New CT team: Writing Team

In 2.0, there were a fair few quests with unfinished dialogue. This was, from what I've heard, because every GM who didn't want to write their own dialogue turned to Selvut to do it for them. Selvut understandably got burnt out and thus a lot of quests released with placeholder dialogue (INCLUDING Aldorei's Secret part 2! This is also the reason the Gerts speak fluent english now).

Now obviously, Selvut is not the only person who can write. There are a lot of talented writers in this community who I'm sure would be more than happy to do it, so why don't we recruit some of them instead?

The CT has many different teams. The GM team, the lore team, the build team, command block team, item team, art team, modelers etc. Why not introduce a new team dedicated to writing dialogue as well?

The writers would be in charge of writing dialogue for GMS who don't want to make their own, and would also check over dialogue written by GMs who WANT to write their own and give feedback. This is much better than having just 1 person do it themself. Also, they could share feedback with other members of the team which would definitely improve the quality of the dialogue in the game.

Such a team should probably have its own application portal since writing dialogue is quite different to coming up with game design.

 

The GM role is way too broad and needs to be split into subcategories.

 

Really don’t see why not. Especially if GMs are already delegating writing their quests to others. Might as well make the role consistent.

 

this is moreso the problem of a few current GMs that don't particularly care for doing dialogue and leave it to someone else to make it high quality ((or make it)) ((you know who you are)) so i'm not quite sure how well this suggestion holds up especially as a full new CT role to apply for and have totally different people handle. writing and quest design go hand in hand and trying to separate the two will likely result in much more formulaic quests which already have been becoming a bit more prevalent nowadays & i'd hate to see that becoming an upwards trend

that being said it is very weird how GMs' main jobs are quests (dialogue/writing & quest design) and mobs (balance & fight/arena design) while those two often have about as much in common with eachother as they do with IMs or builders- at least separating those two into individual mob & quest roles, both of which you could individually apply for, would be a positive change i think considering the increased expectations of both since the younger days of wynn

edit: felt like i needed to tell you guys that there is no lore team there are just GMs who can opt into a lore role on discord and then decide what's getting retconned next patch or something idk

 

Selvut is clearly basing the dialogue he writes for the quests though on the placeholder dialogue put there by the quest makers. The quest makers still come up with the story of their quest (and I think the story of their quest is checked over by Grian), the writers would just make the dialogue for the quest like Selvut already does and maybe suggest tweaks to the story where they see fit.

Also, there are already quests that are wrote by 1 person and made by another. For example, IIRC Oculism did not come up with the story of hollow serenity, rather it was Finndestren.

If you're trying to argue that every GM should be able and willing to write their own dialogue and lore, remember this: Not every GM speaks english natively, and not every GM applied for a writing role.

When you apply for GM, you get a few checkboxes on what you want to make. These are 2 of them.

Quest making and quest writing are different roles, but it seems more like Quest Writing involves coming up with the story of a quest while Quest Making involves creating the quest and writing its dialogue (or having someone else write the dialogue)
It could also be argued that quest writers should write the dialogue, but if all they did was come up with a rough idea for the dialogue, are they really capable of that? Also, this could lead to messy quest development, as maybe the writer would receive their quest idea and the story is not told in the way they imagined it.
It's probably better to just keep doing what's done currently, but with a better method. And again, since there are lots of talented writers in this community, why not have some of them do it?
Also, if you want to argue that Quest Writing is basically this already, people still don't want to apply for GM just to write quests. It would be better to separate them. And as Druser said above, the GM role is too broad and needs to be split into subcategories.

 

Sounds great!

 

Hello there

 

This is very true, Samsam101.