAs and contracts for contributors. It's rather unlikely, but if we were to go commercial with a game set in Vyn, anyone who just wrote a line of lore back in 2003, could make claims and demand a share of the "profits". It's the law in Germany.
3.) Finally, we think that a different setting would provide the opportunity to try out some new and refreshing. We want to stay faithful to our roots, so our first title will definitely not be a Flappy-Wings, 2D-Android Game (*shivers*), but there are settings that would go along greatly with a story and design driven RPG. An end-of-days setting, for example, would also provide a plausible explanation for the lack of big cities, which, even with the right tools and good workflows, would be hard to realize for a small team.
But we'll see. Nothing's set in stone yet.
All the best,
Nicolas Samuel
