WildStar Wednesday: The Story of an Epic World

For the latest WildStar Wednesday feature, Carbine Studios’ lead narrative designer Chad Moore has prepared a developer diary that focuses on the upcoming MMO’s narrative and the conception of its game world in particular. Here’s a sampling from it:

Once we’d established this basic premise, the really hard work of narrative design began. Who were the races and factions coming to planet Nexus, and what’s their interest in this new and exciting world? What conflicts exist before the game begins, and how do those conflicts shape the stories taking place on Nexus right now? What kind of exotic environments and interesting characters will players experience as they adventure through our game, and what will they teach the player about the fate of the Eldan and the growing dangers that threaten everyone on the planet?

Answering these questions resulted in a rich tapestry of characters, races and environments that serve to tell the epic story of WildStar. You have already heard about some of our factions and races, and met a few of our characters. For us in narrative design, it is very important that all of the threads in the tapestry exist for a reason, and that each one will teach you, the player, something about our world and the stories taking place within it.

Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, the job of Narrative Design is to help define our game’s personality. At Carbine, this is an extremely vital aspect of development, and plays an important role in many parts of our game – whether in art, content design, story creation or writing. In Narrative Design, we do a lot of work in developing interesting personalities for our races and characters, including the creation of comprehensive style guides that define naming conventions, interests, and patterns of speech. For those of you who have seen our trailer or the interviews with some of our characters (Sarge, Liara and Buck), the unique personality of WildStar really shines through: a special blend of humor, adventure and mystery that infuses every aspect of our game.