GameShark | Xbox 360 | Features | Crimson Alliance Developer Interview

Article by: Brandon Cackowski-Schnell

Crimson Alliance, an Xbox Live Arcade exclusive, takes the dungeon crawling experience and adds some interesting twists to it. The stats model is completely loot driven making the items you equip even more important than a typical dungeon crawler . The game's three classes can be combined in any manner across four player co-op meaning that if you want to eschew magic and bring an army of mercenaries, or go the complete opposite direction and bring a quartet of wizards into the fray, it's all up to you. These changes to the dungeon crawling experience, along with the game's cartoony style made it stand out as one of the more interesting games at E3, We spoke to Max Hoberman, President of Certain Affinity and Creative Director of Crimson Alliance about the need for good loot, whether it's more important for a game to be fun or be balanced and how working on shooters informs their game design choices in other genres.

Between Daggerdale, Dungeon Siege III and the upcoming Torchlight 2, players have a lot of dungeon crawling options at their disposal. What does Crimson Alliance bring to the table to make itself stand out?

Crimson Alliance is very different from most post-Diablo dungeon crawlers. We really focus on giving the player explosive, fast action that’s designed for the console from the get go. While thematically we have swords, dungeons, crypts and other elements of fantasy RPG gaming that our players love, the moment-to-moment gameplay is much more akin to something like Gauntlet Legends than it is to something like Torchlight. Our focus on co-op multiplayer, either on the same couch or over Xbox LIVE, also really sets us apart from some other dungeon crawlers.

The notion of stats being tied to loot is really interesting; however it also ratchets up the need for loot to get progressively more awesome. How do you design a system that keeps players interested in loot drops but also keeps player progression at the right pace?

We use gold as a way of carefully gating what a player can own. You have to explore the world to find shops where you can buy the most powerful items – and as you might guess, these are sometimes on the other side of very difficult encounters. So there’s a lot of player pacing built in to the design of the item system and the game world. A player who explores everything, finds all of the secret areas, gets gold bonuses, takes advantage of co-op abilities and so on, can definitely get ahead of the curve!

On a similar note, when you give players the freedom to play as a party of the same class, what environmental and enemy concessions have to be made to make sure the lack of class variety doesn't place the player at a disadvantage or too much of an advantage? Is that even a concern, or if people want to make things more difficult or too easy for themselves, as long as they're having a good time, you've done your job?

On some level, if you’re playing and having fun with your friends, then we’ve done our job! The multi-class combat abilities naturally favor parties with bit of variety and there are some optional areas that you need a certain class to get to. However, there are certain types of monsters that play out really well with less traditional parties. (You can completely stomp Deathknights with a party of all wizards, for example!) Characters of the same class can be customized through what abilities you choose to upgrade so they will be good at very different types of things. We did that so you can get a lot of variety even within a party made up of all the same class. We want you to explore those kinds of choices and report back to the community what works best in different places.

Can you clarify the co-op options for the game? I understand that four player co-op is supported both over Live and on the couch, but is any mixture of that supported such as two on the same couch/console and two over Live?

Yes, we support any combination of up to 4 players on couch, Xbox LIVE, or your favorite mix of the two.