Morning Q&As

[Jun 28, 2007, 11:13 am ET] - 11 Comments

Overlord
Talking with Rhianna Pratchett, writer and co-story designer of Overlord on Ars Technica is a conversation with Overlord writer Rhianna Pratchett: "Let's face it, everyone loves the bad guy. So I'd say that's a pretty easy sell! We've deliberately made it humorous, almost Peter Pan-evil, in nature partly to keep our ratings reasonable (we're not trying to be Manhunt with goblins) and because it was actually a lot more fun to design and write for that kind of story. You're "evil" in an amusing, rub-your-hands-together-and-go 'Mwah-ha-ha' kind of way, rather than a pickling-babies-and-eating-human-livers way. We didn't want to force players into doing really evil acts (ratings alert again!) but we wanted to give them the choice. So you start off as being default evil—you've got the dark tower, the spiky armor, the army of loyal minions at your command—and where you take your innate evilness from thereon in is totally up to you.""
Steam
Running on Steam on bit-tech.net is an article-format conversation with Doug Lombardi about Valve's Steam platform: "Take2 even admitted that retailers are doing everything they can to slow down digital distribution. They even threaten, they even threatened Take2, 'if you guys drop the price on your digital side, then we’re not going to be taking as many games, or ANY games, on the retail side'. The retailers right now are doing everything they can to keep their share of the pie."