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Larian looking for a writer

Joined
Sep 7, 2013
Messages
6,165
PC RPG Website of the Year, 2015 Codex 2016 - The Age of Grimoire Serpent in the Staglands Bubbles In Memoria A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire
Sadly my writing experience is limited to working on my novel for the past decade. Well outside the habitable zone for professional jobs like these.
 

Aenra

Guest
No one asked it, so allow me, because fuck all i care about the rest tbh.

He mentioned illness. Do we know who's out? The barbie girl showed some promise, especially considering her age (most girs her age, today? Just..). Am hoping it's not her.
And since some of the team members are reading this, hope you get better, whoever you are :)
 

anvi

Prophet
Village Idiot
Joined
Oct 12, 2016
Messages
7,530
Location
Kelethin
I am an experienced games writer. Can someone please forward him my resume?
I would hire you for that excellent background story.
Thanks. I can also write quests to an industry standard:

"Greetings adventurer. Please help me find my sheep, she ran away and I need someone to find her! Her name is Baabaara and she was last seen heading towards that ancient dungeon just outside the city gates."

"Greetings adventurer. Please help me gather 20 wolf pelts for this set of armor I need to make. Return the pelts to me and you shall be rewarded with this gold coin. Then you can clean my windows."
 

sser

Arcane
Developer
Joined
Mar 10, 2011
Messages
1,866,662
Don't have Twitter, but I did send him a message on Linkedin. :salute:

If they don't respond in the nearest future, do let me know. I can write Swen directly. (Codex connections have gotta be worth something, right?)

Codexian connections seem like bridges frequently burned and rebuilt :lol:

I wouldn't mind it at all. Do the same for anyone else applying from the community.
 

MRY

Wormwood Studios
Developer
Joined
Aug 15, 2012
Messages
5,703
Location
California
No. I'm done with work for hire, at least on RPGs. Whatever others may think of it, for me TTON was the right game to end on.

[EDIT: I don't even know what my agendas are anymore.]
 
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InD_ImaginE

Arcane
Patron
Joined
Aug 23, 2015
Messages
5,366
Pathfinder: Wrath
No. I'm done with work for hire, at least on RPGs. Whatever others may think of it, for me TTON was the right game to end on.

Whats your plan next MRY? Finishing your current game? We still need good RPG writeer in the industry you know :negative:
 

MRY

Wormwood Studios
Developer
Joined
Aug 15, 2012
Messages
5,703
Location
California
No. I'm done with work for hire, at least on RPGs. Whatever others may think of it, for me TTON was the right game to end on.

Whats your plan next MRY? Finishing your current game? We still need good RPG writeer in the industry you know :negative:
I do intend to finish Fallen Gods, but the pace of it is glacial. I am lucky to have a tremendous #2 on the project, whom I found on the Codex and have been working with for the past 30 months, otherwise I would've surely abandoned it. With his help I think it'll get done. I have no idea whether it will ultimately constitute "good writing" or even "RPG writing" but I think it will be okay.

Game writing has always been a hobby for me, not a full-time job, and I doubt it will ever be any more than that. It's just that as my full-time job has gotten fuller time, and better compensated, paid game work has become more costly and less rewarding.

In ~2009, when I wrapped up work with S2 Games, I said to myself that I had finally accumulated enough game-generated capital (literal money) and social capital (i.e., connections) to make the games that I dreamed of making, one of which was Star Captain. But then I got diverted on Primordia, and by the time I came back to Star Captain, the genre was saturated. Then I got diverted with Cloudscape, then Torment, and by now Fallen Gods is also in a saturated genre. So it goes. Working on Torment was basically not what I intended to do -- after S2 Games, I already was done with work-for-hire. It's just that there is no game that mattered more to me as a game-story-teller than PS:T* and no group of people I would rather have a chance to learn from than Colin, George, Chris, Brian, Kevin, Adam, etc. It was simply an opportunity that I couldn't not chase. Still, Jack Vance says everything best: "Deflated, perhaps."

It is entirely possible that under all sorts of metrics the games Larian makes are better than TTON, but to me it would just be another exhausting 18 months in which I hawk my tiny contribution of spit into a whole ocean of someone else's genius for some relatively trivial amount of money. I can't justify it.

* This is a little bit of a hard thing to quantify, since arguably some other games like Karateka, Ninja Gaiden, Megaman III, Final Fantasy II, Wasteland, A Mind Forever Voyaging or whatever all hit me earlier in life and actually made me want to tell stories with games. By the time I came to PS:T I'd been working at it for at least a 12 years already. But still, PS:T probably mattered most.

(Maybe I'd go back to have the chance to add a ridiculous character to PST:EE, like a female incarnation, just to immiserate the world. "She was the only one of you worth a damn," Xacariah sighs, his blind eyes watering. "Beautiful, funny, swore like a sailor, could fix any machine with a bobby-pin and a nasty look. Put my archery to shame." Dak'kon nods. "*Know* that with a sword, none could fight better." Etc., etc. Probably she would be called "The Underdog Incarnation" -- the only one who didn't get to play the game on easy mode.)
 

Luckmann

Arcane
Zionist Agent
Joined
Jul 20, 2009
Messages
3,759
Location
Scandinavia
But they need to have do a good CRPG before.

Swen, me love you.
[...]

(Maybe I'd go back to have the chance to add a ridiculous character to PST:EE, like a female incarnation, just to immiserate the world. "She was the only one of you worth a damn," Xacariah sighs, his blind eyes watering. "Beautiful, funny, swore like a sailor, could fix any machine with a bobby-pin and a nasty look. Put my archery to shame." Dak'kon nods. "*Know* that with a sword, none could fight better." Etc., etc. Probably she would be called "The Underdog Incarnation" -- the only one who didn't get to play the game on easy mode.)
Stop it, stop it. I know you're trying to troll us, but that's one piece of bait I've already swallowed hook, line, and sinker. You could've attached a siren to it blaring "Bait! Bait!" and you'll've raised my blood-pressure anyway.

It's not funny anymore. It would've been funny before they were likely to actually announce Piss-Tea.

:negative:
 

Spectacle

Arcane
Patron
Joined
May 25, 2006
Messages
8,363
anduin It's tricky. But as I said before, very often "oodles of experience required" is a way of screening people through voluntary avoidance. If Bioware says, "We're looking for a writer to help us with the next Mass Effect game!" they will get thousands of applicants from their fans. But if it says, "We're looking for a writer with 3-5 years' experience and at least two AAA shipped titles and a B.A. degree in Creative Writing, Communications, or an equivalent field" it can reduce the number of applicants to a manageable pool because 99.9% of the prior applicants won't satisfy the criteria, and 95% of them will pay attention to the criteria. But that doesn't necessarily mean that Bioware needs or wants someone with that experience -- they just don't want thousands of unqualified applicants to sift through.
From Swen's tweet it seems that in this case they've found themselves unexpectedly short-staffed and need someone who can come in on short notice and be productive from day one.
 

Raghar

Arcane
Vatnik
Joined
Jul 16, 2009
Messages
22,505
I have both experience and can do RPG writing. But I'd currently rather teach multithreaded programing and game development, than do some writting... with my current shitty grammar, and with my disability. Considering I tend to write 3x less than healthy person, it would introduce quite delays.

BTW normally when something like that happens, the best course of action is to delay game by three weeks to allow recovery of original writer, and do other stuff in advance to prevent further delay when someone from programming team would by in jail for 3 weeks, or ill. But game companies often have so many people with multi area abilities including writing there is nearly always someone who can temporally substitute somewhat and delays like that doesn't happen.

Of course if he's permanently out. That sucks. It's pretty hard to get someone who can finish with same style, and is still affordable. BTW capable people in industry are unlikely to be available on short notice, thus request like that often fails.
 
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Raghar

Arcane
Vatnik
Joined
Jul 16, 2009
Messages
22,505
MRY , how to get writing experience for adventure game or RPG game ?
It's actually quite easy.

You either get into it before start of project, and do stuff like writing item text descriptions, altering scripting, or editing. And just show you can write and you are reliable.

Or write your own game. That would show you are capable, and you have finished project behind you. But you should get extra careful to ensure your writing will not suck. It's actually not easy at the end of larger project when you need to also coding and do some debugging and you are generally spend.
 

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