Star Wars: The Old Republic lead writer Daniel Erickson on scope of the project
If you've been following along with our coverage of Star Wars: The Old Republic you'll know that BioWare has placed incredible emphasis on writing for SWTOR. As the game is fully voiced, the complete script is roughly 40 novels in length. G4tv's The Feed has a GamesCom 2009 video interview with SWTOR Lead Writer Daniel Erickson that explains more about what a huge undertaking the game has been from a writing perspective.
Erickson explains that BioWare's challenges aren't necessarily about having the ability to pull this off, it's more a matter of scale, particularly with the French and German localizations. He tells G4, "We think we've got the biggest voice over project in entertainment history."
The voice overs are one facet of what BioWare is putting into Star Wars: The Old Republic and the project seen as a whole is very complex. Erickson says, "One of the things we realized very early was that we need centralized control."
Paradoxically, Erickson does very little actual writing as the Lead Writer. Most of his time is spent maintaining consistency within the story across the efforts of multiple writers. He says,"We now have over a dozen writers that are working on it. But each writer owns a particular piece of it. Some writers own just one class and they really are the voice of that piece."
That emphasis each writer can put into the class they focus on is clearly going to be one of the strengths of Star Wars: The Old Republic. "We got to write each of the classes as if we were doing a roleplaying game just for that class," says Erickson. "The ability to write things specifically for a class means that it's actually a more personal story than we've ever got to tell in any of the BioWare games."
Daniel Erickson has plenty more to say about his role as Lead Writer on Star Wars: The Old Republic and about the scope of the game itself. You can find the interview over at The Feed on G4, or check out our video embed of the GamesCom 2009 interview below.
