Cara Ellison is part of the writing team for this game

So with the thread on here wondering what Cara is doing now she's out of games journalism, and the amount of people backing her for a spot on the GB staff at one point or another, I thought you'd all be interested to know she's on the writing staff for this game.

I for one am excited to see what she does with this!

Awesome! I saw that she'd mentioned doing work on some game a few weeks (months?) ago. I guess this is what she was talking about.

This just makes me more excited for the game.

YES!!

So if I want to become a games writer, I shouldn't get a degree in writing, nor should I write anything in a book form. Instead, I should just write a blog and know how to network around the industry, got it.

She seems fun so I hope it works out for all involved.

Well huh, that's a pretty interesting turn of events. I wonder if she's freelancing, or just straight up at Arkane now. Hopefully it's not just a one off job.

That said, given this news, I have to wonder how far along the game actually is if it's still being written.

Oh wow, that's cool. Good for her!

Wow, you salty much? FYI she has a degree in English Lit, has a book coming out and has written for the Guardian.

#WritersGonnaWrite

Good for Cara! News about this sequel may actually push me to play the first Dishonored.

There's often more than one way to succeed in most careers especially if you can prove that you have the chops to do it. Recognize and seize any opportunities you can get (or straight up create your own!)

So your saying that Dishonored 2 could actually have an actual story instead of the nothing that was in Dishonored 1?

This is good, very good. Cara Ellison is a good writer.

Sweet! That is really cool. I am extra looking forward to it now.

Cara Ellison is a good writer and I expect she can do great in fiction, so this is exciting. Videogames writing is extremely hard because it's rarely the focus of development, I wish the Arkhane team works better at implementing the story into the game this time around so Cara can be creative in her work (and so we can have a better game)!

I think she has come on a bit late to really have an impact on what she is writing for the story. Dishonored 2 has been in the works for a least 3 years. Shawn Elliott hinted a few times at the existence of this game a couple of years ago since he works there now. If anything she is probably acting as an editor for now. I am basing this on the time she threw in the towel and where she is at now.

That's disappointing. I was upset about how they included yet another white protagonist because the writers obviously forgot that non-white people even existed (it's a common thing that white writers do), but now I know good people are working on it so it's probably okay.

Dishonored had a story and in fact there was an astounding amount of reading you could do on the world and backstory through all those books strewn around. What I think was bad game design for once was not making them audio diaries. The world was really interesting but having to suddenly stop in the middle of a level to read 3 pages of text about the history of whaling took you right out of the experience. Would have much rather preferred to have someone read that back to me as I slowly slink around the levels, but I also understand that VO is costly and time consuming, and they had a TON of those books.

That's cool, good for her.

A degree wouldn't hurt, and she has one, but yeah, generally showing that you can produce the content that people would want to hire you for and knowing people who are looking to hire is a decent way to get a job.

I beat and liked Dishonored but I could not tell you a single thing that happened in that game and it had one of the most abrupt, unsatisying endings I've ever seen in a game so the bar is set pretty low for them to improve on.

@humanity: Right, I had forgotten about the books, I was mostly thinking of the main narrative through-line for the first game which was incredibly weak and cliche.

You should play RAGE. Compared to that game, Dishonored's ending was Ulysses.

Also not to be nitpicky but is Cara Ellison writing this game, or is she one of the people helping out? I don't mean to discredit Cara in any way but I mean, there is surely a team of writers working for Arkane, it's not just one person??

@thephantomstranger It was a typical revenge story with some interesting twists along the way of "who dunnit" and why. I especially enjoyed the alternate methods of eliminating your targets which were always really creative and of the poetic justice variety - like abducting slave mine owners, altering their appearance and having them sent to work at their own slave mines.

You seem like a pretty confused person. Everything you wrote is also true. A degree is writing is definitely not going to get you a writing job. It can teach you some useful skills but is mostly useless. Anyone hiring for a writing job is looking for previously published work and writing samples and could care less if you have a degree. Also, the skills required for writing a book and the skills required for writing a game collaboratively are completely different.

So yeah. If you want a job as a writer, start writing and making connections.

Good for her! I have no idea how much change she can effect this late in the game, but I'd love to see what she can do.

@brodehouse:I can no longer tell whether you are being sarcastic or serious.

She's part of the writing staff. I'd assume there are a few people working on it, so yeah maybe saying she's writing the game is misleading. Would "Cara Ellison is part of the writing team for this game" be a better thread title you think? Can I even edit it?

I think that Dishonored was a pretty amazing game. It had a great setting and the ability to fulfill the goals in game with different ways was amazing. Also the ending depends largely on the choiches that you make in the game. If you go through the game killing people that will result in the so called bad ending. On the other hand by minimizing the deaths you will get a much better ending.

Also considering that you can play as a female in this game it is good that they have a woman (women?) in their writing staff. Doenst mean that men cant write believable women characters but having an actual women helps a lot in that.

Cool!

@planetfunksquad: You can edit thread titles sure. I don't mean to be a jerk or anything, I just thought you know, other folk should get their dues as well. Unless she is the lead writer in which case sure, all the power to her!

I'm indifferent to Cara, but I hope she does an awesome job. That's really cool.

@humanity said:

Yeah, she mentioned on Twitter that she's one of five narrative designers so definitely not the only one.

This is super cool! Hopefully her writing comes through in the game.

@humanity: Oh, believe me, I've played Rage. And despite my problems with the story, I really did enjoy Dishonored a lot and I thought the actual world was really interesting. But Rage...man, that game...It's not good.

@humanity: No, I know you weren't being a jerk. You're right, there are other people on the team and she's probably come to the project late, I don't wanna devalue the rest of the writers. I'll change the title now.

Based on here S.EXE column, I assume this is going to be the sexiest Dishonored yet.

This isn't what this thread is about, but man, I disagree. Rage wasn't a great game, but I thought it was good. It had problems, but man, that combat was super fun (the other stuff around it? not so great).

Well that's awesome!

Hopefully the main story is more interesting this time around.

@thevgamer said:

Right now, I only ask that he/she know games.

You only need to look at the last couple Call of Duty games to see the results of "big screenwriter" names (that likely never played anything newer than Mario) being associated with writing games (Activision made a big deal of having an Oscar winner writer work on Ghost).

It was neat, I liked it. Featured a nice, albeit simple message about the corrupting influence of power, despite a pretty obvious twist.

Also had a nice Ravenholm-like moment, where the protagonist finally escapes from a dark place overcome by death to be almost immediately thrown back into the thick of things.

I do like that some of the lore was not purposefully filled in, so there should be room for some revelations in 2, especially more relating to the nature of The Outsider.

I like what I hear.

I'll go ahead and assume she's part of a team of contract writers working on incidental materials, like lore and notes and other stuff in the environment you can read. I'm playing through Dragon Age Inquisition right now and there's an incredible amount of that kind of writing; stands to reason that an open world game like DA:I or Dishonored would get in a few extra talented writers to produce a lot of it.

(Edit: And, oh yeah, anyone being insulting or dismissive will be moderated. The rules still apply to guests/non-staff.)

@meatball: The actual shooting in Rage was good, as you would expect from an id game. But what completely ruined it for me was the save system. You would go into these instanced corridor shooter levels, which was a cool idea for a open world game, but there was no checkpoints (or a limited amount, I don't remember how the system worked exactly) so you either needed to constantly save manually or go all the way back to the beginning of these fairly lengthy levels.

But yeah, Dishonored. Cool game.

Interesting. The only sample of her existing game writing I actually know is this weird club dating text adventure. That didn't do a whole lot for me. Her s.exe column on RPS has good entries however. I'll be interested in seeing how she does with this project. Might prove quite difficult to identify what parts are actually written by her though since it's a team and credits usually don't get that specific.

Well she's good at the gonzo thing, yet to be seen if she can do fiction well.

Good for her.

Cool!

"Man, it was super weird when Dishonored 2 had all that dialogue about pea soup and sex in video games. Seemed a little meta"

@planetfunksquad: Thats awesome, I didn't want to come off weird and that is exactly what I was getting at. It's exciting news since it's always good to get more female writers in these sort of games with their own unique perspectives!

"And that one quest line where the dialog was nothin but lyrics lifted from Drake songs struck me as being quite odd at first, but it actually turned out to be my favorite quest line in the whole game."

A little weird to see someone with a huge catalogue of prose work jumping right into fiction, but I guess if Greg Kasavin can do it so well, why not Cara?