BioWare Writer Interview
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What stories in recent BioWare history do you feel have been done well? This doesn't have to be anything you were involved with personally.
I enjoyed what was done with Dragon Age II. Moving away from the Hero's Journey template and focusing on different character narratives ((character) meaning not only the player character, but also party NPCs) made for an experience I found interesting and different from what most game stories traditionally explore.
Usually, the world revolves only around the main character and therefore the player. In DAII, the NPCs had lives of their own seeing those glimpses was a treat and made me want more.
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What is the world-building process at BioWare like? Do you start with a world/main theme, does it all begin with a single main quest line, etc.?
We start at the highest level and then grind down. So establish the setting you want, in broad strokes. Set up a timeline; start hanging events on said timeline. Then add in all the things that make a culture and individual progression for those things (again, still high-level), before starting to steadily grind down to the details on everything. To give an example: For Mass Effect, we try to ground everything we come up with in reality somehow, which can lead to some pretty wild research and fact-checking with various people before we actually settle down to write anything concrete.
What types of stories do you feel are still underrepresented in video games?
I swung this question by Sylvia, one of my writing colleagues, because all I could come up with at first was (Anything not based off Hero's Journey.) Sylvia articulated it better than I did: Stories centered on an individual's problems as opposed to saving the world tend to be the exception to the rule in triple-A gaming. On the other hand, you do see more stories of that type in indie games, so those types of stories aren't completely absent from video games.
She also reminded me that we have a loooot of high fantasy and military shooters/sci-fi. That may be an artifact of justifying expert gameplay right from the get-go, but seeing something different, or just more games that purposefully diverge from this framework and instead build skill sets for the characters in other ways. that'd be nice. (Again: Not saying none are out there, just that they aren't the standard.)
There are a lot of smaller developers out there trying to deliver new things or just working on games from the (good old days.) Bastion comes to mind; Legend of Grimrock, Limbo, etc. So many good games are out there without the budget that the bigger companies have it's really worth looking for them.
