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How does a Story fit in a Persistent World?
Turel_Azure
Member Posts: 60
So, a story is something that traditionally has an introduction, a plot setting, foreshadowing to conflict, build-up, climax, and the ending. Some stories are longer than others, but the part that gets me are those last two: climax and ending.
How does a story that has these elements fit into a persistent world? I'm looking at the largest of the MMOs right now, both current and in development.
Warcraft tries to fit multiple stories into the game, all introduced within Warcraft 3, their previous game in the series. How do they fit in? Well there's the story of Illidan, that ends with him dying. But uh, you can kill him over and over, which really seems just odd to me. And now the game is getting close to finsihing all it's main villains, what then? I know they have new phasing technology for story driven fights, and those were great, but after that, there isn't more, and now it's possible the game runs out of bad guys, and the player just does the old ones over and over.
Let's look at another MMO, say Guild Wars. In my view, it has a wonderful example of story up to a certain point: you go through a story with your character until you hit the maximum level. And then...PVP and Grind? So this is an example of excellent introduction and plot setting, but while I played (which wasn't forever, mind you) the game simply was a build up to a Player vs. Player end game and the story just stopped. Thus, the game felt very much like a grind fest while you weren't doing PVP, and lost interest for me and a lot of players. Age of Conan is an even better example of story introduction. Hell, Tortage pulled millions of people into the game, and then left them in the dust, with little story afterward, and half of the environment of Tortage (no voices, less interesting quests).
Star Wars: The Old Republic states to be an extremely story driven game, in fact, a direct quote from their site:
"Our mission is to create the best story-driven games in the world. We believe that the compelling, interactive storylines in Star Wars: The Old Republic are a significant innovation to MMOs and will offer an entertainment experience unlike any other."
So theoretically, the story becomes player-centric, with events surrounding your character...but how does that work with multiple players? Can you, like in Warcraft, kill the same boss over and over?
So my question is, how does story fit into a persistent world such as an MMO?
A few things that we do know from the examples (my opinion on what we know, at least):
-Story driven introductions do well, as long as the rest of the game is at the same standard.
-Personalized character stories are coming in TOR, to help push the standard past the introduction
-Climaxes and Endings still fit where? After the great plot and introduction, and maybe even the foreshadowing, where is the player left after they defeat a big bad guy? How does an MMO fit a story into their game if the purpose of an MMO is to never be a game someone can "win"?
(Edited as I realized it might be TLDR, tried to shorten some)
Comments
Humm, story can be added through a phasing engine. Blizz's is pretty good. I liked how Icecrown changed as I did quests. A phasing engine does make playing with peeps outside your phase pretty hard thou. There is definitely a trade off. I liked it, but others may not.
Briefly, I believe that AoC destiny quest line brings in a lot of the story points you mention. Also, LOTRO has some great storytelling at numerous points in the game. I would like to see more of that kind of storytelling in MMOs
Torrential: DAOC (Pendragon)
Awned: World of Warcraft (Lothar)
Torren: Warhammer Online (Praag)
AoC's destiny quest along with the Pyramid of the Ancients do a great job at story telling. However, they do split you off from other players. I definitely had fun playing through the destiny story line in AoC. This type of quest line may not be for everyone but I enjoyed doing the quest series.
More specifc questions for this:
How does being able to fight and kill the same significant story boss impact the story? Do you feel it is negative, as I do? What alternatives are out there?
Does the limitation of individual stories in that they are single-player detract from the MMO experience? How do these stories effect what many call 'end game' parts of the game, which for many MMOs, is the majority of the content?
How does a story, which traditionally have ends, fit in with a persistent world that has no end?
More than one question there.
Now that Cpt. Obvious has been released from my body....
Climaxes and Endings still fit where?
At the end. Once the big bad guy has been defeated there is the End Game. What is that? Depends on the game you are playing. Could be the next release that comes out to add to a new story.
How does an MMO fit a story into their game if the purpose of an MMO is to never be a game someone can "win"?
You can still complete a story line and find other small things to do. Maybe the end of the smaller stories is not to RAID and big bad guy but, take out a small encampment. VSOH has crafting added and Diplomacy for when you have completed the story line. My opinion is you complete the story and move off to now CREATE YOUR OWN. This is where the Open Ended Game Play concept comes in. The game is not to be beat but, to be extended by an expansion or new content added. Maybe the players add their own content at this point.
I think this is where TOR will dump you out on the non-class specific servers that are PvP oriented.
{[(SPECULATION)]} I believe this is why they are not getting too much info on PvP at this time other than it will be there. At least this is my fervent hope. You go through and build your back story while leveling in class specific areas with others.
This leads to some of the planets where there are cross-class populations based upon your class alliegance. Here is where you make your true self be known and at some point I feel you will be made to choose one side or the other based upon your actions and choices up until this point.
From these cross-class locations you eventually rank up until or at some point choose to go to the War Zones. This is where both sides are competeing or carrying out the WAR for various resources and choke points or battleground objectives or whatever. All in the pretense and story of being in the war between the Empire and the Republic. Here is where the Story can no longer be scripted and becomes the open ended journey of your character that is specific to you. {[(/SPECULATION)]}
Say hello, To the things you've left behind. They are more a part of your life now that you can't touch them.
Story fits the game well in FFXI. It was and is one of it's main aspects. Very cutscene driving, there is introduction, middle and an end. It's a linear story like in JRPG's usually and there's not many personal character stories, although each class you play has it's own little tale to tell.
You can "win" the game, not in character development sense but in the story sense. It happens in a way that it won't change the world for others though.
You can't go to kill the main villain again if you want, but you can help your friends in doing so.
Not to derail the thread here, but that is a very unique and interesting direction they could take the game. I like it.
Prax
"How does an MMO fit a story into their game if the purpose of an MMO is to never be a game someone can "win"?
You can still complete a story line and find other small things to do. Maybe the end of the smaller stories is not to RAID and big bad guy but, take out a small encampment. VSOH has crafting added and Diplomacy for when you have completed the story line. My opinion is you complete the story and move off to now CREATE YOUR OWN. This is where the Open Ended Game Play concept comes in. The game is not to be beat but, to be extended by an expansion or new content added. Maybe the players add their own content at this point."
Okay, so the assumption is that players will drive their own story forward after the initial push. But isn't this what caused AoC to fail as much as it did? I know Guild Wars lost a lot of people after release too, for this reason. They've kept more though due to expansions released quickly, and engaging PVP.
But I don't think players can be trusted to make their own story. They grow bored and stop playing. I think certain MMOs know this, and that's why they roll out the carpet for them (Warcraft and TOR). The easiest form of this was quests....but everyone has the same story.
I guess what I'm trying to understand is how big a role should story really play? The most successful MMOs all have a different way of keeping a player engaged, and not one of them is story. TOR seems to be exploring this avenue, but is that something feasable? Or is it really just story until the player just goes into throes of PVP as you describe? Just how important is a story to a game?
F F X I.
Players making their own story works up to a point. There are limits to what even the most creative players can come up with. After a while everything you do you either did before or you did a variation of it. No matter how you try to stretch it a MMORPG world has a finite amount things to do. Once a personal story stagnates it stops being fun. The game has to keep providing the player's with new tools so they can move their stories in a new direction.
I just have a quibble with this statement. GW is different due to it not being a level dominated game. Point in fact, the story doesn't stop once you reach max level, at that point you have only finished maybe 20% of the story (depending on the campaign). I don't think you have enough experience playing this game to really make that qualified opinion about it.
About the topic at hand, the biggest difficulty about making an interactive story in an persistent world is simply, the world does not change. Basically your actions has no affect upon the world, only upon your character and that's where you have to go with this.
I played Guild Wars pre-expansion. I completed all aspects of the story they had to offer then, and quickly grew bored of the grind. The PVP was fun for a while, but the lack of things to do besides grind and PVP at that point had me grow bored, and I went back to Warcraft (which I also don't play anymore, really).
Not to derail the thread here, but that is a very unique and interesting direction they could take the game. I like it.
Prax
Well, I have been following the game for some time. Reading between the lines and based on what they are and are not saying. My feeling is this is the concept they are working on. Of course it is my feeling which may have more hope than actual fact in it.
Say hello, To the things you've left behind. They are more a part of your life now that you can't touch them.
Two ways in which story can enter into a persistant world:
1) you have sub stories that can change the world have a begining middle end etc that do not repeat over and over again. In the current models these are typically run by GM's and usually only affect Lore/History to one extent or another but otherwise have no impact on day to day gameplay outside of equipment that might be gained as a result of participation. If a dev put some proper attention into this area the potential to story advancement is great, however, it can take a lot of resources if you are dealing with multiple servers and each ends up with its own story line. This means dedicated teams for each server running each story line(IE lots of money).
2) You can have chapters in a main story line which have a begining middle and end. Each end would bring about a new age and the game encounters will be shaped by the previous age. Each chapter could satisfy the elements of a story while not handicapping someone who joins the game later. For the most part in order to make a good story actually shape an MMO requires some significant resources which most MMO's either can not afford or choose not to spend money on. A good story will leave the user with lots of choices and every choice has to be programmed or created in some form or fashion. Not an easy undertaking.
In either case to make a true story driven MMO it would be made easier by having a single server or a small handfull of servers with large numbers of people on each server. This would help balance the cost to customer ratio. The bad part of that is the only way to make such a game viable content wise is to use instancing in some form or fashion. So you are left with the lesser of two evils choice - Potential good story lines with instancing - No instancing with less dynamic story line content( IE everything is static and reappears on a regular cycle)
The key to a good storyline MMO would be to have the players play all the different sides in the story with GM's there to just regulate and throw subplots in to make things interesting. A basic storyline - Evil sorcerer wants to take over the world. You have players who side with the sorcerer for thier own power and those who oppose the sorcerer and you can also have nuetral sides that take advantage of the choas caused by the big fights to progress thier own plots. Depending on what each side does you could have the evil sorc now ruling the world...the "good" guys win and rule the world...or a 3rd party could step up enough to become the next threat to world peace by advancing thier ideaology - IE: maybe nature is mad and a crazy druid is trying to overthrow things now.
Ultimately the players will cause one side or another to win and that defines the next chapter of the story for the GM's to setup. You could have guilds/societies/secret societies/religions and any other form of organization you can think of each one trying to become a dominant force in thier world and players can belong to more than one group at a time...IE one guild perhaps but also a secret society made of people from all types of guilds.
The last type is an MMO that has not really been made or utilzed at least in the mainstream that I know of...that is an MMO that ends with an actual winner and begins again. There is nothing in the rule book which says an MMO has to be foreever persistant. In fact if you look at MMO's none are in the sense that if you watch an MMO over the course of a year most of the players are not the same players the guilds change, the content focus has changed to some new expansion etc. Even if you log in after a time away very few if any people will know who you are and your equipment will probably be considered crappy by the standard of the day. So MMO's even now are not really all that persistant in that you have to start from nearly the same point as someone who is new to the game.
I think it might be really cool to see an MMO designed to have an ending and then restart. This would give the devs a lot more time to expand content and fix bugs. Each iteration would be different from new content the devs could put in and would be better as old bugs are fixed in the previous round so ...fewer exploits etc each time around. Of course for me the most enjoyable part of any new game is that initial climb up the level ladder when everyone is still fairly equal and not overpowered and the content works because everything is still in balance.
Ah, thank you, you have been most helpful.
It sounds like one ideal that might appeal to more people is GM run events/story that is released somewhat frequently and controlled by a person on a single large world that has all the players on it.
As a seperate note is I think that MMOs can now evolve into being a single large server for all players with some instancing, this sounds by far the most appealing to me, and I imagine to others. There is already technology that distributes computing power based on where it's needed within a server, and a single world would just require this on a larger scale, along with instanced cities most likely.
But if you had just a single world, you could have a small team control events and the cost would be negligable if it kept people playing.
Once the story has been told/played through, can they re-use it for every new character, or it is global, therefore expiring once it happens.
Doesnt that would mean that developers would spend a lot of development resources into something that would vanish like an useable item in a f2p cash shop?
And if the story lived by the player doesnt affect the world and the other players, whats the point of it?
I dont care about an story that every new character will play through, or every class, for that matter.
Stories happens in time periods. Once I achieve something it has to affect the world arround me and impact every other player.
With that said, all this "story driven" talk from the new Star Wars MMORPG is nothing more than "one story for each class with voice over, that everyone can experience in their bubble world, and whatever one player achieves doesnt affect the other players stories" That is nothing new to me.
Ive played... a racing mmo called Drift City that had story! or an space action game called Ace Online/Air Rivals that also had a main story. Whatever you achieved, you achieved for you only, the world didnt really changed, it was always there, its just that it is "unlocked" new parts of the story as you progress. Its far from a global story mmo affected and changed globally by one or a group of individuals, like Ryzom promissed many years ago.
It's a video game man. Physics and thermodynamics don't apply.
I just have a quibble with this statement. GW is different due to it not being a level dominated game. Point in fact, the story doesn't stop once you reach max level, at that point you have only finished maybe 20% of the story (depending on the campaign). I don't think you have enough experience playing this game to really make that qualified opinion about it.
I agree. "You're doing it wrong!" The whole point of Guild Wars was that it was not about the level or the level cap. I remember playing GW for the first time(Prophecies) and found that it has one of the best (if not the best) stories I've seen in this genre. Cutscenes carry it nicely - you can't miss it.
I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been -Wayne Gretzky
It would cost extra money, but having a set of GMs going from server and server creating events with seperate stories per server would be very possible. Just have these set of GMs not handling tech support so they can handle running events. If you have 24 servers and each event takes an hour to two then you could have each server have a seperate story event every week or two (including time to plan out each event). It wouldn't be too hard if you give the GMs a proper toolset (which they should have anyway). Compared to solution #2 it's a lot cheaper IMO. #2 is usually thrown into most MMOs anyway without the whole choice thing, that's why MMO stories are so freaking boring.
I do miss the GM run events they had in EQ. Do any MMOs still do that?
To the people who can't give up on guild wars: You really don't seem to be reading my comment very thuroughly. I never knocked Guild Wars' story. But when it was over, that was it, until the expansions.
As for GM run events, yeah, I've not heard of any since EQ had their first big cleansing of GMs, and they cut their labor way way down. Years later they released that service wherein people paid more for special GM service in game....the Elite Servers? Legends Servers? I don't remember the name...but even then, there were not GM run events if I recall correctly.
I'm definitely in the camp that thinks an MMO should provide the players with the tools to make their own story. I thought AoC's forcing of every player to be the start of the mandatory central storyline was frankly quite silly. Look at it this way: RP'ers have to disregard a mandatory storyline because they all can't be the same person with the same history, and non-RP'ers will simply disregard the storyline cause they don't care.
I had a similar problem with LoTRO. Great game, polished, fun, etc... but being shoehorned into the Lord of the Rings story was ultimately uninteresting and uncaptivating. I would have much preferred a Middle-Earth Online, taking place after the events of the books, cleaning up Sauron's mess and influence all over.
Plus as the OP points out in the title, in a persistant world, no matter how long its around all new players and alts have to start from the beginning of the story. It makes the whole idea of a persistant world kind of pointless.
Upshot I guess in my opinion, MMORPG's are morphing into RPG's-with-multiplayer. Thats where the money is so I guess I'm S.O.L.
I think the key is that it is more important to give players good experiences, and it is not so important to keep stories consistent in the world.
So it is ok for different players to kill the same boss multiple times, but EACH player should see him killed only ONCE.
WOTLK phasing technology is a way to accomplish that. This does not prevent players to work together on a story quest, except only those in the "same stage" can do it together.
I think probably a system with that, and some developer controlled, world wide events like the argent tournament things in WOW, or the Sunwell Isle progression quests (enough people finish certain quest then the environement changes), can help to tell a story.
I think that the more consistent the story is, the more meaningfull the experience is.
So for me it would be much more gratifying if... in the example above... Ilidan could be killed just once. Its ok if people could get known and rip reputation rewards, by being recognized by other players and by the radiant/addaptative A.I.
Thats how I should things should be made, of course devs dont need to spend so much development time for something that will be played through only once, thats why I think they should procedurally generate the seeds for events in an organic way that is meaningfull to the players because it happens only once, for them and it affects everyone else.
Those opportunities should be plenty off and people should be able to jump right in and participate in any way they can as they appear for them.
Notice: no quest marks over npcs heads.
Everything is "opportunity events generated by other chain effects, or randomly, in a timely basis, yet always different"
Something like that.