| The Loremasters, How developers keep their fictions straight | |
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| (link) | |
| Medium/Format | Print Magazine |
| Date | November 2009 |
| Interviewee(s) | Kurt Kuhlmann |
| Hosted By | Game Informer |
All the organization in the world can't hold back Murphy's Law, but sometimes companies find a playful way to deal with narrative discrepancies. "One of the main things we've always done with Elder Scrolls is to maintain deniability," explains Kurt Kuhlmann, senior game designer at Bethesda Softworks. “As long as the lore is presented from the point of view of someone within the fictional world, it's okay for someone else from within the world to have a different point of view. As soon as we step outside the game and say ‘This is actually true,’ it's much harder to reconcile any contradictions."
A classic example of this in the Elder Scrolls lore is referred to as the "Dragon Break." During development of Morrowind, the writers at Bethesda noticed a gap in their timeline. Nothing happened historically over a period of over 1,000 years. Details of the world's history jumped from the year 1190 to the year 2260, when the later date likely should have been 1260. The gap was likely the result of a typo that happened when someone input dates on Bethesda's internal timeline. But before the typo was discovered, the game's fiction had already expanded past the point of making a simple fix. Events and details taking place after 2260 had already been established, so altering the world's chronology would have been a massive headache. The solution? Maintain deniability.
"One of the designers decided to jump on that and started writing about the Dragon Break — an event where a group of religious fanatics actually 'broke time' through some esoteric ritual,” Kuhlmann explains. “I responded with another in-game book, The Dragon Break Reconsidered [sic], which explained away the lost 1,200 years as a simple error in interpreting ancient records." Which of these explanations is true Elder Scrolls lore? Bethesda has never officially specified, and likely never will.
Bethesda Softworks only recently discovered the nuances of this process with its upcoming novel based on the Elder Scrolls universe, The Infernal City by Greg Keyes. Keyes is a veteran author who achieved some popularity with his steampunk series The Age of Unreason, and even has experience working in established franchises like Star Wars and Babylon 5. However, even before he could put pen to paper, Bethesda spent time making sure he understood its fiction. "We gave him access to our internal lore website, so he had access to unpublished, secret lore," Kuhlmann explains. *He also played through Oblivion several times to get the actual experience of how we've presented Tamriel in the game as opposed to written lore."
Bethesda also pointed Keyes toward well-organized fan sites like The Imperial Library and UESP. The author then had to submit a series of treatments for the company to page through before it settled on a story about a mysterious floating city that kills anyone who falls under its shadow.
"Greg stumped me a few times with some really esoteric questions that I had to do some digging to answer," Kuhlmann says in reference to helping the author research. "One I remember was а question about the correct name for the original Elven language. I had to look that one up. We also got into a discussion about the metaphysical significance of the White-Gold Tower in Cyrodiil, which took me into some of the dustier corners of our lore."
The end result of all this effort is hopefully a more faithful product. In addition to extending a brand's recognition and bringing in some extra profit, extending a video game's story into books, comics, and even toys helps fans embrace the property in new ways, creating a richer, more intimate relationship with its characters and world.