You guys were involved in the casting process as well, working with John Schimmel?
TL;DRThe question about casting goes mostly unanswered; they instead discuss Chris Roberts wanting small, optional character moments that reveal people gradually rather than dumping their backstory on the player.
But I guess just to go back about writing Squadron and coming on the project, and I cannot wait for everyone to get to experience this, but as far as the direction from Chris, allowing us to give these hopefully meaningful small moments that, I think, it's not completely unique in games, but I think it is still special when you can come across it, where it's just people kind of being people, and these small little things for the player to discover, and that he was excited about that and wanted more of that.
Well, and also, one of the big kind of rules that we were given when approaching this stuff was that he intentionally did not want, and again, I understand the methodology behind it, what kind of falls into sort of a general video game trope of, you walk up to a character, you poke the button, and they just kind of vomit their life story out to you, so you understand why you need to go get those 20 wolf hearts or whatever. Like, my family's dead, and oh, I'm so sad.
It's tough. You've got like five lines to have the player be able to understand everything about this person.
But he was like, I don't want that. I want this to kind of onion-skin it. So the players need to kind of spend time around these people if they want to learn what's going on. So it opened up a lot of fun doors, and again, the fact that we had to accommodate for a full functioning crew, that you could just place these little vignettes and moments scattered around the ship of just people being people.
And we don't force it on... hopefully the players, if they're not interested in diving deeper into the narrative, then they can just run past it, and it's fine.
You know there are going to be those streamers when the time comes who just go in a straight line, don't interact with them, just go from one mission to the next mission, just fight, finish.
Well, and I also like the fact that we accommodate for that. That to me is kind of a nice thing.
That you'll still have a deep, hopefully meaningful experience, even if you're like, screw all these NPCs, I don't care about them, I'm here to shoot stuff.