Our lead writer was the perfect guy for that. His name is Richard Dansky. He works for Ubisoft as a writer and before that used to work for White Wolf. It's a pen & paper role playing company very well known for the game Vampire: The Masquerade. For three to four years before he joined Ubisoft he had been working for them as a line editor and world creator, so he knew a lot about role playing games in general and a lot about building worlds. He had written four novels. He knew about video games as well. He knew about Might & Magic. It was perfect and so he was the lead writer. I myself was the coordinator, the guy who made sure that the core visions were respected and that everyone on the project was following the same philosophy and also to make sure that the information was given to the developers.For the graphics we hired Olivier Ledroit, maybe you have seen some of his artworks on the website. He has a 17 years experience in doing comic book series in France, so he's a veteran. He does dark fantasy. He also did a cyberpunk thriller, he was the visual artist on Requiem, which is dark horror, gothic horror. It's really dark and gory. This is the kind of stuff that fit into the idea of this new darker world. His style looks a little bit like Warhammer, because it's exaggerated – Knights have swords twice as big as themselves and huge shoulder pads – but it looks less bulky. Usually his characters are very thin, it looks a little bit like what the Japanese can do.
4P: Did he design characters for the game?Le Breton: Not really the characters, because Nivel and Arkane had done a lot of artworks before Ledroit started. But at least he gave strong visual codes for the factions: Armors, symbols, color schemes, weapons – that kind of stuff. He will have a stronger impact on the future of Might & Magic games, because now we have 25 artworks from him and he is doing some more, so if we did a new Might & Magic game tomorrow, this is the source we'd take our inspirations from. Here it was more like: "In the game they look like this [the characters, ed.], so
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| His bad: Strolling around distracted during his watch gets him stabbed in the back. |
I'll base my drawings on that, but I'll add my own style and make them look bigger, more impressive and then I give it back to the developers. If they can tweak it – great! If they don't have time – too bad.”
4P: Where did the idea come from to change from role playing and strategy games to first person shooter? Was it to make the game more intense and fancy?Le Breton: No. We had the license, we had decided to make Heroes [of Might & Magic] 5, of which we knew where it was going and who would do it, and then Arkane Studios came to Ubisoft with this concept of an immersive action game within a fantasy universe and the Half-Life 2 engine. And we said: "Oh, we've got Might & Magic, so you know, that could work!” *laughs* So, that's how it was born.
4P: Did they always want to do an action based first person game. After all they had done Arx Fatalis before, which is quite different from Dark Messiah.Le Breton: Well, for them Dark Messiah really is what Arx Fatalis 2 would have been. They really wanted Arx Fatalis to evolve and become like this. They are big fans of Valve and the Source engine, so they really wanted it for their game. They had this feeling that they wanted Arx Fatalis 2 to look like Half-Life 2 but with their own vision, their own world.
4P: Had they already worked on the project when they got to you?Le Breton: Yes, they had a prototype, a game design document. They had several concept arts. They were ready to go into production with a game that had no name and no publisher at the time. We talked about how we could make it a Might & Magic game. At first they said: "Might & Magic is not the same kind of world”. But we told them what we had in mind, that we were building a new world and that the guy who wrote the bible came from this background. Then they said: "Well, in this case, if we make it more modern with no guns and no robots, then that's the game we want to do.” That's how we came to an agreement.
