Hi Everyone, Isaac here the founder of Crimson Herring Studios; appreciate the coverage of our game and all of your questions and feedback! I'll try to address some of that here but happy to answer any other questions or just talk about the project more in general. Also available for an interview or something like that if desired.
Yes, the elephant in the room here is we won't be combat heavy with real-time with pause or Xcom style turn based combat like a lot of our peers. I know that's divisive and it means our game won't be for everyone; but we're trying to be as clear and transparent as we can be this early in development so people can decide for themselves. I tend to prefer games that are "combat-light" and have non-combat options to solve problems, and given our budget and resource limitations we thought the "dialogue as combat" option was the best way to do that so we wouldn't have to develop a lot of additional systems. But I will say we'll lean in to the combat more than Disco Elysium did, we want it to feel turn based but using the dialogue panel and making choices about how your character reacts and what happens next. Also planning some stealth elements and light puzzle mechanics across the three character campaigns.
We still think there's a tactical element here (what equipment to bring with you, how to dress, what character to use in a given situation, what dialogue choices to make, etc.)
The other divisive issue most people mention is the lack of character creation. We wanted to focus more on tailored storylines and we want NPC's to react to race, gender, appearance, and choice of dialogue. While we know games like Arcanum and DoS2 did that well with pretty robust character creation we decided the cost of art assets and additional dialogue and QA that would be needed to do a custom character creator justice was outside our means and not true to the stories we wanted to tell. Again we think we've provided for a lot of interesting story lines and mechanics with the three characters we've chosen, and you can help guide their development through the choice of the skills you choose to develop, but no you can't create your own character with your own custom back story.
Falksi, Yes we're definitely aiming for digestible amounts of dialogue, keeping it fairly short and snappy. I was really happy with the balance in Dragonfall (and unhappy with HK by comparison which was too narrative heavy for my tastes.) We intentionally designed the dialogue UI with the film strip effect and the individual frames to force ourselves to limit the amount of dialogue in each cell and not get long-winded. I'm pretty ruthless at cutting frivolous exposition and want to be respectful of the players time (fast-travel for example).
The tarot cards are really just a replacement for dice rolls in skill checks and combat, we use them as an RNG mechanic instead and don't want people to think we're a deck-builder or anything like that. Just thought the tarot cards were a more interesting aesthetic than dice were but they function basically the same way in a skill-check as the dice did in DE.
Thanks again everyone for your time and comments, happy to answer any other questions if you have them.
