lead-writer posts

Star Wars: The Old Republic lead writer Daniel Erickson on scope of the project

by James Egan Aug 31st 2009 at 11:00AM

Filed under: Sci-fi, Video, Events, real-world, Interviews, Lore, MMO industry, Star Wars: The Old Republic

If you've been following along with our coverage of Star Wars: The Old Republic you'll know that BioWare has placed incredible emphasis on writing for SWTOR. As the game is fully voiced, the complete script is roughly 40 novels in length. G4tv's The Feed has a GamesCom 2009 video interview with SWTOR Lead Writer Daniel Erickson that explains more about what a huge undertaking the game has been from a writing perspective.

Erickson explains that BioWare's challenges aren't necessarily about having the ability to pull this off, it's more a matter of scale, particularly with the French and German localizations. He tells G4, "We think we've got the biggest voice over project in entertainment history."

Tags: bioware, daniel-erickson, g4, g4tv, gamescom-2009, interviews, lead-writer, lore, sci-fi, star-wars-the-old-republic, swtor, the-feed, video

CCP Games video interview on player interaction with fiction

by James Egan Aug 30th 2008 at 4:00PM

Filed under: Sci-fi, Video, EVE Online, Events, real-world, Events, in-game, Expansions, Interviews, Lore, PvP, News items, PvE

The backstory of EVE Online is something that CCP Games has put a great deal of time and effort into creating. As all MMOs are ongoing works, so too are EVE's backstory and the storyline that players experience. To that end, CCP has people like Lead Writer Tony Gonzales (author of The Empyrean Age novel) and Lead Content Creator Scott Holden to flesh out the setting's past, while ensuring that the future of EVE's story remains open enough to allow players to do as they choose.

MMORPG.com caught up with Tony Gonzales and Scott Holden at Gen Con, and got them to speak about the story of EVE in a video interview. They discussed how factional warfare finally came to be in EVE, player response to the Empyrean Age expansion, and how CCP is working to better integrate the backstory with gameplay. Be sure to check out MMORPG.com's Empyrean Age interview if you'd like to hear CCP's views on player-driven versus story-driven action.

Tags: backstory, ccp, ccp-games, empyrean-age, eve, eve-online, expansions, faction, factional-warfare, factions, fiction, future, game-mechanics, interviews, lead-content-creator, lead-writer, lore, mmorpg, new-eden, nullsec, pve, pvp, sandbox, sci-fi, scott-holden, story, storyline, tony-gonzales, video

Matt Daniels talks about his role as WAR's lead writer

by William Dobson Mar 23rd 2008 at 1:00PM

Filed under: Fantasy, New titles, Warhammer Online, News items

Writing a compelling game story is no easy feat. Now imagine being responsible for the innumerable and layered storylines in an MMO, constantly evolving and needing to fit with everything else -- sounds like a nightmare, doesn't it? Lead writer for Warhammer Online Matt Daniels would beg to differ. He has penned a new developer diary, in which he goes over his role in bringing the Warhammer setting to life, and it sounds like it's nothing but fun. A big challenge, but still fun.

It seems we somehow missed the previous developer diary as well, which features content director Destin Bales talking about the roughly-ten-thousand pages of documentation that the content team has come up with for WAR. This covers a huge range of things, from the basic premise of the game, to very detailed content information. You'll even get to read an example of the work found in the content documents, with a full description of the "Mount Bloodthorn" zone pasted at the bottom of the article. Check out both Daniels' and Bales' dev diaries, and we'll be sure to keep our eyes out for the next one.

Tags: age-of-reckoning, content-director, destin-bales, dev-diary, developer-diary, ea-mythic, lead-writer, matt-daniels, mount-bloodthorn, mythic, war, warhammer