When you get a bunch of writers together, what do we talk about? Characters, of course. (Also coffee and the overuse of the semicolon.) At Penny Arcade Expo this year we gave TERA fans a chance to peek behind the curtain and get a little taste of what it’s like to be a writer at En Masse Entertainment.
The overall theme was “Emotional Rewards Through Storytelling”—an unofficial motto for the writing team. After a quick look at the many kinds of writing you’ll find in TERA, everyone in the room got to collaborate on the creation of a character for the game. In short, it was an audience-participation version of the exercises that the En Masse writers do in front of the white board every day.
Working together, TERA community members and the En Masse writers created a questline involving a soldier who’s stationed at the edge of a precipice—a precipice she finds far more terrifying than the enemies she fights on a daily basis. Aided by writer Fran Stewart’s improv-acting chops, we duplicated our creative process in front of an enthusiastic audience. (The open bar helped.
We’ve got all kinds of new things going on today at TERA-online! In addition to launching our new site with new lore and updated materials, we’re pleased to announce the launch of our long-awaited blog.
We’re not calling it a developer blog because we plan to use it for more than just developer posts. We’ve got a lot going on at En Masse—a massive Westernization effort by our writers, community events, updates from our producers here in Seattle and Korea—in short, all kinds of things we want to talk to you about. This blog will serve as our soapbox.
We have some content to help get the party started, but if you want to hear about anything in particular, hit us up in the comments. We always look forward to your thoughts on what we write—we plan to put a lot of time into this, so we hope you get a lot out of it!