Stormwaltz 2016 Q&A/Question 33
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Question 33: Identity of the Imperator
Q: Who/what was the Imperator, the leader of the Virindi kingdom? Was it supposed to be a known Virindi from AC1’s lore, or was it a new character?
A: When I left in 2002, it hadn't been decided.
It's important to understand the difference in content processes between the two games. AC1's story was built from the bottom up, haphazardly. Though there was a background to inspire and pull details from, it existed as documents on a server, divorced from the design of gameplay systems. In practice individual content developers added small details that eventually piled up into the greater whole.
There's no particular lore to the original magic system of reagents, for example. It was just an interesting mechanic. Likewise there was no overarching plan to AC1's pre-launch content design. When people had spare time they'd crack open the worldbuilding tools, pick a spot on the landscape or an empty dungeon template, and slap things together to see what worked - what looked interesting.
AC2's story was built top-down, with structural goals and content approaches determined at an extremely high level of the company, and lore rationalizations left for content developers to work out later -- which is the way it normally works in game development. AC1 was made by a startup full of recent college grads shipping their first game and playing it by ear in every imaginable way.
There was a desire to make the story of AC2 more intuitive and understandable. AC1's lore was and is convoluted, bizarre, full of greeble-y details, and often deliberately built at a tangent to conventional fantasy tropes.
If I had the skills I do now, I could have boiled AC1's story down to digestible trope-spaces. Fourteen years ago I thought nearly every detail was important, so when someone asked me, "what's the story?" I'd vomit up a wall of text and made-up names, and they'd walk away shaking their head.
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Chris "Stormwaltz" L'Etoile |