Weird West – Erin Firestine Interview

Erin Firestine, one of the writers on Wolfeye Studios’ isometric immersive sim Weird West, recently participated in this Gamedeveloper (formerly Gamasutra) interview that focused on her career as a video game writer, the challenges of writing for a story-rich game featuring plenty of procedurally-generated elements, and generally working in the video game industry.

Here’s a couple of sample paragraphs to get you started:

Weird West is taking a different tack to narrative, one that provides an experience that is more emergent. “There’s a lot of procedural generation going on,” says Firestine, “and writing for that has been a really fascinating challenge.”

“Ours is a pretty set storyline but the world itself is very open,” she explains, “I have to be constantly accounting for every single possibility that could occur and there’s a ton of writing that goes into that.” Firestine describes her responsibilities as threefold: creating genuine reactions from NPCs that don’t become repetitive, offering players’ ways to role-play with a wide variety of choices that suit their character, and fleshing out the gameworld with intriguing moments that contribute to the overall narrative.

“It’s much less prose writing and much more building a box of LEGOs,” Firestine says, “You’re not even building the things out of the LEGOs. You’re just seeing what the world will do with them and what the players will do with them. We’re so excited to see what happens when the player gets a hold of it because there’s a lot of stuff that not even we will be able to predict.”