Victor Vran: Motorhead Gamescom Interview

There was no presentation of Victor Vran or its expansion Motörhead Through the Ages as the room was not available, so I sat down in the The Dwarves meeting room with Gabriel Dobrev, founder and CEO of Haemimont Games and Achim Heidelauf, who handles the communications for Haemimont Games
First off, we discussed some elements of Victor Vran and started with the less conventional way they chose for character building in the game.
Gabriel explains that it is always hard to strike the balance in making a game different with respect to similar games in this genre. You don't want the players to not understand the game anymore. So they were trying to have a different approach and make it more accessible to people. In several games you start out with your character and you build him, but if you want to play a different one you have to play for something like 40 hours before you have developed that character far enough to know what the play style is. In Victor Vran you can just change your weapons, your demon powers and your cards and try that out at any time. This is the freedom they wanted to give to the player.
Given players more freedom is like a common theme in the game, which can be found amongst others in the unlimited inventory you have, so you can keep everything you want (or decide not to).
Further freedom is provides with the crafting options in the game, with which you can improve your gear and try to make the perfect build.

Gabriel expanded on the story of Victor Vran, with which they wanted to give the player different ways to enjoy the game. The narrating voice that always accompanies you and comments on your actions gives you the feeling that there is always someone watching what you are doing. There are also many references to found in Victor Vran of games they like. On top of that there is a lot of humor in the story, which he feels is hard to do right as there will always be people who like it and who don't.

The story itself is pretty linear, as is normal in Action-RPGs, however they have added challenges to victor Vran. At each level there are five new different challenges. Once you complete the story you can play these challenges, but they are optional, so you can completely ignore them, or you can try to complete them. For each challenge you have to figure out how to do it and some can be really hard. So this can be very challenging, especially if you want to complete them all, which would mean 100 hours of playing time. This is more than the playing time of the main game. Up to now they know of only two persons that have completed all the challenges.

One other thing that is different from typical action RPGs are the item drops that are much less frequent in Victor Vran compared to other games like it. Gabriel responded, that if you look at the important ones, like the legendary items, they are perhaps dropped more frequently compared to a game like Diablo. They just don't drop all the junk items. They decided to skip that so the player does not have to look at every item to decide to pick it up or not. Because of the lower amount of drops you can pick up everything automatically and can focus on playing the game. And by using the transmutation system, you can transmute items that you don't need into something more useful. So, there is more or less a purpose for every drop.

At that point I asked who the Motörhead fan in Haemimont Games is, which turned out to be Achim. He mentioned that he has been closely connected to Motörhead for 25 years now. He met Lemmy Kilmister when he was 17 and to him that was quite memorable, because Lemmy really is a great person. A very nice person, taking care of people, very friendly, very funny and very interesting. The connection got stronger over the years and one of Lemmy's best friends is also one of the best friends of Achim.

At the time, they started talking about the soundtrack and licensing certain songs to use them in the game and during that talk they really, really started to liked the game and asked Haemimont Games if it wouldn't be something that could be built upon to make it bigger.
What Haemimont didn't want to do, is put the Motörhead thing on just something as they didn't want to look bad to the fans and they also don't want to mess up their own brand, Victor Vran. So out of licensing the songs it became an entire big expansion to Victor Vran, that will have a big long story line with three very huge levels/worlds that will feel very different. Several dungeons. New weapons, New monsters, and new special attacks

Achim showed me the first pieces of artwork from the game they were revealing and explained that any of these three worlds, represents one of the themes and also a part of the history of Motörhead . Lemmy has several themes that he likes to address in his lyrics and many of his lyrics are way better then you expect, when you carefully listen or read them.

It starts with a kind of wild-west setting. The colors and the landscapes are very different from Victor Vran, so it will feel like a completely different game also. Not only was that one picked to set it apart and create a wow effect with the same game, but a very different place. But also because Motörhead in the 70s and 80s, when they had the Ace of Spades era, often dressed up as cowboys on promotion photos and they also had these things on the album covers. Many of the songs in that era were about gambling and stuff. This is what is addressed in the first world.

The boss enemy of this world is themed around religion and fanatism. This boss is a fanatic priest in this western town who oppresses his people. Victor will travel there to fight him and make this world better. Every boss fight is based on an album cover from Motörhead and this one is from Orgasmatron. In order to not scare people away from the game or get them very upset, they have been carefull with the religion part in the game.

The second world in the game, where you will travel to with Victor, is the world of wars. It is a mesh-up of different world wars, which are continuously going on. It is themed around wars, politicians and nazi followers. The boss fight in this world will be with a politician.

The third theme will be a middle-age setting with castles and dungeons, with the theme of greed and the rich against the poor. The queen of the damned will be the boss (from the Aftershock album). She is the rich queen who tortures her people.

The three worlds are connected by a hub again, which this time will not be a castle, but will be in the style of Motörhead: a pub.

Achim came back to the new attacks that are in the expansion. Again, these are based on the work of Motörhead, like you can call in a bomber accompanied by a sample from one of the songs.
Another one will be the iron fist, which was on an the Iron Fist album, and it drops from above to smash enemies. There will be more special attacks in the game and in addition to these there will also be new swords and several new different weapons. All this together will offer new tactics from the ones in Victor Vran that you can use. In essence it will be the same game, with a very different setting and with new features in it that expand the tactics and the fun.

And being the Motörhead fan that Achim is he is also very happy with the (about a) dozen tracks they have in the game. Amongst them there will be unheard material that has never been published before. According to Achim Motörhead fans will go nuts about this when it will be announced what these songs are

As to my question about the release date, they mentioned that the plan is to release it early 2016, but they want to do it right, so it will be done when it's done.
It will be an expansion, so you do need the original Victor Vran game and you will be able to carry your character over to the expansion. But, if you are not interested in the original game and want to only play the Motörhead expansion, you can start with a new character as well. The game will scale itself accordingly.

In my opinion Haemimont have made an interesting choice in cooperating with a well-known rock-band such as Motörhead. This might lead to fans of the music buying the game. The danger lies in how much this will feel like something belonging to Motörhead for them and how much they can entice existing players in playing the add-on, even when they are not Motörhead fans. Doing this in the right way is the most challenging part of the development in my opinion.