Wartower: TowerTalk – Interview with Bobby Stein

A German website called Wartower had a chance to interview Bobby Stein, Guild Wars 2 Lead Writer. You can find the interview (podcast) over on their forums.

Continue reading for an English summary (provided by Wartower).

• It’s his job to work with content designers, assist with writing dialogues, conversation in cinematics, rules and guidelines for characters and societies and make sure that there is a consistent tone and style in the end product. They are 11 persons in the team in total.
• Asked if he brings coffee to the team, he admits that sometimes he brings snacks, but mostly he gives his team what it needs and supports it with constructive feedback. He is always concerned that the most appropriate person for the content is working with the right designers on the subject. It’s a mix of managing and responsibility, but he has great flexibility in organizing his job.
• Stein has different teams of writers: role building – cares about the continuity from Guild Wars 1 to 2, outlines the main characters and their framework, works with the content designers to outline the general structure: Running points are Jeff (Grubb) for the dungeons, Ree (Soesbee) for personal stories and John Ryan for explorer modus of dungeons. Stein and his team are responsible for executing all the stuff. Work with content designers is either to initiate stories or to revise them.
• Dialogue should be very tightly with the gameplay; the content is reworked in cycles and several times ingame. Then it is prepared for voice acting to get the script ready for the actors.
• The idea for voice-over stuff in Guild Wars 2 came at the very beginning of designing the game to make it a living world. The players should have the feeling, as if they were part of the world of Tyria: through cinematics, sound effects, in-world conversations, combat, chatter, text bubbles etc. There’s a huge difference, if you just see a character or if you hear him. So the team was split up to different regions of Tyria to deal with the races and cultures that live there and give them appropriate stuff to talk about. In the great cities are also characters from other cities to have the feeling of a metropolitan with different talking at every corner.
• How many voice-overs did they make? Stein answers evasively that Guild Wars 1 only had cinematics. The first game had about 25 (Prophecies) and 200 lines of dialogue. In Eye of the North they had about 1000 lines of dialogue. Diablo 3 has about 15.000 lines. In general, games are adding more and more voice, what makes the game feel more flashed out. In an earlier blogpost he said they will have about 60 films but that was much to underestimated. But he can’t spoiler the actual numbers of dialogue.
• Voice actors mostly come from Los Angeles, some from other places like Canada and even some from Seattle. The casting does an external partner who is very experienced with games. There is a strong relationship with him during all necessary steps.
• It is not so difficult to describe a character to an actor, who has never been playing Guild Wars before, as it may seem. Actors are professionals and are used to take over parts in animation or video games. They are prepped up with a biography of the character and shown other examples of character actings. They get description of races and characters.
• Nolan North, who is already quite famous, speaks the male human character and with his experience he can give a lot of feedback. They are working with over 100 actors, so they like to work with their favorites.
• If the actors give feedback about their character, sometimes their lines are changed due to their suggestions. Sometimes exciting new directions in interpreting a character are adopted. The actor should interpret his dialogue and not be burdened before with too much information. So he has a decent freedom of interpretation and is open to new ideas.
• There’s a script for the actors and sometimes already a cinematic.
• There are more than 200 unique voices in the game. One actor may speak unto 30 different voices in the game. According to the situation the same voice can even sound very differently in another part of the game.
• They are always intending to get emotions better expressed.
• There are different types of stories: personal story, dungeon story (story and explorer mode), dynamic events (with same characters in different situations), side stories – in short, stories are all over the place.
• Action comes into the cut scenes, but is dependent on the lines given to the characters. The player gets information what to do next, but also some character information. The character animators also have their share in the success, when they bring the dialogue visually into life with expression on the faces and gesture. But the team has to be aware, what they want to accomplish with the scenes, because not all of the action can be shown within them. The system has limitations and one has to stick to its strengths.
• A writer has to write for all ages of players above 12. Characters should nevertheless have some depth. But stuff doesn’t have to be too scary (murder, betrayal, war). It’s a challenge how to present it.
• Feedback from beta events wasn’t always positive on personal stories, what perhaps depends on the age of the player. People are very different, everybody can’t be happy with each storyline. But if one doesn’t like a specific personal story, because it doesn’t suit him, he has a lot of possibilities to choose from another one. With races and their different personal stories the developers wanted to appeal to a wider variety of players. They noted that a lot of people were choosing their favorites.
• A lot of characters in the personal story come and go, which means easy work for a developer, because then he can be put aside. But on the other hand a character isn’t understood and evolved, if he’s only shown for a short period. One of the improvements in the personal story was to develop characters much more and let them appear more often, so you can feel with them. What the team will do with the characters in addition will be shown after release.
• The books are a good addition to the story but they are not necessary to understand the GW 2 world.
• Feedback from the beta was also that some people lost their connection to the personal story line, because they had to level up for a longer time and so lost track. The journal can help to refresh ones knowledge. It was discussed that personal stories should be replayable or players could get character bios, but decisions had to be made in developing the game what to cut out. Information will be given to the player without making him confused.
• The developer’s own experience and personality often goes into the personal stories, e.g. how to speak to children. But everybody has the aim to make a great game and not paying service to the developers.
• How are the names created? A developer outlines the basics of a character, a look into the internal documentation helps a lot then. There are certain race-based rules how to create a name. Some are humorous or unusual compared to daily names, but the world shall be unique.
• Bobby Stein likes characters best when they have humor, so he has a soft spot for Lord Faren.