WildStar Interview

ZAM is offering an interview with Carbine’s lead narrative designer Chad Moore on the upcoming MMO WildStar, which obviously focuses on the overarching narrative. Here’s a couple of snippets I found interesting:

With two opposing sides, one of the aspects of the game that naturally arises is whether Exiles and Dominion players will be able to communicate with each other. I asked Chad if he could shed any light on the subject.

(That isn’t something we’ve spoken about specifically, but what I can say is that as much as possible, from a story standpoint, I do not encourage any kind of cooperation, any hand holding or alliances of convenience, because for me I’ve tried to push as much as possible that this side doesn’t like that side, their philosophical and cultural differences are irreconcilable. As soon as you pledge your allegiance to The Dominion it immediately makes you an enemy of The Exiles no matter what your personal story happens to be.

I feel that intense and visceral conflict is one of the things that people enjoy about choosing a faction. As much as possible, I don’t want that to be diluted through content. The specific ways that’s done through our system that we’re talking about, philosophically that’s definitely the direction that we’re coming from.

I feel the less impactful that decision [choosing a faction] is, the less it means. So if it’s just a wrapper we put on at the beginning then if, by the end, you’re all doing the same things and doing them together it dilutes the idea of picking a side, we try to keep the purity of that conflict in place as much as we can.)

To understand how WildStar delivers the stories that make up such a vicious rivalry, I asked Chad about his views on questing and the way that it delivered narrative and identity to the game.

(When it comes to storytelling, we really adhere to environmental storytelling. We have quests, we have quest text, but because of the nature of how players generally play through content in MMOs, we wanted to develop story delivery mechanisms that did not require you to spend an inordinate amount of time speaking to people, going through dialogue trees and so on. That’s perfectly fine for some people but for us we wanted to spend a lot of time on things like voice over, every time you talk to someone you’ll hear a snippet of v/o. It gives you an idea of the personality and the things that they care about.

Our artists are some of the most talented in the industry and they have created an unbelievable world, telling you the story of Nexus. There’re these ancient, monolithic machines left behind by the Eldan. How are these things important to the overall story? We are constantly telling you the story of the game through the visuals and the environment.

There are a lot of other systems, that I would consider (opt-in) systems, such as the Galactic Archive which is our version of Wikipedia in the game which is being updated constantly. As you’re playing through the game, you’re getting new archive entries. That kind of storytelling is the kind where you can choose to do that at your own time, at your own pace. We’re not going to tell you (Hey, now is the time you have to sit here and read this,) you can do that whenever you like and choose not to do that. But for people to get into that; it is a deep, complex and robust system that will allow you to learn lots about planet Nexus and our races and our factions. For the people that really want to do that, you are going to have that ability in WildStar.

Philosophically, we’re trying as much as we can to tell the story of our game through the lens of how people generally play MMOs, so the player is always in control of the way that is being revealed to them.)

Check the full interview to read more on the Cassian/Exile rivalry, the way voice acting will be implemented in the title and and the Protostar corporation among other things.