When I first started working on this story arc, I thought Darbin was weaselly and annoying, and I relished the moments where players can make snide remarks to him or even punch him in the face (to make him a more convincing looking prisoner). But as I worked to breathe more life into the character, I found I liked him more and more. I laughed aloud as he confessed to having to awkwardly hug a Jedi Master to steal an access code. I shared in his pride as he congratulated himself on having kept his traitorous identity from the Green Jedi. I started to see him almost as comic relief in the middle of a war zone. By the time I finished working on the world narrative arc for Corellia, I had been converted. I went from always choosing to kill Darbin, to never choosing to kill Darbin.

When the dialogue wheel comes up for players to choose what they want to say, a random number is generated, and the player with the highest roll becomes the speaker. This creates a number of possibilities that need to be accounted for.

First, we don’t know how many players are currently playing, and if they are fewer than four, do any of the players have their companions with them? These sort of scenes need to account for all of these options, and the cameras which may or may not be filming them, adjusted accordingly.

Next, supposing we have decided that one of the players is going to be the one to speak, we don’t know if they are player one, two, three, or four. Also, we don’t know if they’re tall, short, normal, fat, skinny, male, or female. For every shot of the player, for each player it might be, we must script cameras that will be properly chosen, and then that will redirect to scale for whichever body type the player has chosen for themselves. This way if player three is the one speaking the line, and player three is a super huge dude, we will see the camera adjusted for player three to be a super huge dude when the line plays. More elaborate scenes called for more elaborate work. In some cases, camera framing changes radically to include additional players if they’re present, or might adapt if one of the players in the shot happens to be a less than ideal size for the shot. This attention to detail leads to more seamless playback that feels more naturally cinematic, and more immersive to players both from a gameplay and film perspective.

Now, this is fairly simple for standard back and forth dialogue, but our system allowed for even more customization. In the clip featured above, when the Sith warrior “wins” the dialogue vote and kills Darbin, they use a lightsaber to kill him. But what if you’re a bounty hunter, or an imperial agent? Sith inquisitors tend to not use their lightsabers much, either. Thankfully, we could tailor the player’s experience so that the scene can play out differently for any of these class (or even sometimes gender) discrepancies. In this scene, for all other classes, Darbin flees before being struck down with a large arc of force lightning, or shot if the player is one of the other ranged classes. It breaks my heart every time.