The job of a writer is both taxing and rewarding. Taking the small kernel of an idea and expanding it into a full-blown story involves many steps, including the consideration of limitations and advantages of your medium. Nowhere is this truer than in the domain of video games.
Some might think writing for a video game might be less challenging than more traditional venues with advanced graphics, multi-level sound and exciting game mechanics to fall back on, but these advantages are balanced by the complexity of a task that involves an entire team of artists to accomplish.
My first large task was to create a setting. A solid game world has to provide a basis for quality gameplay while respecting the technical capabilities that have been established for the client and server. This includes incorporating all the game's races, both playable and non-playable, and any gameplay features that depend on support from the setting, such as Wish's player-controlled cities or the expansive PvP desert.
We wanted to design Ganedan from many different perspectives to ensure that a wide range of play styles would be represented and fit comfortably together in the world. The development of culture, style of government and dominant spiritual beliefs became important early factors in the creation of national identities for the playable races. We matched up what we considered to be appropriate and interesting combinations for each race and region then went to work fleshing out how they got that way.
History played an important role in determining the present state of the game. With our basis laid out, logic pushed me in certain directions. It made sense for the New Illanthian elves, separated from their motherland and inundated with humanity during the Age of Strife, to develop a decidedly different flavor than their western cousins in Illanthia. Originally, the idea was to have all the races in conflict with one another during the Empire War, although geographically, this became too much of a stretch. The survival of the gnomes, centralized amongst the races, would have been difficult to justify, for instance. Fortunately, their intellectual and philosophical bent made it a small logical leap to remove them entirely from direct conflict. Some of the setting details actually sprang from existing game mechanisms. For instance, an early build of the game had three different clerical schools of magic, Mending, Blessing and Cursing. I used each of these as a basis for what would later become the White, Blue and Red Orders in human / Larocian culture.
Establishing conflict as part of the setting is also an important task. Players need goals to accomplish. The conflict in an MMO cannot be like the conflict of a novel or even a single-player game. There has to be an infinite source of conflict that can be applicable to an infinite number of main characters. This is possibly the writer's greatest challenge. In other MMO games, this challenge takes the form of a limited number of conflicts that can be repeated a limitless number of times. This approach makes the writer's job easier, but provides less of a reward to players, who inevitably find themselves walking in footsteps that have been trodden countless times already. Fortunately, there's an entire Live Content Team to keep the inner workings of Ganedan steadily moving forward.
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Aside from directly working on the larger aspects of the world and its purpose, I also have many smaller, but equally important tasks. Every new character type, monster model and prop model requires an in-game description and a name tag. For NPCs, I write dialogue and incorporate it into chat files that include any special functions that the NPC may be able to perform such as buying / selling of goods or skill training.
Some written work is indirectly connected to the game. I write website lore stories and bestiary entries for release at regular intervals. Bestiary entries are generally prepared beforehand, when a creature first gets green-lighted for addition to the game. For lore, I have a list of suggested topics to choose from our setting, which showcase particular topics we would like to introduce to the public. I also tailor this list according to fan interest I see on message boards and on our internal beta 1.5 boards, and occasionally write something random whenever a good idea pops into my head. The imp lore piece, The Nature of Evil actually woke me up in the middle of the night and I didn't go back to sleep until I finished it at the end of the following work day.
Help documentation is another one of my responsibilities and must be updated to coincide with the beginning of every testing phase. Associated graphics must be collected from the game client and kept up to date with ongoing improvements to the interface and icons. And, of course, there are public game feature articles and developer journals. Some of these more directly involve writing talent. Others, such as Q&A-based pieces, are more informal and require only an editorial pass for clarity and grammar.
The life of a video game writer can be very different from day to day. Sometimes, it involves intense creative planning and invigorating brainstorm sessions, while other times it's meticulously digging through game files and filling in one-line descriptions. No matter what the task at hand may be, dedication and imagination are always necessary.
Michael K. Donovan
Writer, Wish
Mutable Realms
Originally posted October 14th, 2004 on the RPG Vault, including five exclusive drawings. |
