Seven Dragon Saga - New Interview

Digitally Downloaded notified me of an interview on their website with Producer David Shelley, and Lead Designer to talk about the Seven Dragon Saga.

A couple of weeks ago, we saw the very exciting news that a small development team of SSI veterans had formed a new company with the express purpose of recapturing the kind of gameplay that made SSI games so appealing to a generation of players.

The company, TSI, is currently hard at work at its first game, Seven Dragon Saga. We haven't seen much by way of screenshots as yet, but what we do know is that the game is clearly in the spirit of classic Dungeons & Dragons adventures such as Eye of the Beholder and Wake of the Ravager. As big fans of the classic SSI approach to game design, it's something that we have felt has been missing in recent years, and as such we're very excited to be following the development of this particular game.

I had a sit down with David Shelley, the Producer and Lead Designer of Seven Dragon Saga, to talk about what it's like coming back to the SSI mindset so many years after the company folded shop, as well as to get a feel for the kind of game that Seven Dragon Saga might turn out to be.

More information.

Nice but could they be any more vague?
I've now seen quite a bit on this but I still have no idea how this is going to play…

Originally Posted by Moorkh
Nice but could they be any more vague?
I've now seen quite a bit on this but I still have no idea how this is going to play…

True. The only definite detail about gameplay that I picked up is that players create the entire party and combat will be tactical turn-based. I guess they're still very early in development so they may not want to go into detail about how the rules will work if they're still working them out, but more details would be nice as not all Gold Box games were created equally.

I really like the Forgotten Realms Gold Box games. Especially the Pools, Curse, Secret, etc. series. There was a nice mix of role-playing opportunities, combat, and exploration in those. When I tried one of the Krynn games I was far less impressed. It seemed like they were a lot more combat heavy and less exploration, role-playing, and storytelling. It didn't help that Dragonlance setting is pretty dull. I also love the Dark Sun: Shattered lands game; while not technically a "gold box" game, I think it's the best game SSI ever made.

Originally Posted by daveyd
When I tried one of the Krynn games I was far less impressed. It seemed like they were a lot more combat heavy and less exploration, role-playing, and storytelling.

I have to vehemently disagree with this; the Krynn trilogy can stand proudly next to the Pool series as far as I'm concerned. The Krynn games also featured journal entries for the player to read during exploration of the overland maps and so arguably contained just as much story-telling and exploration as the classic Pools series.
The parlay feature could also be used in many different encounters so I don't think they were really lacking in role-playing either.

If anything, I think the most combat heavy games from the Goldbox series are both Secret of the Silver Blades and Pools of Darkness. The latter is logical given the high level nature of the game - the ending sequence of fights and Dave's Challenge in particular were quite brutal. Secret of the Silver Blades also had these long crawling sections which contained little but combat.

The gold-box games all seemed pretty combat-heavy to me, but then the turn-based tactical combat was one of the strengths of the game. Exploration of a 16x16 grid with primitive graphics wasn't very interesting, and the interactions were somewhat limited.

Man, if they could do a hybrid of the older gold box games and the tactical fields of Blackguards, that would rock. I love the grid feel and think chances to explore and use that field shouldn't be wasted.