Not to shoot myself in the foot, but I prefer visual storytelling and like how Fallout 3 did it. We tried to practice that (although arguably by necessity) in the area design in NV: Old World Blues, especially the sites where the major NPCs had been and the scientist’s houses in Higgs Village. I think visual…

We didn’t make the universe (that was thanks to TSR - Zeb Cook and co, plus the array of designers - Colin McComb, Monte Cook, and more), so we already had a solid foundation to work with. We just put a story on top of it, and because almost ANY story works in the Planescape universe and physics (systems and…

Make a high Wisdom Nameless One and reach the end of Torment, and the answer provided is the one I would give. :)

HK Planet = Time and resources. (Do you mean Droid Planet or the HK factory on Telos?)

It was pretty influential, especially drawing isometric maps (which I did for Fallout 2 and as recently as Wasteland 2, actually). And I absolutely think writing for PNP is a way to transfer into video game writing.

Resources. Our “bookends” for the game was (1) you have to leverage the Infinity Engine, (2) it has to use the Planescape license, and (3) it has to be an RPG. There were probably other stipulations, but that’s what I recall most. So isometric camera seemed the best choice - and Tides is a spiritual successor, so they…

THREE IS UNFAIR. But I will try, because that’s one of the first rules about game design - the parameters will always be unfair. So...

No stairs. Yet. If I get some, they will appear suddenly, and they will lead down into darkness, and be something filled with horrors.

You can avoid this by having the narrative reactivity come much, much later (the Witcher is great about this). At that point, they’re committed. This isn’t to say you shouldn’t have some immediate reactivity for choices, but “too soon to tell” is great advice for quest and consequence design.

I have to confess, I don’t know many details about it, but I trust those guys (we wouldn’t have Old Republic without them in the first place). Overall, I’m still reeling with the loss of the Expanded Universe, since I spent so much time researching it.

Yes, got all the equipment for home (mikes, headphones) thanks to advice from the community as to what the best LP set up is, asked our IT folks if I could have the Arcanum LP computer (the system is so old they were going to take it outside and shoot it, but I asked them if I could have it, and they said “sure.”)…

When writing the companions for Pillars, I focused solely on them for many months. I wanted to do something different and also do the best work I could do. There may have been detours and other design requests during that time, but it was 7 days a week, at least 10 hours a day, and weekends I saw as just another…

The game’s one-liner was “the RPG that happens after the death screen.” I tried to imagine what that character would be, but our character modeler and concepter, Eric Campanella did a much better job than me.

I didn’t feel any narrative constraints from the community - or from the project itself beyond that we were trying to recapture a certain feel of previous Infinity Engine games, and we sought to write towards that. I do think we kept the story close to our chest during development, but that was intentional.

Artistic Merit = Thank Grim Fandango - it was the first game that made me realize games could be... more.

It varies. I start with the character’s purpose (merchant, ambient flavor, reinforcing a theme - refugee fleeing a war, major quest giver/faction leader, companion, major adversary), and then I run through a checklist of (let’s use Fallout as an example):

Not really. There were a few things regarding this:

I think nihilism gives players something to fight against, especially in companions and in the world... and if you can give these NPCs hope or help the world, it sets an example against the seeming uselessness or darkness of it all. So part of it’s the contrast. The other part is I just like the darkness. ;)

She was pretty uncomfortable to write (as was Durance). I took a different approach with those two and tried to imagine characters that didn’t share my outlook (both have a number of principles I disagree with, but I wanted to give those a voice and listen to the characters talk about them and try to reconcile them).

I think I can hear Threadless weeping right now. For me.