Seven Dragon Saga - Interview @ Kotaku

Kotaku has a new interview with TSI's David Shelley. It seems Seven Dragon Saga will not be crowd-funded, and has a release date of sometime in 2016.

TSI’s President David Klein reached out to Shelley when he was founding the company, hoping to bring on board established RPG talent to make something new. “I was really encouraged by the success of some of the great games that are getting made...the times have changed a little bit, right?” he says. “There are opportunities for digital distribution, there’s some terrific middleware that allows you to take an engine off the shelf–things that weren’t present even five years ago.”

It’s these changes that have enabled the return of the CRPG: digital distribution, crowd-funding, tools, the diminishing importance of publishers when it comes to getting a game in people’s hands. Seven Dragon Saga isn’t going the crowdfunding route, but it will doubtless benefit from the revitalising effect that games like Wasteland 2 and Divinity: Original Sin are having on the old-school role-playing game. But given that both those games were crowd-funded, I wonder whether the audience for the CRPG is almost entirely people who played things like Baldur’s Gate or the old Dungeons and Dragons games 20 or even 30 years ago, and who miss them. Are modern CRPGs bringing in a new, younger audience, too?

“I think it’s a combination of both,” Shelley reckons. “If people’s first experiences were with the classic games they’re certainly going think of a lot of the aspects of them in a positive light. At the same time, with the advent of the new technologies and new distributions, it’s easier to put something in the same style out again and bring it forward to a new generation. Obviously, art cost has somewhat gone up from the little pixel-pushing days, but it gives us a chance to create much better experiences. We don’t have the memory limitations that we had back in the day, so you can approach the same classic style in a different way that makes it interesting, I think, to even a much younger audience who didn’t have the chance to experience those early games.