Dungeon Hero - Interview with Firefly's Bradbury @ Gamasutra

Gamasutra discusses two of Firefly Studios titles in development with designer Simon Bradbury, one of which is the action rpg Dungeon Hero, which focuses on a view of dungeon crawling that is a bit different from the traditional approach:

With Dungeon Hero, the concept of him [the hero] in a way being the monster in this world, as they're orcs, being the natural denizens of these places, and he's the one coming in and hacking everything - it's an interesting concept. Was it built around that as a design principle, or was that just something that evolved as you realized what it was?

SB: I would say it evolved from it. You put it in there and you start to show it to people, and they're, "He's kind of mean, isn't he?" and we're, "Well, yes he is." It's like you're doing a demo to the press and half the time you're formulating ideas when you're doing it.

Someone will ask you a question and you go, "Yeah, that's right, he's going to do that." It's a great time, actually, to get your ideas straight and, in the early days, to evolve the design. But definitely, he became more psychotic in the first six months as we talked to people about it.
In terms of the NPCs, you will eventually, I guess, be able to murder all of them if you so choose?

SB: Yes.

Is there any consequence for that?

SB: No, I think we'll leave that one to Fable. If you feel good about chopping a goblin's head off, it's a moral decision in the real world, I think. If you attack too many of them, we will put out a couple of guards that will try to arrest you, but then you'll just kill them quite easily anyway.

Can you just kill the whole town and will they respawn or will they just be gone forever?

SB: Not in the town itself - we had to make the decision, because you need to get information from there quite a lot of the time, that you can't. So in the town you're not allowed to carry a weapon, so we just take the weapons off you, and if you try to button-mash in the town, you just end up waving at people, "Hey, how're you doing?" You won't be able to fight.

That's probably a good way to do it.

SB: It's simple, and we like simplicity.

More information.

What?!? You mean there's an rpg developer out there that isn't rambling on incessantly about moral choices and consequences and how their game is like playing real life? — I honestly don't know how to take this interview!! On the one hand it sounds like they're selling the game short and make it sound too simplistic, and on the other hand I want to applaud for the honest old-fashioned design approach.

Yeah, but the game sounds like crap to me; definitely NOT what I enjoy!!

Well, it's far from old school. Hard to tell as yet what it will really be like, but at least its a different angle on the same old same old.

I dont know what to make of the game, they kinda just him and haw about it and I'm left wanting a video or something. I do like the stronghold games, so I have some faith in Firefly that they'll come up w/ something novel that will be worth playing.

It does sound different, I'll grant them that….