Larian Studios Forums Divine Divinity (English) General :sigh:

I don't think anyone works just at work anymore. Propriatary or not, if someone is intent on trying to sell company secrets (such as a game engine), it wouldn't be that hard for them to leave the office with a 20gb flash drive. So, while I have no doubt that many companies use that argument (not just Larian, I'm talking about the entire corporate mentality many game people have towards videogames), it's just not that great of an argument to justify the current infrastructure. Laws against Corporate Espionage (which is what you're discussing, the theft of secret corporate data), are very real and carry very heavy sentences. I believe it's the laws about Corporate Espionage which are the real security measure here, not being at a specific work place.


But, let's put that debate aside, a continuity/story editor really does not need to "playtest" That function comes after the primary implementation of all the quests. A Lead Continuity/Story Editor just makes sure that the daily reports of "what was done" "what module was implemented" that stuff is all paperwork that is just fact checked against the Continuity Tree.

See I think the big problem here is the Continuity/Story Editory is constantly being delegated between multiple people, these people pay very little attention to it because they have "a real job" that deals with "heavy aspects of the game implementation." Because of this they don't have the time or energy or whatever to sit through pages of daily or reports, double checking the timeline progression, and then going back to say: "Hey, bud, you need to double check the initialization of this area. Make sure that this door is open after X Meeting. or Make sure that response Y is still available after event X."

It's not a "Heavy Duty" job, that's why so few companies actually advertise for it. It's just paperwork! It's "grading" the progress of the programming! It's got nothing to do with anything on the computer! It's not even classifiable as "data entry". Because of this seemingly worthless, least important job, companies routinely produce games with "unforseen" loopholes or "bugs" or "oops I got screwed out of the ending because somebody forgot to make sure that the programmers didn't get rid of X line of text!"



For instance, right now I need to figure out how to either get back into Corima's (sp?) basement, or get the herb item from a past save game because someone forgot to remind the programmer to either:

A. make it impossible for the player to accidently drop items in the basement.
or
B. make sure the player could go BACK into the basement if they accidently dropped a game important item.

A simple fact checking editor would've been able to catch it long before that particular section of the programming module was finalized.



:sigh: anyway. It's not just Larian which has had this problem. Many, many other games have had this problem, and I believe it's because nobody thinks that particular job is of any importance.

Companies need to take a hint from the Movie Industry. The Movie Industry actually has Continuity Editors to sit beside regular editors to make sure they don't splice the wrong frame of film with another frame of film despite how much cooler it may look.


edit: btw I fixed my corinna problem ^_^