In an interview with Famitsu (via 1UP), Dragon Quest IX co-producer Ryutaro Ichimura outlined the project that Square Enix licensed Epic’s Unreal Engine to develop. The game will be an action-RPG with a darker, Western-style look according to the concept artwork accompanying the interview.
"We do have the worldwide market in mind with this title," Ichimura said, "and we're prepared to deploy along those lines. However, we're not trying to make a game for overseas gamers -- the challenge we're undertaking here is to present a fun game to the entire world that only Japanese people like us can make.”
Ichimura wants the game to be “authentic” for non-Japanese audiences and is working closely with Square Enix’s overseas teams.
"I think Japanese studios have a tendency to make these 'good enough' imitation backdrops when they're making a game set outside of Japan," he explained. "We're working closely with our overseas staff to keep this game from winding up that way. We're not trying to push what we want to do on others -- our approach is to gauge what gamers want right now and take that one step forward.”
“That's why I've been traveling around the world for the past two years to fully investigate our potential userbase. If anything seems off to the gamers in terms of art style or the test gameplay, we write detailed reports and rework the problem area. Now we're finally at the point where the foundational research and technology is pretty well set in stone. It's a new experience for me, but this trial-and-error approach is what I've set out to do from the start."
"Working on an in-house project is another first for me and having an entire studio working right next to me is a really amazing experience. Having worked with UE3 before, the speed this trial-and-error process is going is extremely fast. We have a core team of about 35 people right now, but really, there's only a few people in each individual section. We have experience making RPGs, but not exactly with action RPGs, so we're going to have a special need for people with extensive action experience -- as well as network experience, because that's certainly going to feature in the game too,” said Ichimura.
The Unreal Engine 3 project has no announced target platform. It’s interesting that Square is doing this as Capcom is trying a similar play with its new title, Dragon’s Dogma. Hiroyuki Kobayashi, the producer for the title even admitted to Destructoid that Capcom was making “an effort to make the game feel more like a western game.” Are western-style action-RPGs the next target for Japan’s RPG developers?
