BioWare Blog: How to Score a Writing Job, Part One
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First things first: what does a writer do? Well, I can tell you honestly that there isn't a lot of call for dedicated writers in the game industry. There are only a handful of companies that actually have such a beast, and BioWare no doubt has the greatest chunk of them. Most other companies, I would suspect, either have people who wear various hats or outsource any time they need actual writing to be done. We do a little of both, ourselves. There was a time when the designers wore more than one hat out of necessity, but as BioWare has gotten larger we've begun to specialize within the design group. The writers are the people who do the quest design and a great portion of the story and level concepting, as well as all of the dialogue writing (which takes up the vast portion of our time).
A level designer, meanwhile, is someone whose focus is on setting up the actual layout of a given level. This is often almost as much of an art-related task as it is design. System designers are the people who put together the actual gameplay systems, such as spellcasting or combat. Cinematic designers are the people who put together the cutscenes, and these days are also the people who retouch cinematic dialogue to make it have more impact. Technical designers, meanwhile, get to be the people responsible for putting it all together and making it actually work. They populate the levels, balance the combats, and they do all the scripting to make the plots go.
