If you’re an old-school CRPG fan back in the 90s and 2000s, the name Chris Avellone should be familiar to you. He’s done the story and narrative for the best and/or memorable ones- Planescape: Torment, Alpha Protocol, Knights of the Old Republic 2, Fallout 2, and Fallout New Vegas. Those games were gripping and engrossing, bugs be damned, because of their tightly-woven narrative and consequences of choice.

Chris Avellone aims to do that with the upcoming Dying Light sequel, and wishes to take the story bits he’s done in past CRPGs and put it in a mainstream action adventure game. In fact, according to a VG247 interview, Chris has been on the Dying Light 2 project since its planning phase.

Here are more tidbits from the interview:

• His talent came from pen-and-paper RPGs and D&D, just like most writers and game designers in this line of work. Avellone headed up RPG sessions with friends, taking on the role of gamesmaster before leading them on a journey. “Working in video games is a lot like being a virtual gamemaster,” Chris said. “Over time – and a whole mess of mistakes later – I made attempts to refine my gamemaster skills to adjust to the players.”
• Avellone is on the writing team alongside Karolina Stachraya. If you loved the Bloody Baron storyline in The Witcher 3, you’ll love Dying Light 2 because Karolina did that storyline.
• Avellone plans to fix disparate story quests and plot threads that do not go anywhere. “I’ve done a lot of branching storylines, branching dialogues, and a variety of reactive events and different endings in most of the titles I’ve worked on, so to be able to apply that to an open-world space like Dying Light 2 is a fun challenge. Because I’ve had a chance to work on extremely reactive games, I know some of the best techniques to organise the flow of the plot and characters to account for a wide variety of actions.”
• At the same time Techland wants to make the Dying Light 2 world a lot more reactive to its surroundings and landscape. “We have new AI in the game, and it will react to different situations,” creative director Adrian Ciszewski explains. “For example, AI in Dying Light 2 can ‘sense’ if the place or the situation they find themselves in is dangerous. And if so, they can make a decision to get away from that danger.”

Check out the full story here; it’s quite an awesome read if you’re into storytelling.