Writing your story: An interview with the writers of Guild Wars 2
I run a Guild Wars 2 fansite, and was recently given the opportunity to interview several of the game's writers about what goes into writing for a game like that, among other things. I spoke with Bobby Stein, the lead writer, as well as Peter Fries and Angel McCoy.
First and foremost, just how different is it writing for a game from writing, say, a novel or script? And how does writing for Guild Wars 2 differ from writing other games?
Angel: Writing for a game differs from every other type of writing. You could say it’s its own animal. The grand majority of writing in a game has a technical element. By that, I mean that it serves a practical purpose and is rarely just creative. Even the dialogue between NPCs may be there to guide or inform players. It’s all there to build a cohesive imagining experience for players.
When you’re writing a novel or a script, your only goal is to tell a great story. In a game, your goal is to tell a great story AND make sure the player knows where to go and what to do next. This can be quite challenging because you don’t want to sound like you’re giving directions. You have to be extra creative to make it all sound natural. If you’re doing your job right, the player gleans the information without ever realizing they were hearing a lecture on how to proceed.
Guild Wars 2, being an MMO, has a vast ocean of text in it. Games that come close to the same amount of text are few and far between. Many people are contributing to the text in the game, and it’s the writers’ jobs to make sure all that text is as flavorful, useful, and lore-ful as possible.
First drafts come in from all over the company (content design, level design, story design, etc.), and we writers buff them up. For example, a content designer may develop a town in the game, and that town will have certain non-player characters (NPCs) needed to support gameplay. The designer builds those NPCs into the game and gives them temporary text that expresses what’s happening. This then comes to the writing room, where we take their ideas and polish them to a shine.
In addition, we write from scratch many of the elements unrelated to gameplay ourselves. This includes scenes and player/NPC interactive conversations that are scattered around to share world history, anthropology, and politics. It also includes those scenes written to express racial characteristics or social norms.
We have an in-house style guide that we use to uphold grammatical continuity and a wiki for tracking lore continuity. A large part of the writing team’s job is to police text and make sure it abides by those two rule sets.
Bobby: Game writing is especially challenging due to the emergent stories that happen through player influence. For instance, as a player, you can roam a region somewhat freely, encountering dozens of characters that may or may not be involved in an event chain due to a number of external or player-driven factors. An event chain could be in a number of different states, so you have to make sure that the voiced dialogue is written clearly, concisely, and in character to convey everything from character development to gameplay information for every possible state. All too often, character development takes a back seat to thinly veiled exposition, so it’s a constant fight to pull the “gamey-ness” out of character dialogue and instead treat your NPCs as true characters. The most memorable moments happen when dialogue is triggered under a crazy set of circumstances and everything just clicks, but that’s very hard to predict.
The scale of game writing is also very different from novel and screen writing. Where an average 90-minute film might have around 10,000 words of dialogue and a tight narrative, an MMO might have 100-200 times the writing with many smaller stories to juggle. To generate that much content, you need entire teams with representation from multiple disciplines. For Guild Wars 2, there are about 50 designers, with specialties ranging from systems and content design to writing and editing. Ideas are kicked back and forth between teams, ultimately passing through the writing sieve to ensure a more consistent voice and writing style. It’s an enormous, complex challenge to tie it all together.
Writing for online games is especially difficult because you have to account for multiple players experiencing the same content from different perspectives. It’s relatively easy to generate dialogue for grouped content, such as dynamic events, but once you factor in personal, branching storylines, it gets a lot hairier. Cinematics can be triggered under a number of different circumstances. If party members are spread throughout a map, some might miss critical story or gameplay information unless you broadcast VO in ways that might not sound natural. There are technical challenges as well. There are only so many types of character interactions we can show in certain types of cinematics or gameplay scenarios, which limit the types of content we can even show. You must learn to write around situations, presenting plot points or character interactions differently than if you were writing a novel or screenplay. Even if the scene calls for characters to embrace, you may not be able to show it due to technical limitations or animation constraints. So, while games may share some common challenges in telling compelling stories, those problems are magnified when applied to MMOs. And don’t get me started on the number of characters inside an MMO; it’s obscene.
Peter: Though the scale of an MMORPG like Guild Wars 2 makes it a project to dwarf any novel or script, it’s the amount of collaboration that sets it apart from other writing work. With dozens of designers and the dozen or so writers on our team working on the game’s sprawling content for years on end, finding and maintaining a consistent voice throughout the enormous amount of written and voiced text is a constant challenge.
The sheer size of the story in Guild Wars 2 is massive - I remember a recent blog post saying that there’s 30 storyline splits in just the first ten levels. What kind of challenges did the writing team face in coming up with these branching storylines?
Peter: Our team had to constantly compare notes to make sure we were on the same page with the overarching storyline envisioned for our game and that we were hitting the right story beats to provide players with an interesting set of characters to spend time with. We wanted to be sure each of the many possible player decisions paid off in a satisfying way while also taking each of our iconic characters through an arc that saw them learn, change, and grow.
Angel: We started designing these storylines back in 2007, well before we knew exactly which game mechanics we would have available to us, so the initial designs were full of pie-in-the-sky ideas. As we progressed in the development process, we realized that we would never be able to do some of those things in an MMORPG environment, and we had to hunker down, evaluate, and redesign where needed. This meant that, in some cases, we rewrote the text for a particular portion of the story more than three times.
That’s iteration. With each redesign, the gameplay got tighter, and the story got better. The iterative process takes longer and produces a lot of discarded text, but it’s worth it because we come to a place where it all works beautifully together (text, gameplay, and art), and you get a final product that you can truly be proud of.
Bobby: Eric Flannum, Ree Soesbee, and Jeff Grubb drafted the personal story arcs near the beginning of Guild Wars 2 development, almost in a vacuum. This was at a time when the game’s core systems hadn’t been built yet and our content creation tools were in their infancy. It wasn’t until a couple of years later that the personal story team was formed and work began in earnest. That new group, consisting of various members from the content, lore, and writing design teams, revisited the original story outlines, making changes where necessary and iterating on the gameplay and plot until things felt right.
We learned some important lessons once our tools came online and we were able to build content inside the game world. Some character arcs and plot points that made sense in our heads showed less favorably on the monitor. There were logic gaps all over the place and many of our favorite characters came off as flat and uninteresting. After months of rigorous company playtests and feedback sessions, the story team went back to the drawing board armed with pages of notes. Encounters were adjusted, character motivations were shifted around, and thousands of new lines of dialogue and voice-over were implemented.
It was worth all the stress and aggravation, though, because the current versions of the starter story chapters (a.k.a. the “1-10 bits”) are more cohesive and engaging than the initial drafts. The story team gave the supporting characters more screen time with the player. They also implemented more ambient and triggered voice-over, which made for a more immersive play experience.
The writing team was then able to take the first draft dialogue, which was authored by various members of the story team, and further refine it to make it more conversational. A big part of the writing team’s job was to cut back on redundant information, rephrase lines to sound more in-character, and edit scenes and cinematics down to their most potent forms. The more time we had to spend on review and revision cycles, the tighter the scripts became.
So, the burden of personal storytelling was shared across maybe two dozen people. The designers came up with compelling scenarios, and with the story writers, they drafted the dialogue framework. The writing team further refined the dialogue for our actors to voice, and the animators brought it to life. It was a large collaboration that took place over several years.
Full text can be found at the source - they had a lot to say and thus it is a pretty lengthy and in-depth interview.
(also, can we get a Guild Wars 2 tag, please?)