WILDSTAR

Building an IP from scratch is unbelievably hard work. It involves an incredible amount of focus from a dedicated core of passionate people from multiple disciplines. It involves defining a simple and compelling idea, communicating that vision clearly to hundreds of people in your studio, and then reflecting it consistently through everything from game design to web development to marketing and brand.

I was privileged to be one of that dedicated core of individuals at Carbine – first, as the Lead Narrative Designer on the project, then as its Creative Director. During that time, I was central to the development of WildStar's IP, giving me a unique perspective into how one is best created. Through a few compelling examples, I'd like to explain how we achieved it, using materials that I personally produced and directed.

LORE and style guides

Our game universe started with one very simple question - what would happen if someone discovered the most legendary planet in the universe? That question spawned a few more. What was this planet? Why does everyone know about it? Who used to live there? And what happened to them? To answer these questions, we wrote extensive lore for all our factions, player races, world groups, and iconic characters that covered everything from physical descriptions to history and cultural traditions. We also developed comprehensive style guides to define things like naming conventions, personality profiles and figures of speech. These documents were extremely important during development, as they communicated the fundamental rules about how the races in our universe would talk and act.

Want to see an example?

CONTENT BRIEFS

Once we had defined our game story and developed our lore, we had the necessary information to begin creating content. At Carbine, the content brief was the foundational document for our content – including zones, dungeons, raids and story instances –  which set the stage for the development teams to implement them. I was responsible for writing almost all of them. In these briefs, we outlined enemies, iconic NPCs, epic POIs, and character and story progression. Using these briefs as a guide, the teams created content that resonated with our IP.

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GAME CONTENT

Along with providing creative direction for content, the Narrative Design team was responsible for designing, creating and implementing all of the lore- and story-driven collectibles in the game. In WildStar, this included Datacubes, Journals, Galactic Archives and Tales From Beyond The Fringe. All of these represented different vehicles for delivering narrative content to our players, while at the same time providing them with a reason to further explore the vibrant world in which the game took place. As the Lead Narrative Designer I designed most of these systems, and was personally responsible for writing and implementing a large amount of content for them.

Want to read some volumes of Tales Beyond The Fringe? 

Interested in listening to a few Datacubes?