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I don't think the director of The Witcher 3 needs to prove his RPG bona fides, but he loves the genre so much that he just can't seem to help himself. Konrad Tomaszkiewicz is now leading vampire RPG The Blood of Dawnwalker at his new studio, Rebel Wolves, but he's taking every opportunity to stay current on the game industry and see what other developers are doing well. It should be no surprise, then, that he's interested in what's made Crimson Desert such a breakout hit.
"I'm playing everything that's on the market right now," Tomaszkiewicz says in a roundtable interview attended by GamesRadar+. "I'm paying my attention not only to the story element, but also on replay loops, on how people approach the open world. I'm playing Crimson Desert and checking how they [Pearl Abyss] approach freedom from the system perspective, because it's a different type of game, different type of RPG, but also really interesting when you play it, because you see that you can achieve totally different emotions with the game [without being] story heavy.
"The game mostly pays attention to exploration, to systems, RPG things, and so on. It's really interesting. And I think that most of our studio is playing the same way as I do."
There's some debate about whether Crimson Desert is an RPG or simply an open-world action game, but it seems Tomaszkiewicz is interested in the genre in its broadest interpretation. He shouts out last year's surprise hit Dispatch as "great story-telling game," for example. But the notion of so many great games offering different spins on the types of things RPG players enjoy goes back to the genre's golden age. (Of course, everything is an RPG now, as even Bethesda boss Todd Howard has argued, and you haven't been able to swing a stick without hitting an XP bar or dialogue tree in most games released since the mid-'00s.)
"When we spoke about the games from last year and this year, like Crimson Desert, Dispatch, Clair Obscur," Tomaszkiewicz says, "it reminds me of the '90s, early '90s, where every game which appears was sometimes similar in the meaning of genre, but really different in the meaning of how you control this game, how you experience stuff. Like, you take Eye of the Beholder, which was [in] first person, and you take Betrayal at Krondor, which had turn-based combat, and you have two different games – but also RPGs, right?"
Some of the RPG fans among you might not even remember the likes of Betrayal at Krondor or Eye of the Beholder, despite their massive stature among old-school PC RPG fans. But Tomaszkiewicz comes by these comparisons honestly – he says he still thinks of BioWare's original Baldur's Gate as a newer game, despite the fact that it's "an ancient story for most people."
But, Tomaszkiewicz reckons, modern RPG fans are still getting a taste of the vibrant, varied scene that defined the genre in the '90s. "I feel that we are in a place where those doors are again open," he says, "and the companies which are not really small and doing really small games, can do something like AAA with this indie feel. Or something which opens an unknown experience for you, which is cool because some time ago, every game I played – or many games I played – had really similar experiences, and right now games which are different [are appearing]. It's really cool, and I will try to promote it and be the company which, from game to game, delivers this kind of experience."
The Blood of Dawnwalker is set to launch this September, and I gotta say, even if the setting, quest structure, and pedigree underlying the game didn't already have me excited, this amount of respect for the art of making RPGs – and the history of the genre – absolutely would.
"I love RPG games so much," Tomaszkiewicz says, "that if you told me, 'Okay, we have a new company, we have money, and come to me and do an MMO,' I will not go. I will not go to do racing games or shooters, because these kinds of [RPGs] are something which is inside me, and this is what I want to create as a piece of art."
