Skara The Blade Remains - Q&A

Since our tease from two days ago, Skara The Blade Remains has been funded on Kickstarter, although there are still 9 hours to pledge towards the first stretch goal - a new playable race called Celea. Read on for the full interview with Cesar Ortega!

• We’ve talked last year about Skara. What changed during this year for the project?

In a word, everything! The most important difference is the use of the Unreal Engine 4 (UE4) as opposed to the UE3 that we were using then, as a consequence the game looks many times better as I’m sure you’ve noticed. Also important is the fact that we have now received a developer’s kit for XboxOne, which places Skara at a different level.
We have also grown our social network and have literally thousands of future players waiting to get their hands on Skara!

 

• How complete will the game be when it releases on Early Access later this month?

Actually, only Kickstarter backers will have exclusive access to Skara in July, these will have the chance to help us testing the game, balancing the characters and favoring different game modes. Early Access is planned for a later stage, probably in August/September.
By doing so, we can guarantee a smooth transition from Alpha to Beta by allowing the most engaged players to play from the beginning and guaranteeing a high quality product when Skara hits the “shelves.”
The Early Access version will have those two arenas freely accessible and one more scenario that will be accessible to eager players only. The number of game modes will very much depend on the result of our Kickstarter campaign, although it shall increase with time.

 

• Last year you told us that you were experimenting with dedicated servers. Are you going to use them for Faction Battles or not?

We have actually decided that we are going to use Shared Hosting for Faction Battles. It´s a system common in some FPS – think of Call of Duty – and allows as an easy transition when porting the game for next generation of consoles.

 

• How much gore will the final game have? Will there be decapitations, dismemberment and the likes?

We will have fatalities from the very beginning – in fact you can see most of them in our Kickstarter campaign videos, we even have a video update showing them all. About the dismembering, we are working on procedural ones, but the final result will depend on our budget and the cash we raise in Kickstarter but we’ll definitely would like to use them. They may come in at a later stage though.

 

• You’ve switched the engine to UE4. What can you tell us about this new version of Unreal Engine? What was your experience with it, and were you able to push the graphics/physics even further?

UE4 is an amazing tool. Unfortunately we didn’t have any experience with it but as a new engine, no one had it! We were lucky enough to get our hands on it quite early and we are now at an advantage compared with many other studios as we’ve been working with UE4 for almost a year now. In terms of graphics, the new engine allows us to achieve astonishing visuals – as you can see in our videos, even in an early estate of development – but it´s not only that: blueprints offers our team a wonderful way to work and scale the game architecture without touching a single line of code, and that makes the process of creating a game more fast and agile, so you can see a massive difference with our videos one year ago!

 

• I’ve read that you are working to bring the game on Xbox One already. What can you tell us about this platform after working on it? 

Yes, we have received a developer’s kit for Xbox One, but we are giving priority to the PC version given that fact that Microsoft has not developed the environment for Free-to-Play games yet. We expect to have this version ready by Christmas.

 

• Will Xbox One users be able to enjoy the game in its full glory or not, and do you have a resolution/frame rate target already?

Our initial testing with the Xbox One dev. Kit – and a badass TV screen – was incredible and although it’s quite soon to say,  we are pretty confident about porting Skara to next generation of consoles with the same graphic quality, resolution and frame rate than the PC version.

 

• Do you have a projected release date for Skara on Xbox One? Also, what about PlayStation 4 - is there any chance for the game to be released there as well?

Yes, we would like to release Skara for both XboxOne and PS4 by the end of 2014, although once again this does not depend on us alone.

 

• Thanks for your time!