Darth Hater

Star Wars: The Old Republic News, Interviews, Media & Podcast

Comic-Con: Drew Karpyshyn Interview

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If there are errors in a book, you can go back and re-read your book to catch whatever you can catch. There is only a linear path through a book you can take. But with a game, how do you catch plot holes and errors in writing?

DK: With our branching dialog and branching errors, the only way to catch mistakes, errors, bugs, and things like that is with massive amounts of testing and QA. BioWare is very lucky; we're a company that has its own internal quality assurance and testers. Unlike other companies where they are kind of part time positions, they are full time. You can make a career, advance, and make a salary that respects how hard you work at BioWare in the QA department. That is very rare in the industry. They have to test so many branches and options and combinations... things we can't even imagine. There are players who are like "I did A and then B, but then I went back and did A again because you didn't lock it off. Then I did Z and.." And we're like "oh good lord, what is going on?!?" The only way to catch it is brute testing. We have documents that we try to track it all and plan it out beforehand; we've gotten fairly good at it over the years but things are always going to slip through and we really need the help of our testers. We test our own games, too... we play the hell out of our games. Which isn't the worst thing in the world -- they are fun so it is alright.

How involved are you in determining side quests?

DK: When BioWare first started, we were a much smaller company. Things were more simpler back then too. The writers were also designers, or what we would call world designers now. We would do a lot of that scripting, placing things, setting them up. With the sort of the advance in the technology, and the growing of our company, now a writer will work with someone who is designated as a world designer or technical designer to implement this plot. So we write it up, and give it to them. They read through it, then they give us feedback on what will work or what won't work, neat game mechanics they can do, then we work with them. Then we write it out in detail, then they take it and implement it. Then we get back together with them and kind of go through it to see if they can add anything to it or anything we can add to it.; things that didn't work, change it. So we really work in teams now, and I think that is the wave of the future in the industry. People are becoming more specialists. So as a writer, you know the theory of how it is all supposed to work, but the skills to actually make it work in a particular engine... they unfortunately slipped away from me. I can't do what I used to do. Back in Neverwinter Nights, we did a lot of our own scripting, but things have changed.



Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic was your first credit as lead writer and a huge critical success and fan favorite. What did you learn from crafting story in KotOR that helped you work on The Old Republic?

DK: One of the great things we learned when we worked on Knights of The Old Republic is there is this mass audience desire to know more about the history of Star Wars before the movies. Honestly, before we did Knights of The Old Republic, there were some people who speculated that nobody would care because it is characters they don't know. We realized people love Star Wars... you love the movie characters, but you love Star Wars itself. And that was one thing we really discovered when we did KoTOR. So we learned that as long as you respect the IP and respect Star Wars as people know it, you can still build on it, add to it... you know we kind of explored the history in ways it hadn't been done before, but as long as you do it in a way that doesn't disregard what comes later or what comes before, the fans love it. We're fans too, so we know what we like about Star Wars and there is a lot of common ground. If we go after what we like, the fans respond and that is the best part about working on this.

Of the eight classes in game, do you have a favorite? Which class would you choose to play?

DK: I can take the easy way out and say my favorite is the Jedi Knight because that's where I did the majority of my writing. But honestly, the other thing I can say is that I kind of like the Sith classes because of my Darth Bane experience... I feel like there is a little something there. One of the things that is interesting when you work on a game is the thing you like the best often is what you didn't do. So I love the Smuggler class, I love the Agent class. They are the ones that get some of the best lines; they get to do some of the really tricky thinking, scheming, and thinking outside the box. I really look forward to playing those. It is hard when you work on the game for so long to not spoil yourself, so unfortunately, I won't get that experience the players will get when there are all these great surprises. But even knowing a lot of the story and all that, I'm really looking forward to playing them partly because I didn't work on them.



Do you get tired of the stories you wrote or played through a lot?

DK: You know, by the time it comes out, you've played through it so many times that it is hard to go back and play it. That is why with The Old Republic, I'm looking forward to playing the classes I didn't work on; they'll be fun to play because I haven't seen it and I'm not as familiar with it.

The other thing is, when you develop something... people will sometimes ask me about a book or a game I worked on, and I'll have trouble remembering. "Well, you wrote it... how come you can't remember?" And I'll be like, "I wrote ten versions of it. And in nine of those versions, what happened isn't what you saw. You only have to remember one version -- I've got nine versions running in my head. After awhile, they meld together and it is hard to remember because there is so much change and polish. Or that didn't work, let's rewrite it. It can be better!" It does get to a point where at some point, you kind of have to let some of that go, or your brain just gets overwhelmed. By the time when I'm done with a project, I'm like... I'm done! Time to move on!

You have a very prolific writing career. You have written for video games and novels obviously. What do you feel is the differences between writing for prose, interactive fiction, comics, etc.?

DK: I think the biggest difference is obviously the player interactivity or what we call "player agency." For me, I think reading a book or watching a movie almost like watching sports. And playing our games is more like playing sports. You can love to play basketball -- it doesn't mean you love to watch basketball. But you can love both. I really think they are that different.

There are a lot of writers who come into games that don't understand this need to let players have some control, have some impact, and throw themselves into the story in a very different way. Because it feels like it is affecting you directly when you are playing a game. Especially our types of games, our roleplaying games, where you are creating a character and embody that character. Whereas with a story, you are interested in what happens to a character in a book or game. You can have sympathy for them, but it doesn't necessary feel like it is you that this is happening to. So I think you get more of an intense feeling in a game.

The flip side is because you have more control as a player, we have to understand we're going to have less control over the story. So we have to give you more options to do, but we can't go as deep into what the ramifications of them are. In a book, it is easier to get inside a specific character's mind and really take them on this really complicated story arc. We can't do that in a game because a player might say "well, I'm not going down that arc. I'm going down this arc." So I look at games as being very wide, where I look at something like a novel as a chance to not go as wide but to go much deeper. That is the difference to me; there are similarities but I think a lot of writers don't appreciate how different they are.

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