Brian Fargo visited G4TV.Com (G4’s weekly gaming ‘talk show’) to talk about his new company, inXile (warning for folks at work: the site makes noise), and more specifically their upcoming remake of The Bard’s Tale. Since I had the ep Tivo’d I thought I’d transcribe a couple of Q&A’s for you folk.

G4: What is the storyline, and what genre is the game?

BF: Well, its a role playing game, and certainly thats a genre that I’m well known for, and its an action-rpg, so anybody familiar with say, Dark Alliance or Champions of Norrath would know the style of gameplay, but at the same time its more like my old PC games and I’m bringing a deep, non-linear PC mentality to the console world.

G4: What characters are we going to be playing as?

BF: Well you’ll be playing as The Bard, which is not your typical RPG hero. In fact he’s not a hero at all, he’s more like Han Solo in the fact that he’s really not interested in saving the world. He’s interested in ‘coin and cleavage’ as we say and that’s about it. If there’s not something in it for him…tch, no interest.

G4: What makes this a new adventure, what kinds of things from the original game are in there, and what kinds of things are completely different?

BF: Really most of it is completely different. The thing that made the original Bard’s Tale work back in the 80’s…what made that work has nothing to do with today. I’ve been playing and making role playing games now for 20 years and so, I sorta looked at the genre and I thought “We gotta do something completely different.” And so, for us, I’m just tired of breaking open barrels to find the skeleton key. We can’t stand that stuff anymore. So we came at it with a very mature sortof perspective on it. It parodies, in fact, many of the old rpg… some of the conventions that we actually helped create.

G4: Tell me a little bit about the RPG genre. Obviously there are millions of RPG gamers out there. You’ve obviously made some of the best. What is it that sets RPG gamers apart from the regular kind of shoot-em-up crowd?

BF: Hmm. Well, I think they’re looking for a deeper experience, really, for the most part, you know?. More of a narrative experience. Action games are just purely a function of beating it and getting to the next level, and there’s a certain amount of that with RPGs but you know we focus on looking at the human side of things. And on sortof good and evil, and in our case humor, and human motivations. And so I just think they’re looking for a deeper experience.

I have to say that the idea of combining the fun and fast gameplay of action-rpgs with a storyline with some meat is pretty intriguing to me. I’m looking forward to this one!