Something like Pixar's "braintrust"?
They have QA testers who basically do the same thing, and they also have a group of trusted players who get to test content before it is released and give feedback on it (I think both Dulfy and Woodenpotatoes are in this category, I know Konig was for GW1, not sure if he still is for GW2?).
I should clarify that I was thinking more of the early concepts, creation of story beats, overarching themes, rather than those groups you said which seem to be more for ‘polish’ towards the end of the process.
Their internal process go through all of that step by step. They had a blog post during development that was all about iteration and how everything goes through a ton of people. So yes, everything is thoroughly checked throughout all phases of development.
I don’t know if it’s specifically looking into their story that they have written, I know I saw a tweet (ugh) last year from one of the writers (I think it was Peter Fries, he usually tweets about astronomy which is cool) mentioning the story structure of True Detective which can only be a good thing. I think they embraced the idea early on last year that their story structure/pacing wasn’t awesome and they looked specifically at television (which they are trying to emulate with the Living Story – this has been stated since the beginning) to see how to do it better. I’m a little concerned by this because GW2 is an MMO, not a TV show. There is so much more to an MMO experience than what you get from a non-interactive medium like TV. I can explore Tyria and my actions should matter in Tyria, I can’t interact with Westeros and anything that happens there is just something I witness.
People playing content before it’s released is far too late to change anything (talking about the previews, that’s marketing not feedback gathering). In some ways, the two week release schedule allows for them to make some changes, but like with Scarlet last year, they planned a year’s story in advance and you can’t change much of that once the ball starts rolling.
I’m not convinced the story goes through a lot of people, at least not in a critical “braintrust” kind of way. I’m sure most of the studio has input (it’s a group product – concept art, environment design, character design, scripting mechanics etc) but going off of what I’ve seen from the writers in the live streams, it really sounds like individual writers have a lot of autonomy when it comes to creating something. As long as it fits into the big picture of events that need to happen, the seem to be able to write how they want to write. I think that’s why the characters often come across as being the one tone.
I would imagine in the studio they
SHIREN THEY WHAT?
So after reading and lurking on this thread:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/lore/lore/Interesting-things-in-Scarlet-s-Room-Spoilers/first
It seems like maybe ArenaNet should consider working this into their lore pipeline, and add a few key people like Konig or whoever ArenaNet can trust outside of the company without spilling the beans to keep the lore consistent with itself. I’m reminded of George R. R. Martin (game of thrones writer) in one of his interviews where he regularly checks with someone like Konig for details and timelines just to keep his descriptions consistent.
I think the hard part is that in a video game, writers aren’t the only people who have input ingame. Map designers may have a lot of indirect influence, and what could be an artistic whim of the map artist can be interpreted as pre-meditated lore by players, and the writers have to shoehorn those creative decisions back into their lore somehow.