Diana Flindt
Splash Damage
Diana is a game writer and narrative designer who specialises in story for live games. She joined Splash Damage as a narrative designer in 2022, having started her career in QA on Elite: Dangerous (Frontier Developments) and then moving into quest design and writing for the MMO-RPG RuneScape 3 (Jagex). In her spare time she writes experimental interactive fiction and sci-fi and fantasy novels.
Diana Flindt is speaking at the following session/s
How to End the World: A Post-mortem of RuneScape 3’s 2022 Season Finale
The live MMO-RPG Runescape 3 created an epic high-fantasy story throughout its 2021/22 season of content, the Elder God Wars. The universe eaters were awake and coming to kill us all - and only our players can stop them. The conflict culminated in the 2022 grandmaster quest, Extinction. I was lead developer and main writer for this quest while a junior developer at the time. In this talk I will share what went wrong, what went right, and lessons learned from building an end-of-the-world story in a live game. I will highlight the unique narrative challenges of trying to create a satisfying ending in an ongoing live game, the importance of scoping out the consequences of your stories, how to get players to care about high-stakes conflict, and how to learn from hostile player reception.
Session Takeaway
- How storytelling in live games is fundamentally different to storytelling in standalone titles, and how to leverage that.
- How to avoid some common pitfalls when creating stories for live games.
- How to learn from players not liking your stories.
Session speakers
