Pathfinder: Kingmaker Turns to a Veteran to Bring Its World to Life
If you’re familiar with role-playing games, you probably know that Pathfinder has been around in the tabletop realm for quite some time. But when it came time to make the leap into video games, Owlcat Games realized they need to create a story that successfully brings the world to life. For this reason, they teamed up with Chris Avellone, who designed some of the most memorable video game stories, from classics like Planescape: Torment to Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II – The Sith Lords and Fallout: New Vegas.
“The way we approach it is, when you have a franchise, you sort of want to immerse yourself in it actually before you do any heavy lifting with the tighter plot,” Avellone said in a recent Gamespot interview. “You’re like, ‘Okay, what are the stories that have already been told? What’s the feel of this franchise?'”
“After you read like 30, 40, 300 books, you have the mindset,” he continued. “The same thing’s true with Star Wars. When we were doing Star Wars, I read all the Young Jedi books, I watched all the movies again, I watched the Star Wars Christmas special. Once you get all that information, it’s all in your head. You’re like, ‘Okay, well, now when I propose stuff to LucasArts, I have this background and I know everything a specific character did.’ And the best part is when you can propose those ideas.”
Avellone even provided a specific example of when his experience in the field and familiarity with the stories has helped him.
“Like in KOTOR 2, there was one example,” he said. “We have this companion that was a Wookie slaver, and that’s unusual. Our producer pushed back and he was like, ‘I’m sorry, that’s just completely inconsistent with the franchise. Wookies just aren’t slavers, they’re enslaved all the time.’ and I responded, ‘Well, in Young Jedi book #13, there’s a whole character arc involving this one Wookie as a slaver.’ The producer went quiet and was like, ‘All right, I guess it’s approved.'”
“But we have that information, we know the license, they’ll respect you more and they have fewer questions about what you submit to them. I think we got five or six comments in the KOTOR 2 storyline, and that’s because we just took the time to make sure that we’d done our research on the license. And if there was ever an issue, we could discuss it and make our case. They’re like, ‘Well, we just trust you now.’ It’s cool.”
Pathfinder: Kingmaker is set for release on PC and Mac on September 25, 2018.