Not someone like Mod Osborne, who has to divide his attentions across the whole game, and has a background in sports writing. Someone who comes from the world of narrative, novels or comics or plays or movies. Someone who could actually manage the story, maintain consistency, vet the dialogue, ensure a rich, continuous story with identifiable, engaging characters? Could Jagex do it? Should Jagex do it?
***
In prepping for Children of Mah and Endgame, I went back over all the relevant lore. I talked to npcs, I read all the books in my POH, I rewatched cutscenes, I even read a couple of transcripts from quests where I couldn't remember all the beats. And the thing that struck me the most is how wildly inconsistent the RS story is. How certain characters can behave completely differently between writers, how the tone can shift so abruptly in the middle of a storyline, how dialogue in one place can be subtle, compelling, and fraught, while elsewhere it's almost laughable.
One of the biggest problems of the 6th Age is how, in the interest of making it accessible, it has downplayed and, often, outright ignored or contradicted existing lore (though more recent quests have definitely tried to ameliorate this). However, sometimes this laissez faire attitude seems to take root within the 6th Age, as writers fail to account for others' revelations and characterizations (Heart of Stone and Dishonour Among Thieves immediately come to mind). Major themes from TWW and DoC (directly relating to the 6th Age) seem to have been forgotten.
Now, I don't want to come off as overly critical. There has been some fantastic storytelling in recent quests, and when you're striving to create a compelling piece of content, you can't be expected to keep tabs on every piece of minutiae from your colleagues' projects.
But, what if there was someone who
could
be expected to do this?
03-Jan-2017 09:35:04
