Story driven MMOs
I recently received an email from one of my readers, Gareld, that really gave me the opportunity to think about why we play MMOs. It also so happens that this topic has been under quite a bit of discussion due to Bioware’s impending “The Old Republic” and 38 Studio’s Copernicus Project. Gerald basically indicated that we tend to play MMOs for the story and the engagement and not just for raw numbers. It was an interesting point.
Now, what really interests us when we are playing an MMO? The story behind the MMO. If playing an MMO was all about numbers we would not be spending so much time creating characters and designing such complex universes. We would be playing chess or monopoly. When we go kill that huge dragon we feel like we are killing something epic, not just pixels.
This is a point that I have made myself in the past. We are most certainly just playing a game but it can frequently feel like a lot more than that. An MMO character is almost an extension of ourselves and we look to leave a lasting mark in our fantasy worlds, much like we do in our real ones. I never cared too much about the loot an uber mob dropped. My guild and I were more concerned about winning. The actual act of executing a strategy and defeating a monster was so important. This, in turn, created a story for us to tell and be proud of. We created our own lore and stories. These days, however, the designers of our favorite MMOs want to take story in a different direction. They want our experience to be somewhat like a single player RPG. Using TOR as an example, we do know that each class will have a rich experience that is unique. Playing through the game multiple times will probably be quite compelling. It is obviously too soon to tell but it sounds like an interesting idea.
Shifting from the idea of an individualized story experience we can also look forward to an MMO design that might focus more on the world itself. We know that Copernicus has a massive history written and intends to focus heavily on telling the story of the world. Players will live in it and learn about the lore, heroes and history through quests and a multitude of tie in products. Much like the original EverQuest, 38’s product will feel alive.
Gareld takes a moment to contemplate this and notes that to date the story behind MMOs and the math that goes along with them hasn’t quite matched up. In many of our games we spend more time worrying about class balance, statistics and the various systems that run our entertainment than we do what is happening around us. How quickly do we go from saying, “Oh wow this place looks great” to “I can’t believe this quest guy is sending me BACK there.” The truth of the matter is that we as players do frequently miss some of the finer details of our games. Developers seem to do so too. How many have we seen recently saying quest text needs to be cut down? A lot, and they’re right, because we don’t read it. We don’t read it, however, because it is not interesting and rarely has any meaning. Quests aren’t quests, they’re chores that NPCs send us to do. If there were less quests and they were more meaningful, perhaps we would take interest.
More often than not when a new game is developed [the] first thing you hear is the combat system and how it will work with the quest system and how this will all relate to loot and raiding and so on… Developers will talk about how long it should take to reach max level and how players should go about it. Do we favor killing, quests, something else? Do we want crafting to be a support? A necessity? All in all they design the systems on which the game will be built upon.
All told the idea of MMOs that are more focused on story instead of mathematics is an intriguing one. I could easily find myself less concerned about gear and such if the story was so compelling that I just had to find out the next part like I did playing Fallout 3. It is, without a doubt, an entirely new take on the genre. Obviously, it is too soon to tell as neither of the two titles mentioned are going to be in my paws any time soon. It is something to look forward to! Thank you Gareld for the thought provoking email!
Tags: 38 Studios, Bioware, Copernicus, MMO Design, TOR
There was a lot of stuff in the email but I think you pretty much got the gist of it. Also thanks for sharing you ideas!
In any case I can’t wait to see if TOR or Copernicus will deliver on their promess of story driven mmo. If they do we could be seeing something truly new in MMO that we haven’t seen for a while. I mean since WoW there hasn’t been a lot of innovation in MMO and even WoW took old concepts and only refined them.
It really was a great email! I really did appreciate the inspiration I received from it.
Spot on.
The problem I have with a lot of mmo’s now is that they don’t have any sense of storyline/interaction in the sense that what you’re doing is actually effecting the world.
Games that have a progressive storyline such as Asherons Call are excellent because everything that people do, somehow effects the story and game.
Blizzard was talking once before about WoW, and basically they said that they didn’t want it to continually evolve because new players wouldn’t be able to experience old content, but I think that’s bull.
A continuing storyline is great for everyone. People that play the game on launch, will obviously know all of the lore and how the game has progressed, and may be the “veterans” and such that people look up to.
Although new players wouldn’t be able to experience what the game was like years prior, they are starting their own tale and can completely change up the way things are in the game as well.
Star Wars has a massive amount of Lore, and it’s great that they’re doing The Old Republic because it isn’t explored that often, so they have plenty of room to play with, which benefits us all.
I think a lot of this comes from the MMO truth that in the end you want your players to play for as long as you can make them.
The first answer the dev tought was to make the game take a long time to reach endlevel and make it very hard. However that kind of game has a very targeted audience.
WoW brought a second answer by making it easier to reach endgame and by being as convenient as possible to the players. To keep player playing they designed a really complex and grindy endgame. Numbers prove they are on to something.
Why not try quality as our next answer to keep people playing? If we offer a shorter game but much more involved and polished with world repercusion maybe a lot of player would play again and again even if the experience was shorter. What would you prefer? 40 hours of greatness or 400 hundreds of “meh”.
Story-based MMOs? What does that mean?
An MMO where the story is dictated to the players by the game world?
That doesn’t make ANY sense. The players are the heroes of the world. If anyone should be making the story, it should be the players themselves. If the story is laid bare before the players and railroads them through a string of “story” encounters, there is no actual story: whack-a-mole quests and NPCs have no effect on the game world because they don’t actually interact with the game world at all. They just spawn, walk around, and die, while perhaps executing a few scripted events here or there.
The story that you seem to care about Ferrel, is the story ABOUT the game mechanics. You don’t care about the reasons why parts of the world became how they are, you care about what has happened to you and your friends and how it will effect the future of your guild and your own play. You want a player-driven narrative, not a contrived railroaded narrative. If you want a player-driven narrative that is more than a commentary on the coincidences of different game mechanics, the world has to be dynamic and facilitate player interaction leading to changes in the game world.
I wrote two articles about the basic design flaw in MMOs that causes story to be marginalized. If you’re interested in story in MMOs, I suggest you read them and think about their contents.
http://thatsaterribleidea.blogspot.com/2009/06/save-world-and-level-up.html
http://thatsaterribleidea.blogspot.com/2009/06/games-fail-when-they-do-not-allow-their.html
Actually I care a great deal about lore. It is one of the things I felt has been missing since EQ. Loot had a story behind it and so did the zones. It just wasn’t always clearly defined and that was half the fun.
As far as story driven MMOs I am refering to TOR. Each class will have a line of quests not unlike a single player rpg. Each classes experience will be somewhat unique. On the other side of things Copernius will be a lore rich world where we take part in the happenings.
I would love for characters to be heroes but that seems to be pretty rare theses days. If anything we are just foot soldiers.
If you care a great deal about lore, why don’t you read a book? That seems to be the place where the best lore is written. I suggest _The Book of the New Sun_ by Gene Wolfe and _A Game of Thrones_ by George R.R. Martin. Those two books are significantly better than any MMO story I’ve read.
You first deride quest text, then you say that you want static worlds with static lore. Well… how do you think that static lore is going to be relayed to you? You could probably discover it through exploration, but that is a slow and uneven process. There’s little means for designers to know how much a player has seen of the story, so pacing becomes a nearly impassible issue. The way stories must be told in a static environment is through static text regurgitated ad infinitum by static NPCs.
MMOs are just the vestiges of mediocre fantasy stories with mediocre games laid on top of them. The reasons people seem to play them is either from sheer novelty, blind competitiveness, or social expectation–fickle factors that could apply to any MMO that isn’t complete trash.
I’ve heard of the class-specific stories in TOR. That concept rings hollow, though, because every person who plays that class experiences the same story. That shouldn’t happen. It makes each story meaningless because it’s infinitely repeatable and the same for everyone.
You should be able to interact with the game world in meaningful ways (Guild Wars 2 may try to do this)–only then can you actually have player-driven narrative and story that matters.
Even a foot soldier has an effect on the war. As it stands now, players have no effect on the world.
@evizaer
your argument about reading books is like saying why play guitar hero? Go buy a real guitar! or why watch a movie about cops? go and become one? or why watch sports! playing them is better!
if your truly interested in numbers and stats why bother with creating a character? Why bother killing goblins? In fact you could have a piece of paper with stat numbered A to F and fighting other pieces of paper (#35464 for example) using a complex strategic system.
If strategy interests you more than anything play chess. We’re loosing way too much of that element in MMO with all the story nonsense. Or play a dice game if predicting random results is your thing. What I mean to say is that since we spending so much time developping story elements for MMO that we ought to use them well.
I agree with you when your saying that currently it’s very poorly implemented. Even horrible. But the solution is certainly not to move away from but rather to find a way to do it well. If you watch really old movies you can see they improved a lot at their craft since the beginning and if you compare the recent mmo with muds you can also see a lot of improvement. I’d rather try to find a good way to implement story element than just throw it all away.
“your argument about reading books is like saying why play guitar hero? Go buy a real guitar! or why watch a movie about cops? go and become one? or why watch sports! playing them is better!”
Not at all. Playing Guitar Hero is not the same as playing a guitar. Playing music is different from hitting buttons when lights flash on a screen (no different if you add in the strumming element of the game). But reading static text on a computer screen that relays a story is the same as reading static text in a book that relays a story. The similarity is that neither story changes depending on what you do. The game lets you have an avatar to mess around with some unimportant facets of that world, but that has no effect on the story. After your character’s actions in the game world, nothing changes.
I’m not saying that story hurts MMOs, I’m saying that it fails in MMOs the way it’s done now. Story is trivial and useless to the player unless the player feels like reading static text for their own self-indulgence. The stories that MMOs offer players, even when players WANT to self-indulge, is often far worse than the story a good book offers.
A story-driven game is a game where the story is important to gameplay. If the player doesn’t understand the story, he can’t progress in such a game. MMOs are completely the opposite. You don’t need to know anything about the story in order to do anything in the game. I don’t see how you suggest designers change this–can you give a concrete example of the kind of design that would make a good story-driven MMO tick?
I’m making the suggestion that we allow players to make the game’s story happen through their actions.
“I’d rather try to find a good way to implement story element than just throw it all away.”
I never suggested we throw it away. I’m suggesting that we do it right and do it well instead of treating MMOs like glorified single-player games. I’d like to harness the power of MMOs to tell stories as well as provide platforms for challenging gameplay. Currently MMOs do neither of these well.
When I say we in the article I am more meaning “MMO players in general” versus what I actually feel. I see a lot of that sort of thing from the folks I associate with and am guilty occasionally too.
As far as deriding quest text I think I’m being fair. A lot of it is meaningless filler and those who write it know that. When you write a one of quest to go kill pigs in a garden that isn’t really a quest. It is just a task.
I understand your point that the stories of these games we can’t participate in but at the same time our actions allow us to progress through them. We might not change what occurs but with each motion and effort we learn more. That, to me, seems very different from a book.
Every smuggler will experience the same story in TOR but that doesn’t cheapen it if the story was great. That is similar to saying that reading Dragon Lance is pointless because my roommate has read it. We take different things from it and an MMO can do that as well.
Essentially if there were better stories in these games I think they would draw us in more. If the lore was so rich and exciting we might forget those statistics for a minute and just read what the NPC is saying. I do that a lot after I’ve maxed one character.
I’ve always thought MMOs (and games in general) excel when they really leverage the interactivity and let players be active components in the story process. The more I play MMOs in particular, the more I think that players should be the prime movers of the game world, otherwise, why bother playing with other players in an interactive world?
The Legend of the Five Rings CCG did an interesting thing years ago by letting their players change the game’s lore and storyline. The devs took tournament results (especially regarding certain “hook” cards designed to tempt players) and turned the story “told” by player actions into the backstory for the next expansion’s lore. (Players registered to tournaments under certain houses, and their actions in the tournament reflected on their sword house.) It was a fascinating case study in game design, and taught me that while story is important, if we’re not really using the interactivity of our medium (games), evizaer is right, we may as well be making movies or writing novels.
Games are unique in their storytelling potential, but very few games have even started to tap that potential. Even the much-vaunted SWTOR is more likely to go the “barely interactive movie” route in its storytelling. Sure, there will be choices like the KOTOR games, but the interaction a player will have with the *world* of the MMO will likely be minimized. MMOs just aren’t the place for strong storytelling from a dev’s narrative, and until we can keep internet idiots down, they won’t be all that strong from a “let the players tell the story” either.
Story *is* important, but the story in an MMO will almost always be weaker than a story in a novel, a movie or even a single player game. It’s just a limitation of the genre and the anonymity (and idiocy) of the player base. (Which isn’t to say that everyone is an idiot, just that giving storytelling power to everyone will inevitably invite abuse, so most devs just don’t bother with it.)
Addendum: The stories in SWTOR might be fantastic, but they will inevitably *not* leverage the potential in an MMO. They may as well be KOTOR sequels, standalone single player games. As it happens, that’s going to be the biggest thing that pisses me off about SWTOR. I’m sick of being tethered to the internet to play games, and if I’m going to be stuck online, there had better be a blasted good reason to be online with other players. Playing through my own little private instanced game that I could easily have done offline is aggravating, especially in a subscription model.
“Essentially if there were better stories in these games I think they would draw us in more. If the lore was so rich and exciting we might forget those statistics for a minute and just read what the NPC is saying. I do that a lot after I’ve maxed one character.”
No. If there were better stories, we’d still ignore them so long as the story isn’t necessary to progress our characters. If the player has no reason to become engaged in the narrative, he’ll do the simplest, easiest, and quickest actions to aid in his character’s progression: ignoring the story all together and treating the game as a set of mechanics to be exploited or overcome.
The story needs to be built into the mechanics of the game–the mechanics have to go back to their D&D roots as conflict resolution methods to keep the story going.
I can’t say I agree. I know we generally take the path of least resistance but that has become too much of a straw man. Developers count on it too much and create too many rules to force us down the right paths.
How many single player RPGs have us enthralled like a good novel? I can name a few that pulled me in. I cared about the story, not finishing the game as fast as possible. Everyone assumes it can’t be done in an MMO but nobody as really tried.
I think TOR will be the first real attempt.
I can’t think of a game that has immersed and captivated me as much as a good novel. Game’s stories have held my interest before, but I don’t think I’ve ever found myself itching to get back to a game because I need to see what happens next in the story despite gameplay that I don’t particularly like. But that may just be a unique issue that I have–I tend to focus on gameplay more than story because I get great stories elsewhere.
There’s far more at play in an MMO that prevents us from becoming immersed in the story. There are so many immersion-breakers in MMOs, not the least of which are all the quest database websites and raid strat sites that compromise any need to think about how to play the game.
You don’t conquer the immersion issues by having better story–look at LotRO for an example of how well-written quest text and a great underlying story are still largely ignored in favor of playing the game. You conquer immersion issues by addressing those issues directly through improving mechanics and building the story into the game design.
Implementing a storyline for a MMO developer is probably a haphazard task, considering the finite and short nature of a story, and the more long term pace of an MMO. Getting a story to match the pace of an MMO without reducing it to a to-do-list would require a a lot more work and resources.
A developer could try to make a story more visible or important by tying it directly to the player’s progression of the game. Without meeting certain conditions, portions of the world would be locked out or even character progression can be locked.
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Story: Short and finite? You obviously haven’t been involved in enough stories lately.
Otherland spans 4 thick volumes and yet ultimately touches only a handful of characters in a universe over a few years. Plenty of room to expand just using the rest of the lives of the characters directly or indirectly referenced in the novel.
Conversely, while not nearly as long, House of Suns tells the story of an entire civilization of millions of years. Plenty of room there to go more indepth, branch off and detail important (and even not so important events).
Humans have been creating stories for as long as we’ve been communicating.
I’ve never got why MMO storylines aren’t much more player driven. Neocron was a good (or bad, depending on how you look at it) example of this:
They would hold some great events, yet ultimately if the side they wanted to win was losing, they’d spawn npcs to help that side to ensure a certain outcome (and not even trying to play out any kind of storyline – just “oh look – sudden reinforcements!” and bam! Many generic guard mobs.
Similarly, the multi-shard system failed them because at one point on the server I was on, while the official storyline said that 2 factions were at war, in-game they were co-operating like the best of allies.
In another instance, they killed the leader of one of the factions, then rather than do something interesting like introduce a new leadership, with which they could have taken the story in new and interesting directions, they simply said “oh wait, that was faked, he’s still alive”
Then there’s some games (Face of Mankind tried this route) who just go “here’s your backstory, here’s your world. Now the players are the entire population of the world”. I don’t think this route will ever really work either – the players need to feel a reaction to their actions, not simply be allowed to do anything.
Pen and paper RPG game masters have been writing multiple storyline paths and rewriting storylines because their players did something unexpected for as long as there have been pen and paper RPGs. Why is it so hard for MMO developers to do the same?
With the odd exception, the developers don’t need to react to every little thing, but claiming 2 allies are at war is just silly. And spawning obvious mobs to ensure outcomes gets equally silly.