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| - AC2's story was built top-down, with structural goals and content approaches determined at an extremely high level of the company, and lore rationalizations left for content developers to work out later -- which is the way it normally works in game development. AC1 was made by a startup full of recent college grads shipping their first game and playing it by ear in every imaginable way.
- When I left in 2002, it hadn't been decided.
- If I had the skills I do now, I could have boiled AC1's story down to digestible trope-spaces. Fourteen years ago I thought nearly every detail was important, so when someone asked me, "what's the story?" I'd vomit up a wall of text and made-up names, and they'd walk away shaking their head.
- There was a desire to make the story of AC2 more intuitive and understandable. AC1's lore was and is convoluted, bizarre, full of greeble-y details, and often deliberately built at a tangent to conventional fantasy tropes.
- It's important to understand the difference in content processes between the two games. AC1's story was built from the bottom up, haphazardly. Though there was a background to inspire and pull details from, it existed as documents on a server, divorced from the design of gameplay systems. In practice individual content developers added small details that eventually piled up into the greater whole.
- There's no particular lore to the original magic system of reagents, for example. It was just an interesting mechanic. Likewise there was no overarching plan to AC1's pre-launch content design. When people had spare time they'd crack open the worldbuilding tools, pick a spot on the landscape or an empty dungeon template, and slap things together to see what worked - what looked interesting.
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