As a "twist," I’m going to do this interview primarily through visuals, which is how I think game interactions should be in the first place - mostly because a good chunk of human dialogue is essentially communicated non-verbally anyway.​

Here is the basic overview: you go and fight monsters, gaining loot and experience in randomly generated areas. Now, here's the twist, you are not the only hero in this land of the brave. Other heroes, representing local factions called covenants, do the same "hero" thing - fight monsters, gaining loot and experience. Unfortunately, the town seems to be too small for all of you, and as C. McLeod once said "There can be only one!", so it's either you or them. You can use basic diplomacy to keep someone off your back for a while and/or make offensive/defensive alliances. The game is over when your covenant's lifestone is destroyed or when you destroy other covenants' lifestones. Naturally, the lifestones are well protected by hired monsters, NPCs, and heroes, so attacking a lifestones is like attacking an enemy base in an RTS game: come prepared and expect a lot of resistance and casualties. Let's take a closer look now:​

To show that Bethesda understands and, like, totally digs the setting, the game features exploding nuclear reactors in cars and mind-blowing "tell me it's a joke" handheld nuclear catapults. In the example described in the Game Informer article, the main character, undoubtedly inspired by the famous Baron Munchausen, kills two giant ants by shooting at a NEARBY car's nuclear reactor. A small nuclear blast destroys the car and the ants, but ignores the resourceful main character, standing a few meters away. The nuclear catapult is an even more retarded concept and, hopefully, needs no explanation. Using nuclear explosions in close combat in a survival game that watches your rad count is kinda stupid. Even for Bethesda.​

4. How would you evaluate the finished product? Any lessons learned there? What worked well, what worked ... uh, not so well? What was the game's biggest strength/weakness?

I think the game as released is a high 7, low 8 title. To be honest, the major issues are due to a lack of polish. There's certainly a lot of stuff in the game, but none of it really looks or feels great. At best, the controls and features feel good, at worst they feel terrible.

For example, the camera. Programming got the camera in and fixed a number of its glaring problems, but for all the various camera modes you could run in, it was hard to find one that felt good. The toolset is also an appropriate example: highly functional, very powerful, not enjoyable or fast to use for many tasks.

The biggest problems during development were an unrealistic scope and a lack of focus on quality/fun from the beginning. It's arguable that the former resulted in the latter. With D&D games, it's easy to become consumed by the idea of adding every feat, class, and race you can find in various books.​

It’s a harsh reality of the genre that, whether by developer influence or actual player demand, CRPGs have been trying to emulate Hollywood productions in order to present games with an increasing focus on emulating cinematic experiences. However, the result is often amateurish and embarrassing since the transposition from one medium to the other is made while disregarding the formal vocabulary of cinema and its context; something is lost in translation from cinema to videogame, and developers end up trying to implement narrative elements that run contrary to the narrative possibilities of the other medium. They look at movies and try to create videogames that behave – that play – like movies, which generally fails to build upon the strengths of the videogame medium and poorly uses the narrative structures of cinema. Some developers have tried experimenting with other approaches to the problem, trying to create situations where realtime player input is crucial and determines the flow of the story but these sequences often feel like compartmentalized and separated from the rest of the game; more in common with minigames than a situation that feels natural and fluid to the rest of the game and the gamer, if for no other reason than developers often can’t handle the complexities of the videogame medium and only propose simplistic input methods for these situations which in a certain way, present challenges and base interactivity that feel like glorified variations of classics like Space Ace or Dragon’s Lair.​

8. Dialogues. What role do dialogues play in your game? Why? Are there great lines like "I saw a mudcrab the other day" or "Elvish, motherfucker! Do you speak it?" in your game?

Thomas: Dialogue in any RPG is critical to establishing the game world and advancing the storyline. Eschalon handles dialogue via a branching system with different responses based on quest flags. It is simple yet effective and allows the player to have multiple responses to most situations based on how they want to play their character. Overall we’ve chosen to keep the dialogue a bit leaner compared to other contemporary RPGs to more closely match the flow of a classic RPG. As for great lines, I guess the player will need to make that judgment for themselves!</blockquoute>​

How would you compare Mass Effect to Knights of the Old Republic?

It's a good question. In some ways Mass Effect is a lot like Knights of the Old Republic, so all KOTOR fans should be really excited. You have a starship, and you travel the galaxy, having all these really great moments. You have all these Mass Effect powers, which are a lot like Force Powers in the Star Wars universe. However, the main difference, which is where the game really shines, is the main character. I know the word "extreme" may seem overused a bit, but it's an extreme character who does some very extreme stuff unlike Revan who was a very blank character.​

Bioware's younger brother kinda saved the year with Neverwinter Nights 2, which could be described as Baldur's Gate 2 meets Icewind Dale 2, which is great, because these are my favourite games. From Baldur's Gate we’ve got the epic story reflecting the choiceless life of the Chosen One, and from Icewind Dale 2 we’ve got endless waves of enemies and more combat than in Halo, which is another of my favourite games, so I'm pretty sure we are dealing with an instant classic and a game of the year material here. Any game that features a githyanki proctologist has gotta be good. Don't worry about getting lost in the game though, it's one of the most linear games I've ever seen, and even individual maps feature super linear maze-like designs, firmly leading you in circles to your destinations through waves of unavoidable enemies. Every now and then you are given a dialogue option that can help you avoid 5% of combat in an area, to remind you that it's not a Diablo clone, but a fully blown role-playing game.​

The orcs in Gothic 3 are not some wild beasts, roaming the land, but a well organized tribal society that knows nothing but war and respects nothing but strength. No wonder they have finally won. The buggers have always dreamt of world domination, but were defeated and stopped at every turn, from The Lord of the Rings to Warcraft 3, until Piranha Bytes developers of equal opportunities gave them a chance to run the show. And you know what, it kinda worked. The war is finally over - a fact noted and appreciated by many humans who were sick and tired of it. The towns and settlements are properly guarded and managed. The slave business (trade, management, and hunting) is a booming industry that has even brought the hashashin experts from the south. Great employment opportunities are available for human mercenaries who don't think that hiding in caves & forests, playing Robin Hood, is a good career path.​

Augmenting the skills are traits, one-time purchases which enable new attack modes, or make a character better at managing the weight of his or her armor or weapons, or make certain types of attack more or less effective. Traits are point-buy and each has a unique cost, so no two traits are necessarily exactly alike or equivalent. We are presently planning to include negative traits as well, allowing you to "buy" points by taking a permanent hindrance.​