BioWare's Lead Writer, Daniel Erickson, recently gave a great interview in which he discusses the challenge of writing an MMO as huge as Star Wars: The Old Republic. As lead writer, Erickson oversaw the writing of content and dialogue for the game.
If you've had a chance to play SWTOR, you can understand what a massive undertaking this was for the writers at BioWare with every NPC having their own dialogue and each player class having multiple conversation options for most NPC encounters.
On top of that, you have the overarching story itself that we've come to be enthralled by. Check out a snippet of the interview below:
If you're going to license something, the biggest, most successful license in Western history is a nice one to work with. And Lucas is probably the closest to the ideal you're ever going to get from the writing side. I can't actually come up with a single story place where we ended up having conflict. They are extremely welcoming to new ideas, new stuff. You see how much Star Wars stuff is out there in the expanded universe.
We weren't trying to do anything zany, we weren't trying to be the new Star Wars that did some crazy thing or took it more sci-fi or whatever. We sat down at the beginning and said, we're going to do a love letter to Star Wars. We're going to make everything we loved about Star Wars, that fascination, running around with your plastic X-Wing when you were a kid. That's our Star Wars. So we never ran into conflicts, we never had to worry about story stuff. They would come back once in a while and say, "Hey, this actually is kinda similar to this thing happening in another product, if you take a look at it, let's make sure everything meshes up." That kind of thing.
The other side of it is, we had this discussion before we started, we decided on purpose to go licensed. The work done on Dragon Age, just from a background, world-building -- I don't mean physical world-building, I just mean on paper -- Building the Dungeon Master's Guide and the world guides for Dragon Age, was almost a year's worth of work. It's something we were just not going to have time for, while trying to build an engine from scratch and do everything else.We were going to need something where we could hit the ground running.
Check out the full interview and be sure to discuss over at the Darth Hater forums! For more on Star Wars: The Old Republic, check out the SWTOR Wiki and Darth Hater Database.
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