Editing Stormwaltz 2016 Q&A/Full Q&A (section)

== Question 33: Identity of the Imperator ==
{{Turbine Developer
|      Date = September, 2016
|      Link = '''No'''
|  Question = Who/what was the Imperator, the leader of the Virindi kingdom? Was it supposed to be a known Virindi from AC1’s lore, or was it a new character?
|      Text =
When I left in 2002, it hadn't been decided.
<br /><br />
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.
<br /><br />
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''.
<br /><br />
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.
<br /><br />
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.
<br /><br />
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.
| Developer = [[Turbine Developers#Chris "Stormwaltz" L'Etoile|Chris "Stormwaltz" L'Etoile]]
}}