On the day of The Elder Scrolls Online's release, Wired.co.uk meets the man with one of the most interesting jobs in the business.
Is your job title "Loremaster"? It probably isn't. You probably didn't also oversee the creation of tens of thousands of unique characters that populate a certain fantasy game, devise how their cultures should work and what they think about religion.
Lawrence Schick did.
His official role is Loremaster. It's not a colloquialism. He works at Zenimax Online and is in charge of one of the most interesting aspects of building a game as vast as The Elder Scrolls Online, the gigantic multiplayer fantasy role-playing adventure game that went on sale today after a seven-year development period. "I've been working on this title almost five years," Shick tells Wired.co.uk. "We have almost 40,000 named NPCs [characters] in the game and nearly every one of them has something to say to you, and so it's important we understand where they come from. What's their culture? What's their society? Who are these people?
They're not generic fantasy people; they are very specific to Tamriel."
Welcome to Tamriel
Tamriel is the continent upon which The Elder Scrolls is set -- a land familiar to anyone who has played previous single-player Elder Scrolls games, such as Skyrim, Oblivion or
For the unfamiliar, think Tolkien's Middle Earth and imagine it was explorable in a video game. It's a continent vast enough that each game was set in just one of its numerous countries (Skyrim itself being just one of those).
That has only become larger in The Elder Scrolls Online, which allows the exploration of the entire continent.
The game's stories are told in a non-linear fashion, which means exploration is key -- discover a place, learn its lore, meet its people, accept their quests and move their personal stories forward. Better still, do so with real-life friends or complete strangers; the game is online-only, like any other multiplayer RPG, and the thousands of people you will see exploring territories around you are real people. Team up with them, kill them, follow them back to their homeland and steal their swords -- or give them yours. It's an open world; do what you want.
The game involves frequent battles for those who thrive on fantasy combat (with over 40 million combinations of weapon), and for intrepid explorers the world is littered with over 60 million individual collectible items. But for the story-lovers, over 2,000 unique in-game books have been written and left around Tamriel's countries and zones to be unearthed and read, and that poses a unique problem for the Loremaster. "The books are my particular concern," Schick says. "I've written almost 200 of them. There are a whole lot of other books that were written because I said to someone on the writing team
[that they] need a book on this, this, and this. "Every zone has a book budget for the lore books, either general about the region; or specific, about a point of interest. And then there are plenty of single-purpose books that are quest related."
A book budget? "Yes. Budget in that there must be a certain number of lore books in a region to provide context for the area.
Every design team has a writer-designer attached to it who is responsible for storytelling. Those writer-designers typically write the lore books for the regions. [...] In most cases I have a look at them at some point -- especially if they have some sort of broad lore concern, I need to look at it to make sure we're on the same page."
Speaking lessons
Aside from ensuring the content of the lore is consistent, Schick has another fascinating role that has nothing to do with books. "I come up with the speech guidelines for each race and culture, and how they pronounce things and what they say. What kind of references do they put in their speech? What gods do they swear to and what's sacred to them, and what's profane?"
The Elder Scrolls Online has some well-known actors voicing the characters for its 3,000 quests and story lines. John Cleese, Bill Nighy, Michael Gambon, Kate Beckinsale and many more all make major appearances. "I record pronunciations for every proper name in the game; I write all of the pronunciation guides for the [voice actors], for all of the races. It's set up so that when they're in the studio the director can click on any name that's a proper name and it will play my pronunciation of it so the actor knows how to pronounce it."
Like most RPGs, The Elder Scrolls has a variety of races and peoples, such as the human Nords of Skyrim or the Dark Elves of Morrowind, to the anthropomorphised reptilian Argonians and the Khajiit -- Tamriel's cat people. They're all different.
Some hate or fear each other. There's a lot of death. And it's been this way for a very long time in previous Elder Scrolls games. "We have a world setting that has 20 years of rich background," says Schick. "It was important to make sure that when we built this game, which quantitatively is the biggest one in the series, that we maintained the tone and stick with the precedents that were set before in the single-player games."
The Elder Scrolls Online is set hundreds of years before the other games in the series. Is it not a monumental challenge to have to figure out how to build on such a vast quantity of complex existing lore with these characters and their cultural histories? "It becomes really delightful to just wallow in that and find synergies and cross connections that are useful for the stories that we're telling," Schick says. "And also, because we are many centuries before the stories in those games were told, we have found ways to set up those stories -- telling history of the cultures and peoples that culminate in the stories of
Oblivion and Morrowind and Skyrim. "On the other hand there's taking the cultures that have not received a lot of attention in previous lore, such as the Argonians of Blackmarsh, the Khajiit, the Bosmer of Valenwood, and taking the hints and pieces of pre-existing lore of previous Elder Scrolls games and rounding those out and connecting the dots, and bringing those areas to life in a new way. That's a different kind of fun."
Keeping track of history
The writing staff for this game is around a dozen, so collaboration is essential. "We've got whiteboards everywhere covered with notes and drawings and arrows connecting things, and we do a lot of brainstorming," Schick says. "It's not like people at the top are saying 'it's going to be like this, this and this'; it's more like 'we want generally to have this kind of fun here, this is the kind of area you're going to build, now go and figure out what's there'. So you get the artists and level designers and encounter designers and writers and quest designers and concept artists and lore guys, and we all sit down and bang it out."
How do you keep track of all that thinking? What if a whiteboard gets rubbed out? "We maintain an internal wiki," says Schick. "The important thing is to get everything memorialised in the wiki where people can find it. When you're building an area and you're telling stories and writing quests, characters just start to emerge. People start to reuse them. It's up to the writer-designers to maintain lists of recurring characters, which can then be passed off into different areas and reused by other teams. Then our recurring characters become memorable and players start to recognise them.
That's done by all of the designers and it's my job to define, initially at least, the high-profile characters -- the alliance leaders, the guild leaders -- and then the writer-designers and quest designers take them and run with them, and they become fully rounded in time."
But how does one get to become the Loremaster? Schick himself has been working in the role-playing industry since the 70s. He began working on early Dungeons & Dragons products with the late Gary Gygax, co-creator of D&D. "I started out in paper RPGs, I was one of the first guys to go from paper gaming to video gaming. I've been bouncing around the business doing RPGs for 30 years or so."
This long heritage, he explains, has helped inspire his and others' work crafting the extensive world available in The Elder Scrolls Online. "Like most of the lead designers on the single-player games, I and some of the other designers here have deep roots in early Dungeons & Dragons world settings," he says. "Most of us are old-school D&D guys. Most of us have had a lot of experience working with [...] fantasy realms and settings, things that were done for
D&D and other fantasy RPGs like Runequest. We have that collaborative world-building experience to draw upon."
Schick highlighted that this involvement in or knowledge of RPGs, while not a prerequisite for employment, is certainly something that comes up in interviews for new positions. "When we interview people to work at Zenimax Online, one of the important questions we ask is 'are you an Elder Scrolls fan?'" he says. "We are not here to make a generic fantasy game; we are all here in this studio to make an Elder Scrolls MMO. That's our passion. We sincerely hope that the fans of the series will find themselves in a comfortable place when they're playing our game, that they'll recognise that this is the same world they have come to know and that we are dedicated to making it have that tone and feeling, because that's what we're here for."
Is there anything fans might not recognise? Give us a scoop! "We're going to be showing people parts of Oblivion [as seen in the game of the same name] they've never seen before."
The Elder Scrolls Online is on sale now and requires a monthly subscription fee to play after the included trial period expires.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
