Chris Avellone
Arcane
Short answer: Role: Yes. Studio: Nothing new to report. My writing: That's very kind, thank you, but keep reading. Random Name in Random Game: It may seem random, but many such seeds have been planted and they're ready when they're ready. There's also a reason I take challenges like that (below).
Long answer: Someone else asked something similar to your question, but I can’t find their post, but I’ll do the initial response to yours instead – so even when being lead designer/writer even on a DLC, you don’t write everything. Granted, you can steer the ship, but the drawback is usually the more you steer the ship, the less you write.
The only time I felt like I wrote in a manner I think you’re expressing that I should return to/do again is Torment, and maybe the FNV DLCs (K2 was too haphazard to count, imo – there was a skeleton there, but barely time for any organs, and I take the blame for that and learned from it). I didn’t write any of those games by myself. I’d also argue that my work on a number of these projects wasn’t any good, which made me take a step back and realize there’s something wrong with my process as well as the process itself. I’m happy if older works end up being the best thing I’ve ever done, but I wouldn’t be content with that if I didn’t try to get better, then do something better.
When I work on a title, I do more than concept work (but I’m not going to try to convince anyone otherwise) and I’ve never taken a job that’s solely “I’ll just review this,” there’s always content and system work involved, whether Prey, Divinity, Wasteland, Burden of Command, Kingmaker, or Into the Breach – and those are just the ones announced. I rarely do any pre-production work, it’s usually early production, production, or late production. With Into the Breach, I did the majority of the writing (Matthew, the programmer of the duo wrote Zenith and parts of Dewey Alms and he and Justin also worked with me on the archetypes for the pilots and lore), I wrote a lot of the background lore and corporation work, did the reactivity scripting, and other production work all the way to the end/bug fixing/QA, etc. I wasn’t in pre-production for ITB. While it’s a small game by comparison to other games I’ve worked on, I did work on it for 3 years, so sometimes it takes time for things to get announced. It also taught me a studio of two (with some contractors, sure) can get a lot of work done, turn out a quality product, and still declare their release date as "when it's ready," which is music to my ears.
So yes, even if I’m not always steering the ship (although sometimes I am), I do think taking some time to branch out and learn to be a better writer – both game-wise and genre-wise - is a good investment. That means learning new tools, new production methods, working with more writers and developers, working in brand-new IPs as well as established franchises (established franchises can inform your writing in interesting ways, even if you don’t “own” the world), working in other genres (including non-RPGs), and doing other types of design vs. just writing. It means a lot of new mistakes along the way, but that's fine - it just hopefully means you won't make those same mistakes in the future, so best to get them out of the way as quickly as possible.
f.i. Would anyone dared say "no" to you if you told them "I'm gonna be lead writer/designer on this" back in 2012? :D
