Kobayashi-san says they’re ”nearing completion but we’re not done yet,” and that the ”sense of pressure” on this very ambitious Capcom project is ”still very much apparent.”
The team looked at popular open-world games in the west like Fable and Oblivion, so they could figure out what it is ”about those games that make them tick,” and work so well with the fans.
”From the Capcom side what we bring to the table is our action pedigree; we’re known for our action games, and I feel that lots of other games of a similar breed lack fully-realized action. Thankfully we could bring that to the table without any problems,” said producer Hiroyuki Kobayashi in our interview.
”But we did have to look at the challenges of creating an open world game, so we had to be able to look at the games that were popular in the West and our designers really studied them and looked at the design choices, the art direction, and just all those elements and see what was good about them. We made sure to look at what people respond to positively and how we can incorporate that into our game.” The development team has kept action ahead of it all.
”…it’s a game that has both action and RPG elements, but for us the action was the focus and we wanted to make sure we got that into the game. But it’s an open world - an open world action game if you will - and with that we’ve taken and added RPG elements on to it to kind of fill it out,” explained Kobayashi-san.
”We’ve looked at what kinds of things you have in an RPG and to make sure that some of those key features are part of this game, but to make sure that the action was really well done.”
Hiroyuki Kobayashi isn’t big on shoving genre labels on games anymore - what matters is if something makes gameplay fun, not if it fits a genre or not.
”We realized in the course of discussion that everyone has a different opinion of what a true action game is and what makes a true RPG. It’s actually hard to limit games nowadays into defining genres. I think most games nowadays have elements of multiple genres included; RPG and Action games included,” he explained.
”So you can’t just pigeonhole games into genres anymore, it’s getting harder and harder. So as a developer, personally, I don’t view games in terms of those genres anymore. I just view them in terms of “are these games enjoyable? Can you have fun in it?”” Check out our full interview with Hiroyuki Kobayashi.
Dragon’s Dogma releases on Xbox 360 and PS3 March 27th, 2012 in the US.
