Neverwinter Creation Guide

GameSpy, amidst a torrent of criticism for their recent rumor mill regarding a recently released ultra hyped game off of one of their hosted sites, continues to produce by allowing a character from Neverwinter Nights to sit down and tell them the spirit with which anyone can begin creating worlds. It’s the beginning of a monthly series in which a member of Team BioWare writes tips on how to create story, setting and style utilizing the NWN game editor. This is just the introduction to a few of the more elementary story creation tips and will be followed up I’m sure with more detail later. I used my silly putty over a particular paragraph and this is what it copied:

I believe that the first step is in settling on the story that you wish to tell. Determine your intended audience and determine also the style of narrative that most interests you. The second step lies in visualizing the story you wish to tell. By actually pressing quill to page and sketching maps, for instance, you force yourself to bring the mass of ideas into a discernible vision. Once you have your tale envisioned, you can work out the major details of your story, as well as the challenges, the rewards, and the clues that shall propel your tale ever forward. From there, I shall do my best to offer a few insights into the implementation of these inner thoughts of yours, as well as on edits and revisions that can bring out the inner strength of your crafting. When that is done, we shall end our discourse with some suggestions as to how you might announce your crafting to the fellow faithful of this Neverwinter night.

Food for thought:
Are the creators of RPG worlds going to be different from the mod and map makers from first person shooters? Does the setting of a game inherently influence what kind of motivation these people have to create? Or is motivation a dynamic force that inhabits all creation, while instead the setting magnetically draws creators to its type of medium, producing two different types of end results? I think that’s probably the case… and after thinking further, probably a little bit of both.