The Memory of Eldurim Interview

Recently Bryan Excell of Liminal Games agreed to answer a few questions about their RPG, which is currently in development, The Memory of Eldurim.

RPGWatch: Thanks for agreeing to do the interview. Can you tell us a little about yourself, and your game The Memory of Eldurim?

We started working on The Memory of Eldurim over a year ago because we love games of this genre and thought we had some unique ideas that could contribute to the genre. Some genres are flooded with great games while others only have a few. We love open world RPGs and love making video games, so we felt like we were ready to give it a shot.

It has been a long road but we have loved it and are glad that our game started emerging into the public. It's still early alpha but so far the response has been positive.

RPGWatch: My next question is about why you choose CryEngine to develop the game. Does it offer something other engines don't? I ask because I noticed a few other RPG developers using the same engine.

The CryEngine is an extremely powerful tool that is actively developed. In excels in nearly every area that a modern 3D engine can. We initially started out with some of the other popular engines but we came to a point where we could not make the game exactly as we wanted to. Ultimately we feel that the CryEngine is the right choice because of all it has to offer.

It was not easy for us to have access to these tools. Usually the CryEngine is reserved for the big companies that can buy it outright. We were the first group to go through there new Free SDK indie license but we feel it was worth it.

RPGWatch: Allow me to say congratulations on getting your game on Steam Early Access. Can you share any information on sales, and future updates?

We are grateful that the Green Light community was so supportive of us, and we thank everyone who voted for us. As of writing this up we have been on Early Access for just over a week and the response has been great. We are pushing out updates fairly often and we do our best to remain active on the forums.

Future updates will allow us to add in more content more quickly. We expect to overhaul the combat system as well as the item system very soon. We are focusing on updates that add fun content as well as chasing down the bugs.

RPGWatch: One of the major questions from our readers is about NPC interaction. Can you share any information on how it will work?

NPC interaction is very important to us and we have big plans on how we want it to work in our game. Right now the NPC system just isn't there, and we want to fix this. It's been tough with so few of us but with support we hopefully can speed things up.

Ideally we want to create living villages, towns, and cities. We want every NPC to be someone the player could potentially develop a relationship of some sort with. We want the player to have an effect on the town but not be pressured to upkeep the town.

This means you could trade a lot with a town, do quests for the town and see growth with the number of building and population, while others might not grow as quickly without your influence. Also, we like the idea of NPCs that you kill being permanently dead, but (just like in real life) other NPCs might step up to take their place.

This could lead to interesting dynamics. A situation we thought of was that you could join some sort of army (like the town guard). Once you do, you could look at the guild's roster and see where you are in the ranks, and you could see the rank of all members above and below you. The normal way of going up the ranks would be to do quests and so forth, but what if you assassinated someone high up on the roster? It would make sense that a lower ranking person would get promoted, and that would probably cascade down to you. There would of course be consequences, maybe you get away with it once but if high ranking people start getting offed in the guild they might start an investigation, or send someone to watch you and catch you if you try again.

This sort of thing could get really exciting. We want to do that in all sorts of areas about NPC interaction. We have thought of another area that could be pretty cool. Players are used to seeing blacksmiths who can smith and upgrade your weapons, they are even used to being able to try their hand at it themselves and with time becoming good at it. But what if you were so good that you started getting famous and people would try and hire you to forge their weapons? You could probably easily become a small town's only smith if they don't have one, or move to a bigger town and start making a lot of money if you were really good. Maybe you could even buy some property and spend money to advertise, or you could turn off broadcasting your skill if you didn't want to be bothered by people coming up to you and asking to hire you.

We have so many ideas for this, I haven't even got into how factions will interact or how you can influence individuals and groups through your actions.

RPGWatch: That's all for now do you have anything you would like to add before we finish?

Even though our game is still alpha we really appreciate those who have supported us by buying an early copy. It's a strange conundrum, people want a finished game, but publishers throw money at games and get them to the shelf before they're polished, so people like indie devs who can nurse a game along and interact with the community but indie devs can't produce games unless people support them in their early development.

We really rely on those who believe in us. Our game will continue to grow and we hope that it attracts more people as it become more and more complete. Thank you again to everyone who has shown their support. Our number one priority is going to be to grow this game into something great.