Going Green with 38 Studios

5 pages of goodness

Source: Gamasutra - Going Green With 38 Studios: RA Salvatore, Brett Close On The House Curt Schilling Built

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R.A. Salvatore: I’m Bob Salvatore, creator of worlds for 38 Studios.

Creator of worlds?

RS: That’s my title. I’m the COW. [laughs]

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BC: We were somebody else. And now we still are somebody, but it’s not the same somebody that we were before. So we were Green Monster Games, but we rebranded ourselves because, right about the time I came in, we started talking about the focus and vision and direction of the company. The primary point -- with people like Bob involved, with Todd involved, with this higher level vision and direction from these guys that were building the world based on an original IP -- we’re building more than just videogames.

This is going to spin off into ancillary products that support that. It actually blurs over into various other media, like video on demand, like the online presence, like Todd’s figurines, like graphical novels, and Bob’s vignettes, and various writing releases that we can do, as well as full blown novels. You know, wireless hand-held consoles, cross-platform, etc.

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How do you integrate story into MMO’s? It seems like a really difficult thing to tackle, and in general, people kind of don’t outside of, say, single player quests. It's very hard to actually have people feel like they’re affecting the world.

BC: It’s a tough job.

RS: It is.

BC: And that’s it. [laughs]

RS: The way I’m beginning to understand what’s going to happen -- because, a lot of this is a learning experience for me -- I never realized –

BC: Actually, be careful not to say too much here.

RS: – is I’m learning is I really shouldn’t say too much, and so we’re gonna leave it at that.[laughs] I can say that one of the things that’s helping is taking different characters, and different parts of the world, and writing little short stories about them. I have a friend, the printer friend, who's printing one copy, a leather bound short story, of a character in our world. That copy circulates through everybody in the office. The goal is that the art team, the design team, all of the people will have the feel of that area, of that character. Then they can work from there, and build it bigger and better.

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I don’t know if this is too “secret sauce” oriented, but how are you going to make a game that is not trying to compete with World of Warcraft. How do make it in a different arena? Because obviously you can’t compete with World of Warcraft, right?

RS: Oooh, ooh, ooh. How do I write a book that's not going to compete with J R R Tolkien?