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Stories in MMOs
blognorg
Member UncommonPosts: 643
I don’t get it. Why is a story so important to people in an MMO? I can understand if the world has good lore surrounding it, but why a personalized tale?
For me, it doesn’t matter. In fact, I prefer if an MMO doesn’t try to tailor a series of personalized events around me, because, in the MMO world, it’s not just about me; it’s about everyone. Not to mention, most of the time, they’re not even good stories. Even in a lot of single player games, the plot is bad. As much as I liked Oblivion, the main story was complete garbage, and I never even finished it. Granted, the lore surrounding the game was interesting. I think it’s just too difficult to come up with a story that’s so vague that it can apply to everyone. I’m not really blaming the developers, here, I just think it’s a really hard thing to do, and I haven’t seen it done very well yet.
That being said, what do you, the MMO community, think? Would you rather a lengthy single-player campaign that focuses on how special and awesome you are (ignoring the thousands, perhaps millions of others just like you), or would you like to see that time and effort applied to other, more applicable areas of an MMO?
Note that I’m only joking about the blatant one-sidedness of this issue, but I’d like to hear what you all think.
Comments
I'd rather I got to write my story.
A poor farmer rising to be a mercenary. An apprentice mage learning to control the winds of the arcane. A shepherd learning to tame dragons.
Instead of "follow this linear path, IT IS FUN BECAUSE WE TELL YOU IT IS".
http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1014633/Classic-Game-Postmortem
Story is great, provided there are enough options to influence the outcome.
You also have to take in regard exactly HOW story is implemented in a mmorpg. Does it determine everything, even the layout of the world (like in Lotro), or is it used to substitute thousands of boring kill and collect quests or hours of grinding which you normally need to do to level up? i.e. High quality leveling content.
I am fully in favor of the last version.
Story is a good thing to have NEXT to sufficient and deep repeatable, open content. Like crafting, world pvp, world bosses, instanced group content, battlegrounds, etc.
My brand new bloggity blog.
I do want the story to be present in theme park MMOs but i don't want it to be the only thing happening either. I want times i can get away from it and do other things, and then i want times when i can do the story and really get into it.
The biggest problem for the MMOs in the past is i could easily get away from the story, it was getting into it that was the hard part.
I don't want consistant story all the time and be forced to play it, but i feel in a theme park MMO it needs to play a bigger part. Thats whats supose to get you through the level. Well actually your suppose to be playing for the story and the levels just depict your powers and ability to pass a road block in that story (like a boss or a dungeon). Theme park MMOs have had it backwards for some time now in my opinion. They used to provide story so you can level quickly. When it was suppose to be you level so you can see more of the story. But i digress.
I think theme parks are suppose to have a really good interesting story that you *want* to get into and can. But at the same time not forget about the rest of the world (the other PCs).
Sandbox MMOs? thats completely you are a person in a world doing your own thing, the only story that is going on is your own. Sadly most of those story won't be good because not everyone is a good story teller.
Help me Bioware, you're my only hope.
Is ToR going to be good? Dude it's Bioware making a freaking star wars game, all signs point to awesome. -G4tv MMo report.
MMO’s never really bothered to have an individual story for your character, only a story for the MMO world and where it was going.
Using the same story for all players is one of the many ideas that got ported in from single player RPG’s. Some worked better than others, it was clear to early MMO designers that having all players as the hero of the story was absurd. Thousands of the hero’s who have the same background and are all supposed to be each other in the same game was nonsense.
But being the hero did well in solo RPG’s and became an increasing feature of successful RPG’s like Fable etc. A success which MMO designers wanted to replicate.
But there was another reason, MMO’s have increasingly been made to make the transition from another genre easier. So you only play single player RPG’s? Well you are The Hero here too! This is one of the reasons why solo play in a Massively Multiplayer genre has become king, it helps new players fit in.
I could go on, but hopefully you can see now how pandering to players who don’t play MMO’s has drastically altered the kind of MMO we play. Are all those solo RPG players now MMO fans? Many are, but only of the type of MMO that is a mirror of a Solo RPG where other players run around, never having to group with you and all being the hero.
I kind of view MMOs as analogies for real life. We are all just part of society, and we make our own little stories depending what we do. We're not spoon-fed content (ignoring childhood).
I guess my main gripe is when the story mirrors something that you'd see in a single-player game. You know, where the world is in peril, and you alone are the only one that can save it. Whereas MMOs, there's kind of the million other people thing, and I just can't take it seriously.
Like I asked before, how do you design a story that can accommodate everyone? At least with the old RPGs, there was a main character (that wasn't supposed to be you), and the story was constructed around what made sense for that character.
This is a little off topic, but I seriously laughed at Dragon Age: Origin's attempt at it. I know everyone's entitled to their own opinion, but I really couldn't see why so many people liked the story in that game. To me, it's a prime example of why there shouldn't be open-ended plots. Now it's creeping into MMOs.
On the "hero" idea, I remember my first play of the Rift beta, arriving as an ascended and all the NPCs cheering and clapping...and it cheesed me off. Really? I'm a hero already? I'm sure some players love it, but I always felt one should have to prove oneself somehow in order to be considered a hero. It's just empty otherwise, you and every other player are a hero, unquestioned, immediately. Under that definition heroism is worthless.
On story: as pointed out by the OP, lore is one thing, story is another, and the quality of the telling of that story matters an awful lot. I'm always interested in exploring the story in any game I try, but oftentimes I'm thwarted by lazy, stereotypical writing, that you feel no effort went into because "people don't read quest text anymore" anyway (or whatever the current excuse is).
Story matters to me, but story is more than just a personal quest line, it's all of it. If you have quirky mission text that is a joy to read, you'll read it. If NPC vendors say stuff that makes you laugh out loud, you'll click on them repeatedly to have them cycle through all their dialogue options in search of another gem. If you're introduced to a character early on and keep meeting them throughout the game, you feel more linked to the game world. If that character is strongly written and gives you interesting things to do, you'll look forward to seeing them again. If other missions deepen that character or refer to them, so much the better. A good story fleshes out the world, and makes it feel more immersive.
A lot of the above paragraph directly relates to my experience in Fallen Earth (the character you meet up with repeatedly is Elena Winters, who you used to meet in the tutorial, but don't anymore), there is one long quest line (pitched not as heroism, but selfishness - if you don't fix your DNA it will degrade and you will die, permanently) running through the game. It's not a personal story, but it's a damn well-written one. It's what made me love the game.
For those reasons, I think something like SW:TOR that is focused not only on world story, but also more specifically in a personal story arc, that has a great writing team behind it, could well be one of the more engaging games for me.
Yikes, wall o'text, obviously story does matter a lot to me.
Haha. Your post wasn't up when I started typing mine up; I had left it halfway done, then finished it up. It looks like I just copy/pasted some of your items. Oh, well. You make good points :-P
Also, yes, I do realize that developers are just pandering. It's just one of those topics that I feel alone on (the minority, anyway). I was just wanting to hear from people that actually like stories in MMOs, because they just don't do anything for me.
What I don't get is why ppl have to ask "why is there a story?" it's like asking "Why do mobs have to hit me?"
Good story and good writing makes you attached to the game world. You want to see want happens. You want to see those NPCs again. You care what happens to them. It motivates you to go forward and play more and learn more. It is also an excellent way to introduce the player to the game world and its lore.
A game without a story can seem... clinical.
I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been -Wayne Gretzky
That's a really good argument. However, I do find a difference between establishing personality in NCPs and creating a series of events for your character. I'll be the first to admit that I love novelties in games, and when I actually take the time to read some of the quest dialogue, I find myself chuckling a little. The issue with most questing is that there are just so damn many of them. So, no matter what you are doing, it all seems trite. People claim that the quests are just meaningless, but I think that's only half of the picture. The quantity diminishes the quality.
I've never played Fallen Earth, but it sounds like they went about things the right way. That's the difficulty about writing for everyone. People care about different things, but most people, at least, care about themselves. That's what's easier about having a 3rd person perspective main character; they care about something if you want them to.
Also, I forgot to mention that I heard that Morrowind did a pretty good job. I've never played it, but a few people that have said they enjoyed the story. Perhaps there is hope, after all.
There I was in Gloomwood did every quest to save the woods from the curse of the Hag and even killed here, got rewards was praised by the npc's and even Devs. gave me a nice loading screen that i save Gloomwood. But I don't feel like a Hero Because the werewolf, Vampire and other Hag related NPC are still there and I even return to the place where you kill the had to check for the Gloomwood puzzle (didn't knew about it) and there was another player killing the Hag.
That's the problem with personalized story in mmo's....they aren't personal.
"you are like the world revenge on sarcasm, you know that?"
One of those great lines from The Secret World
Don't misunderstand; I'm all for good writing and quirky NPCs. I just feel that there's too much empahsis put on you, the player. Let me give an example: I played WoW a few months back, just after Cataclysm. I was an Undead Warlock around level 20, when, in one of the quests, I was personally escorted by th leader of my faction whilst given a dramitac sob story. The whole time, I was well aware that the super-special moment was provided to every other player, and I wasn't taken in by the experience at all. It's stuff like that.
As far as an actual story goes, since when does it get reduced to something that gets tossed in your quest log with the rest of the mundane tasks? That's one of my biggest issues with Oblivion and many games.
I'm not sure where on the same page, here. There's a big difference between the story and the lore of a game. Yes, I tihnk a game should have good lore, and for the most part, I think many do. To make the connection that you did, it implies that you need a personalized plot in an MMO as much as you need stuff to kill, which really isn't the case.
You unravel it with you friends and find out what happens next and play through it. Take it as a separate chunk of content made for you. Enjoy it as it is. It shouldn't matter that everyone else has done the same thing. Ask yourself, why does it matter?
I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been -Wayne Gretzky
Personalised stories in mmos are generally a stupid thing to implement as they spit in the face of what these games should be about. Player interaction. Stories cause each player to treat the mmo like a single player game, focusing only on their own progress through the game (as thats the only thing they can influence) and generally not caring what everyone else is doing as the other players have nothing at all do with the story they are each being told. Of course players CAN interact with each other, but usually only in a very limited and meaningless way (eg chatting in general tab while they grind through the story on their own, teaming up only when they are both on the same bit of story or totally ignoring the games "content" altogether in an attempt to pretend that they are playing an mmo instead of a co-op game).
Unfortunately its easier for a games developer to write out a story for everyone to follow than it is for them to make an interesting and complex gameworld that reacts to the choices of the players. Games developers are faced with two choices when they make an mmo.
1. Design a game "world" that caters to multiplayer scenarios where the players have the freedom to do what they like
2. Design a game that follows single player game design and allows players to see each other as they each play through the story
Obviously number 2 is the easiest to make. They have already had years of experience at making single player games so they just keep repeating that and tweaking them to allow players to play them co-operatively on a server. Making a genuine massively multiplayer game would require them to go into a territory they are unfamiliar with. It involves taking a risk as the more options a player has, the more chance there is of something going wrong. Building them like single player games is just safer. It also gets more people playing them (although for shorter lengths of time) as the players dont have to think for themselves and can just do what the devs have planned for them. Most people dont have an imagination of their own and simply arent interested in creating characters and being part of a game world. They just want to kill things and go up levels.
Devs are faced with a square hole (single player) and a round hole (mmo). They already have a square shape and they dont want to spend time making a circle shape.......so they just cram the square shape into the round hole every time.
So we are stuck with online single player co-op games being passed off as mmos. Oh well.
Taking a look at why story can work, from the opposite direction using eg Minecraft as an example of a sandbox game (not nec. mmo) and one of the problems for the dev of this game is to get players playing at the beginning (give some structure) and also some more objectives for longer-term players.
At least with sandbox, players can interact with the gameworld with new combinations, anytime. Once you are used to the set decisions in a theme-park mmo such as quest, explore, find loot, kill mobs, level up (again) you'd better have really got sucked into a cracking story THAT is changing still at least. So think that's why stories are important and taking the basic gameplay discrete decisions further along.
Personal story connecting with a global story for each avatar is a massive improvement as seen in gw2 and tor (presumably). Another improvement would be taking a character that may be a hero in waiting and unequal endings to players stories?
http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1014633/Classic-Game-Postmortem
Say in a game you hopped onto a boat, went up a river in Africa, sought out a European man with godlike status among the natives, and watched him die. Would you say you just wrote "Heart of Darkness", or even recreated its story?
I don't think people who say "I want to write my own story" truly understand the same thing from a "story" with most people who are story proponents. To me what you're talking about is not a story - it's just things you happen to do and stuff that happens to you in a game. A story should have a deliberate design, themes, character arcs and subtext, and it had better have depth and if we're lucky, even profundity .
"A poor farmer rising to be a mercenary"? That's not a story, that's just a pitch line, a stock concept for a story, devoid of merit and meaning. The distance you need to cover till you have a real story on your hands is for all practical intents and purposes the same as before you came up with that pitch line.
And an overwhelming majority of people are no good at covering that distance to come up with full stories that are more than tired concepts, thus most amateur "stories" in games usually turn out to be bearable only by their own writer - and this is actually quite consistent with our experience from books! 
There is no set rule on how much freedom you're supposed to have in a game. In Minecraft you have loads of it, in Planescape: Torment you have much less of it, and in The Longest Journey, you have even less of it. Each of those is a brilliant game in its own genre, and it's absurd to claim "story" does not work with the latter two. Granted, we may not have seen it to really work in MMOs yet, but I'm inclined to chalk it up to traditionally lazy storytelling in this genre and having it as an afterthought.
I'm not saying that's wrong, or that no games should do it. I'm just saying that it doesn't entice me. I see where you're coming from. It really just hinges on whether or not you can ignore that other poeple do the same thing, but I feel that a good story can really engage its audience emotionally. Back when I played Final Fantasy 7, I felt genuine sadness when Aries bit the bullet (spoiler alert). Granted, I was 13 at the time, but still, I wouldn't have felt that way had Cloud been replaced with some generic husk that I'm supposed to project myself into, or some scene that's designed for everyone else's husk. I dunno, It's like seeing your significant other making out with somone else. It kind of robs your own experience a little.
I completely understand where the OP is coming from and I have felt this way many a time. I guess that's why I prefer the older 'themeparks' where you make your own story almost like in a sandbox game if one wants to put it that way. I tend to burn out on the massive amounts of quests and hand-holding in stories like one finds in WoW for example. I felt especially this way in LotRO which is the king of hand-holding, you're-special-like-all-the-other-players moments that you get with the so-called epic storyline.
In old DAoC, EQ1, and AO, they had some quests but few and far between. I prefer that style of play, but it seems like it's pretty much completely disappeared in recent MMOs. All three of these games had amazing lore too, just no really elaborate quests, no phasing, none of the new tricks MMO companies are putting in.
I'm overall a bit wary of what will be put in SWToR and in GW2. I was looking forward to both, but now I get a feeling of meh and that they're being completely overhyped. All of this highly architectured stuff is giving me burnout.
Playing MUDs and MMOs since 1994.
If a story works in a single player RPG why does it not wotk in an MMO? When you played FF7 did you realize that millions of other people had seen the same exact thing that you had? Did you understand that this game had not been designed just for you and played only by you? In the end Cloud was a generic Husk that was designed for millions and millions of people. Why was it different? Was it just because you didn't see thousands of other people running around?
WoW had solved the problem of seeing the world as it was before whatever heroic quest chain thing you completed with their phasing technology. So in theory if it was used correctly should that not give you a very similar experience? NPC's die and stay dead, the world burns..etc etc.
It does not matter if other people have the same experience as you. In life that is always going to be a reality. If you were standing in front of the pyramids in Egypt would it matter that millions of other people have seen the same thing as you for thousands of years? Does that diminish the experience?
The problem is not that there are stories in MMO's..the problem is the stories usually suck.
I don't know if you're trying to be clever or something, but the purely clinical defintion of Story is:-
Wikipedia: Story is a common term for a recounting of a sequence of events, or for a statement regarding the facts pertinent to a situation in question (see narrative).
Dictionary.com:1. a narrative, either true or fictitious, in prose or verse, designed to interest, amuse, or instruct the hearer or reader; tale.
3. such narratives or tales as a branch of literature: song and story.
5. a narration of an incident or a series of events or an example of these that is or may be narrated, as an anecdote, joke, etc.
6. a narration of the events in the life of a person or the existence of a thing, or such events as a subject for narration: the story of medicine; the story of his life.
7. a report or account of a matter; statement or allegation: The story goes that he rejected the offer.
------
If you're talking about plot, sure. We're talking about story. Before biting someone's head off, try fact checking first.
Interesting comments. I am hyped because gw2 & tor themepark mmos will have much more story to go with the g8 visuals and other polished features of themepark mmos. Normally PvE holds little interest apart from discovery exploring a map. Story allows characters, personalities, emotions, conversations, drama etc. It should make the combat in PvE normally limited by the AI have some context or immersion or rp to it. Levelling vertically is tempered by interaction along story lines across the map.http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1014633/Classic-Game-Postmortem
The most fun in "story" I've ever had was
1) Ultima Online-- I wrote my own story.
2) Champions Online / City of Heroes-- Stories were simple (Quests) but fun. Wasn't really a story though, just quest text.
UO provided a "tell your own tale" type of gameplay. This was something I want to see more of. Something that I will be disappointed in myself if I don't bring to Emergence. Something I can't even fathom how to do successfully.
If anyone here knows how to give the "write your own story!" feel to a MMO, then by all means, please email your design document to me, lol...
If being a developer means being quiet, mature, well-spoken, and disconnected from the community, then by all means do me a favor and believe I'm not one.
QFT
In an MMO, the story should be inspiring players to interact in new and different ways. The pass that everyone has always used to get over the mountains is closed in some way; natural disaster, monster control, whatever. Now the players have to react to that change in a way that is appropriate to their gameplay. Some players will want to clear the pass. Some will want to find new ways around it. Some will already know ways around it. Some will sell the materials used to clear the pass. Some will have to find new markets for their goods that used to go through the pass. Some will lose suppliers that are on the other side of the pass. And so on. To me, that's a storyline change appropriate to an MMO.
I'm an pen and paper alum, and when I moved to MMO's I never expected the experience to try and replicate what I get at the table top. It can't. Those experiences and stories come from a communal creativity that can't have in a video game, even one online. I did however enjoy the freedom of games like EQ to make a number of my own choices, to fill in the gaps of my quests with my own imagination. While there were a number of rules ported over from games like DnD in EQ, there was a vagueness to them that allowed for a great deal of creativity. My Dark Elf couldn't be Paladin, but there was no lore reason there to enforce this, so that vagueness allowed me to give a reason to it if I wanted.
For me personal SWTOR is taking away all of my choices and giving me their own choices to choose from. While they are replacing all of this vaugeness with lore, they are also taking away that ability to fill in those gaps. From the Start in a game like SWTOR it has been decided that there is no story for a Bounty Hunter who doesn't side with the Republic, or a Smuggler who sides with the Sith.
Some long for this hybridization of the MMO world into a giant single player RPG with multiplayer capabilities, I'm happy for them. But I simply don't want to play in that closed off world that suffocates real creativity. My story in SWTOR is never going to closely resemble my own because it will always be made up of the best of a list of choices rather than allowing me to fill in those gaps with my own imagination.