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Blizzard - The Collaborative Story Process @ Gamasutra

by Magerette, 2010-06-28 15:24:00

Gamasutra interviews former Bioware writer (for Jade Empire and Mass Effect 2) and now Blizzard's lead writer for Starcraft 2, Brian Kindregan, on how creating a storyline works at Blizzard, especially for an RTS. There are some tidbits for strategy fans on the game's development, but the interview really focuses on how writing and story work in Blizzard's scheme of things:

BioWare as a company is very explicitly about storytelling in games. It's the number one thing in their mission statement. But StarCraft II is a strategy game. How do you make a story around that that is engaging and striking but doesn't step on the toes of someone who just wants to go in and fight a bunch of RTS battles?

BK: That's definitely something we think about every day. The answer I've come to is that everybody is interested in characters and people -- at least interesting people -- and events. If you get plugged into those things, they'll sweep you along. What they do is they inform the gameplay you're experiencing.

Rather than thinking of them as two separate things, we focus on making one complete experience so you can get swept up into the total experience, rather than compartmentalizing it...

Coming from a story-centric studio like BioWare, how does Blizzard compare in writing, on the development side? Their games are absolutely miles apart in almost every respect. How does the writing differ under the hood?

BK: That's one of those things where, certainly, you might say the delivery method is different. The way we get story to the player is different. And that's also true just coming from film. When you have someone sitting in a dark room staring at a screen that's 20 feet high, you know you have their full attention.

All of these different experiences have all shown me that there are really different ways to approach the story, but the unifying theme is just getting what giving the player or audience member or whoever to be a complete experience of characters and storytelling [is], and trying to engage them. That, fortunately, stays the same everywhere. I say "fortunately" because that's obviously the most important thing in entertainment.

 

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