Kingmaker - Developer Interview

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MMORPG interviewed creative director Alexander Mishulin about Pathfinder: Kingmaker.

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MMORPG: That is a lot of lore. How big is the world of Kingmaker?

AM: It is a little difficult to measure but we provide an experience for the whole adventure path, from level one up to level twenty. It covers the land that exists within the adventure path. Because it is tied to one geographical location, the Stolen Lands, it does not cover a huge amount of physical ground. Still, it could take you as many as 50 hours to complete the main story. If you investigate every area of the game it might be more like 80 hours to get through.

MMORPG: It seems that lots of this time is spent in narrative dialogue. How do you know where to just stop, and draw the line?

AM: Basically, when Oleg comes to us and says "stop doing this!". To be honest, it is an iterative process. We are trying to take the core story and expand upon it. For example, our first playable slice of the game was given a great deal of polish. We worked on it for some time and included a ton of dialogue choices in it. When we took this demo and showed it to Paizo, to our friends, and to a few select fans of Pathfinder, we realized that this amount of variety and content was just about right.

We used that initial demo as a reference point for the amount of content that worked. Sometimes you get a bit carried away and other times time constraints mean you have to put in less. Generally, we tended to use that first iteration as a point of reference, however.

MMORPG: When you were creating those early demos, how influential was Chris Avelone's input?

AM: Chris is absolutely great. We started working with him, initially on the main story arc and he gave us a lot of really interesting ideas on how to expand the game. He helped us to really sharpen the overall dialogue and gave great input on the choices that players have in the game.

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