Interview Matt Chat 259: David Shelley and Laura Bowen on Seven Dragon Saga

[Infinitron]

Tags: David Shelley; Laura Bowen; Matt Barton; Seven Dragon Saga; Strategic Simulations, Inc.; Tactical Simulations Interactive

The latest guests to be interviewed on Matt Barton's show are none other than SSI veteran designer David Shelley and veteran artist Laura Bowen, who have come to talk about the upcoming Seven Dragon Saga. It's a nice little interview, that goes over stuff that we more-or-less already know, with an emphasis on the game's character creation (which is not as simple as might be assumed from looking at the images on the game's website), combat (random encounters will definitely be a thing) and faction-based choice & consequence. Throughout the interview, David and Laura also share various little anecdotes about their SSI days.

At one point, Matt asks a question submitted by some dude named Gabor Domjan about Seven Dragon Saga's supposed martial arts/anime influence, which caused a bit of stir on the Codex when it was first announced. David clarifies that while the game will have a bit of an "international flair" and also some wuxia-esque fantastic abilities, the setting is still essentially standard Western fantasy, and nothing like, say, Jade Empire. Matt also asks whether SSI CEO Joel Billings is involved with the TSI enterprise. David replies that Joel, being a wargaming guy at heart, is not interested, but that he wishes them well.

However, the big news of this interview is that Seven Dragon Saga actually will have a Kickstarter campaign, and early next month at that. So what the heck was that Kotaku UK thing? Make up your minds, guys.

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On a related note - you might be aware that Matt Barton is first and foremost a Gold Box guy. He clearly had a blast doing this interview, and now he's decided to he wants to put together a full-blown short film about the Gold Box games. But, as he explains on his blog, he'll only begin the project if he gets 25,000 subscribers on his YouTube channel. So you'd better subscribe now! Between this, and allowing Patreon backers to vote on his next interview, it looks like Matt is finally starting to get serious about promoting himself.

 

[Infinitron]

BTW, I wanted to add that it's kind of gratifying to see that Shelley actually knows what Jade Empire is. And Fallout and Baldur's Gate. That's not something you can take for granted with a lot of these veteran types. And he was three hours into Wasteland 2 when he did the interview (which was a day after WL2's release). So, he's not out of touch with the genre.

 

[mbpopolano24]

I am going to keep my hopes low as I did for D:OS. Hopefully I will be surprised and get another good contender. I like what they are saying, the devil will be in the details.

Next year looks very promising as well: Torment, PoE, D:OS expansion, Runemaster, SDS..... The incline is now, the incline is here. Bow before your master....

 

[turbo elephant]

OK so her/his/its hair is blocking the view but it looks like a Manowar T-Shirt so that's a plus (could be...maybe) but I'm way to lazy to make a a YouTube account or resurrect an ancient one, so yeah..no.

13 hits on Vimeo and I'll join

 

[<3sRichardSimmons]

I'm a huge Goldbox fan. I really hope this Kickstarter (assuming they don't change their minds yet again) succeeds, but I'm feeling pretty pessimistic. I was pleasantly surprised when the Kotaku interview made it appear as though they'd secured private funding specifically because their ability to market themselves seems to be... erm... non-existant? This compounds the problem of the Goldbox games having (in my experience) less name recognition than, say, Fallout or the IE games. Time will tell if their inability to promote themselves belies a more worrisome lack of overall vision for the project.

I hope my fears will be proven ill-founded, and I'll be pledging to their Kickstarter next month (albeit probably at the lowest physical tier), but thus far I've been extremely unimpressed with this project, and as far as I can tell I'm a prime example of their target audience.

Edit: Oh, and thanks to Matt for giving this project exposure. I wish the interview had been a little more focused on the more technical aspects of designing the GB games, but it was still a great watch.

 

[Wizfall]

Damn, it's going to have a rotating camera.
They could have notice that lot of people dislike it in W2 (and other games) and don't want to bother with camera controls.
What a pain, i would have liked so much better a fix camera like in PE or Torment.

 

[Morality Games]

More than double his subscriber count, eh?

 

[Dorateen]

I don't like Dave Shelley's tastes in shirts. A certain indication that this project will be a disappointing failure.

 

[VioletShadow]

Good interview. The game sounds promising so I'll keep my hopes up for now. BTW, is Matt anti-steam? The curator thing could help a bit with the show popularity.

 

[Jedi Master Radek]

Mostly western fantasy with wuxia just as a flavour? It sounded so good when the have announced it, and now they downplay the coolest aspect.

 

[MicoSelva]

the big news of this interview is that Seven Dragon Saga actually will have a Kickstarter campaign, and early next month at that. So what the heck was that Kotaku UK thing? Make up your minds, guys.

It is possible that Kotaku just misreported, since their line in that article about 7DS not being crowd-funded is not a direct quote.

 

[Dorateen]

Not that I'm rooting for a kickstarter campaign by any stretch, but it did strike me odd that the article never quoted David Klein on the subject. If this turns out to be crowdfunding, then it sounds like that was the plan from the beginning. So no changing of minds. I'm sure that TSI would be exploring other possible funding options, but it's more than likely kickstarter was always in the cards.