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An interview with two ‘guys’ from Spellbound
The website arcania.gamona.de, also known as Arcania - A Gothic Blog, contains an elaborate interview with two employees from Spellbound: Jean-Marc Haessig and Hans-Jörg Knabel.
Jean-Marc Haessig is a Creative Director and Hans-Jörg Knabel is the Head of Story / Story Designer of Arcania. Many visitors from World of Gothic will remember Hans-Jörg Knabel from the short stories on The Cleaved Maiden.
The following information can be extracted from the interview:
The game world
The size of the game world of Arcania lies between those from Gothic 2 and Gothic 3. It isn’t an open world right from the start. Instead the player will have to unlock new regions one by one. When you unlock the next region you enlarge the world until, in the end, you can travel over the whole island of Argaan. Every region has its own characteristics, contrasts and conflicts. The regions that have been created offer enough room for exploration and thematic support for the story, without forcing it into a corset.
The GameStar preview mentions the presence of empty fields. Some will indeed be empty, others will be infested with monsters. Some fields that first seem empty, may turn out to harbour surprises later in the game. There wil also be many hidden places, small locations behind rocks, in dungeons, in forests, etc.
The story, side quests and cutscenes
The story is divided into chapters. It is designed to move you forward. However, many items are hidden in the game world, so it invites you to explore it. For instance, there are a number of divine artifacts spread all over Argaan, which will lend the hero additional abilities. To get the extra abilities you will have to gather them all. You will however not find them if you stick with the main story line. And of course there are many plants, recipes, chests and other items hidden in the world. These also invite the player to explore.
Side quests will be linked in part with the main story line. Some of these quests stand on their own, others will touch upon the main quests. All of them will be woven into the background story: The war and the threat posed by Rhobar III and his army from Myrtana will play an important role.
The game will contain a number of cutscenes. At the important chapter ends most of them will give the player an outlook on what can be expected later in the game.
The Crystal Crawler
The game will contain several new monsters, of which one is called the crystal crawler, a spider existing completely out of crystal. It is supposed to be a creature from ancient times, and serves as a guardian of long forgotten secrets. Its presence is also linked to an ancient place that can be discovered in the world.
Gothic ambiance
To bring in the Gothic ambiance on a graphical level, the makers concentrated on architecture and clothing of the prequels. They took care to create a credible natural environment, with dense forests and mysterious dungeons. Also they wanted to transfer the Middle-European ambiance to the Southern Islands. Stewark and Thorniara were created with Khorinis in mind.
Polishing of the game
Most of the work on Arcania is done. Some examples of the polishing that is going on at the moment: tracking bugs and removing them until none are left; work on the balancing, which includes adjustment of the artificial intelligence of the opponents, optimization of the values of weapons and magic abilities, and hunting for undesired exploits.
Some fans and magazines have criticized the squashy textures on NPC’s and objects. This problem has been removed. The high resolution textures had already been available for some time, but were not included before, because of the memory space it needed. The whole memory management in Arcania is one of the most efficient that exists. Even on the Xbox360 it results in a beautiful image, without loading screens in the world, no matter where you go.
Leonardo di Caprio
To get a german voice speaker for the Nameless Hero a casting was organized. Spellbound liked the voice of one particular person, Gerrit Schmidt-Voss, right from the beginning. Only later it dawned upon them that they had selected the voice that is used on german television for dubbing Leonardo di Caprio.
by bigsnappy
Read the whole interview (in german) on: Arcania - A Gothic Blog
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