Are video game script writers hampered in any way?
Iain: I found the experience of writing for Killzone 2 to be fulfilling, but I also found a number of challenges. The vast majority of the dialogue I wrote were one liners that would be spoken by a random ISA or Helghast soldier when he had to reload, when he was shot at, when he wounded an enemy, when he saw a grenade and so on. The VAST majority of it. The hard part about this is that when you come to write it you have no idea of the context. You won’t know who’s saying it, where he is, who he’s speaking to, whether it’s raining or not and so on. Battle cries were written without knowing how long the battle had been raging already, who was winning and whether the crier was outnumbered and near death, or leading a glorious counter charge. Screenwriting for movies, of course, is painstakingly precise – each line delivered at a precise place and time, and hand-crafted for the character speaking it. This represents a huge challenge. There is also the fact that the game does without dialo
