We have put several questions to Arx Fatalis' Lead Designer Raphael Colantonio, now that the game has been out in Germany for a few weeks already. Some of the questions, you will find, are a bit uncomfortable, but Raphael Colantonio answered them patiently. Others will reveal plans for a sequel - but enough said, read on yourself:

ARXDot: Hi Raf, first of all, congratulations on Arx Fatalis, which has has become a great game indeed!

Raphael Colantonio: Thanks :)

ARXDot: Arx Fatalis is out in Germany for 6 weeks now: How are the players' reactions to it?

Raphael Colantonio: So far, I received many emails from players who go really crazy for the game, I think the ones who are totally pleased are the Underworld fans, who seem to have been waiting for Arx for a big while :) Obviously, I've also read some bad things on the forums, people complaining about bugs (I can't blame them for that) or for taste reasons, but I guess there's always a percentage of people who won't like your game anyway, the important thing is to have a majority of players who like the game.

ARXDot: There were some nasty bugs in the sales version and still in 1.11 - why did that happen?

Raphael Colantonio: If only I knew... I think that due to the nature of the game, Arx Fatalis is a game that should have deserved more testing than most games usually do. But we discovered that only too late. You know, there are so many ways to solve quests, you can do things in different orders, the game saves tons of informations per item, per character, etc... it's a really heavy project with heavy and complex data. Believe me that we'll keep this in mind for our next games !!! In the meantime, be assured that we'll do everything possible to fix all the crashes for the international version (Obviously a patch will be made avaliable for our dear german (and austrian) players)

ARXDot: How long has the development of Arx Fatalis taken, from the very beginning until the release of the German version?

Raphael Colantonio: Almost 3 years... but that includes the creation of Arkane Studios, the making of the librairies, team building, and most of all: the long discussions with publishers. Also, we started from scratch, installing Msdev and DX7 SDK on freshly formated computers, no preliminary coding work had been done.

ARXDot: Of what feature or aspect in the game are you the most proud of?

Raphael Colantonio: A risky question, because it might make us sound arrogant, and I don't know if the elements we are the most proud of will be the ones that people will like the most... But anyway, we are proud of the amount of detail we put into the game, all the little things that we've added that maybe people won't see but which makes the game universe richer, including the humour elements, the little secrets... Also, I think we did a good job with the atmosphere: the graphics, the lighting and the sound are sometimes intense enough to create a real tension and I've received a few emails from people telling me how scared they were in certain situations such as their first lich encounter, or some crypts areas, or the ratmen place. Another thing is the multi threaded story, its twists and its different endings is one of the elements we're happy with, we've spent ages in meetings trying to get it right: talking about the story, we've linked it as much as possible with the puzzles, this is something I've always wanted to see in a game, instead of having a set of mysteries to solve one after the other like in some RPGs.
Finally, I think we managed to do a good job at doing some believable behaviors in advanced situations such as magic fights: the enemy casters will always try to use the right spell according to the situation, for example if you turn yourself invisibly, there is a high probability that a snake woman will cast the reveal spell.

ARXDot: And what was the most difficult thing to realize in the game?

Raphael Colantonio: Running a project that brings so much variety and so many types of gameplays into one big game:

1/ First, it's a very risky task in terms of programming because you have to concentrate on too many things when most games concentrate all their efforts on a few aspects such as exploration, or 1st person shooting, or stealth. In the case of Arx, we wanted everything : a first person shooter aspect, good graphics, multilayer animations, fun combat system, realtime magic, infiltration gameplay with believable characters behaviors that can hear you or flee, or call some friends, high level of interaction between items or NPCs, multithreaded story in a persistent world (any item you leave will stay in the game), very heavy savegames... this brought a few nightmares to the programmers.

2/ Also, finding the good equilibrium between all these gameplays has been very difficult considering that we wanted the players to be able to solve all situation using different techniques : either by using magic, or combat, or stealth, or action, or using the right item, etc... so the tuning for this was a somehow hard task to anticipate, and we were not sure we'd got it right until we had our first testers playing the game.

3/ Also, the game being all one big flaw of data where you can always come back to places where you've been before, and you can make things in different orders (as opposed to most games that are level based). The script coding has been one of the hardest task of the project that we certainly underestimated in term of difficulty, we didn't expect it to be so hard when we started the developmeny of the game.

ARXDot: What other features did you want to bring in Arx Fatalis, but couldn't and why?

Raphael Colantonio: To be honest I think we managed put in most things we wanted at first, we probably even added a lot of stuff on the fly, as we were developping the game. Looking back at the initial plans we had, the game was not that ambitious compare to the final result. Obviously, there are a few things we initially planed that we dropped, such as the multiplayer feature. Another feature we would have liked to add is an automap feature on which you can write down some notes, but we dropped it when we realized that it wouldn't be compatible with a possible console port. Also, the maps should show better where you are, but that's not an easy feature, because if you really think about it, how do you represent 3D worlds in 2D ? I guess there must be a reason why no Quake or Unreal engine based game have an automap feature...mmm ? Another thing I personally would have liked to see in Arx is an advanced physics system, but the gameplay incidences were hard to manage: for example, in the demo, you could start piling some chairs, then you could climb anywhere in the level, so that is the kind of thing we want to avoid.

ARXDot: So, this means we could expect these features in a possible Arx Fatalis 2? What other new features would you do in a Arx sequel?

Raphael Colantonio: It's a bit too early to tell... Player's feedbacks from Arx 1 will certainly determine some of the choices for Arx 2...

ARXDot: You were or are thinking about bringing Arx Fatalis to the XBox: Aren't you afraid such a game as Arx Fatalis is too complicated for a console, both to play it and to get it 100% bugfree?

Raphael Colantonio: That still really depends on our publisher and Microsoft submission system. I don't think it's really complicated if we bring the necessary adaptations, mostly in terms of controls.

ARXDot: You are still patching and optimizing the game to get the english version even better: what exactly have you or will you improve or optimize?

Raphael Colantonio: A few stability issues, graphic card compatibility, some simplified controls schemes, an enhanced interface with options such as an auto-inventory rearrange command or auto-reequip weapons on break. In addition, we're giving a look at performances, and we're still hunting possible quest bugs. As I said already in question #3, there will be the corresponding patch for the german version.

ARXDot: What will you do after the english version is released? Go for some 'real' vacation (i.e. away from PCs and Arx Fatalis) or start planning a new project, possibly Arx Fatalis 2?

Raphael Colantonio: Many possibilities are currently being discussed, I can't really reveal anything precise for now, but what is sure is that 'real' vacation is not in the plan: this is one of the bad side effects of running a small game company.

ARXDot: What other projects would you love to do, regardless of fundings and effort?

Raphael Colantonio: Interesting question... I guess there would be a different answer per each Arkane member, but in my case, I would love to work on a mission based infiltration game. Or maybe a mafia game playing the bad guy, managing ressources... It could also be interesting to work on an online RPG...

ARXDot: What are your favourite games and influences? I am strongly suspecting, that one of them is Underworld, but there must be others as well :)

Raphael Colantonio: Ok, I will probably forget some, but here are some games that really stroke me, in no particular order : Most of the Ultima series, Fallout 1&2, Alone in the Dark 1, Underworld, Thief 1&2, Deus Ex, Another World (old game), Zelda SNES, Ultima Online, Syndicate, System Shock, Bioforge, Prince of Persia, Dungeon Master, Oddworld...