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We are all "The chosen one"
tochicool
Member Posts: 153
In the begining, there where RPGs and quests where created and they where good. The first generation passed. Then a new network enabling people to connect to almost anyone, anywhere in the world and RPGs evolved in MMORPGs and quests where BAD?!?...
What the hell happened? The answer lies in realism. Now, before you set me alight whilst I've just bathed in petrol, here me out. I'm not saying that MMOs need to be ultra real as that would ruin the whole fun element of it and just turn in into another chore. Yes, we're in a fantasy world but it's ment ot hide the fact that it's a game.
So, to the point. We are all running around killing and looting mobs or showing are superiority in player versus player combat but, the truth is, we're all dragon-born and blessed by the gods. We've all been the guy/girl who saved that prinsses from the the evil great dragon. We're all the hero that stopped that undead invasion of are factions capital. We're all following the same story.
It's accually funny when you think about it. RPGs make you feel special whilst MMORPGs make you feel like a genetically cloned lab rat. Thus, this ruins the game. When your stuck on a particually hard or puzzling quest, instead of asking are fellow guild members or asking players, it tend to be more easier to just go on the first quest database that you can find (even though that can be done for RPGs aswell).
Now, this is what I'm proposing, quests change dramatically due to a huge number of random and fixed vairables like your class, race, level, etc. There should be hundreds of rewriten story of the same quest (I know it's alot). But this still doesn't solve the problem. This is why I need you. Give your thoughts; flame all you like. Is it even needed?
TochicOol 
FEEL THE FULL
FREE-TO-FLAME
FANTASY.
Comments
Very good post!
To a large degree, I agree with you. Paper and pencil RPGs, with the usually small number of players a scenario would have, allowed those players to be "a cut above" or special within the context of the world.
Single-player computer RPGs can and usually do make your character "The One".
Unfortunately, this translates into some odd play with the epic storylines of many themepark MMOs in which there are thousands of "The One". It makes immersion a little difficult on that level, just as killing the same Mighty Foozle at the end of such MMO storylines over and over is problematic.
In a game of thousands, the content still must be made available to each person. A conundrum, to say the least.
This is one reason I gravitate toward sandbox games (currently, Mortal Online). Some of the gameplay in a sandbox is often more "mundane", and they have their own repetitive systems, but "players as content" is usually more varied, in my opinion.
Hell hath no fury like an MMORPG player scorned.
I strongly disagree.
Here why;
Developers add Quest and contents to tell the story. its not their job the give you an imagination. Game WORLDs are never to the scale of an actual world due to Technical problems. So its pretty obvious that for each Player hero, there are many characters that follow said hero into battle. This is where the player's own Imagination kicks in.
Example of what I mean can be applied to Warcraft 3.
In Warcraft 3, you had Hero Units. These Hero Units are the equivalent of a Player character in WoW.
But in Warcraft 3, the Hero unit rarely fights alone, they have other units with them as their own personal group/army/squad/etc. Well in the MMORPG WoW, you, the Hero Unit, fights Solo without these NPC unit ally, but its expected of you to imagine that the things you do as a Hero Unit in WoW, are also accompanied by Ally units.
this is why it makes sense that other players can accomplish the same goals as you did, because on a lore standard, they represent 1 of the many units you had with you when you accomplished said goal.
hope that makes better sense to you
Philosophy of MMO Game Design
I agree. I never felt like a "hero" in any MMO I have played up today. There is one that would make me feel like one if I had standed the negative sides it had for me; Darkfall.
MMO's today have no risks or no consquequences. I just rush through the dialogues from NPC's cause I "know" it is just bollocks they say anyway. In a RPG I read everything in case I do something that affects me in a way I would not like. Here I am talking about Oblivion for example.
MMO's today doesnt offer any challenge. Well not much, other than the challenge to bare the boredom of grind until you have gotten your/mine flashy gear. Then it is rinse & repeat at next patch.
Bah. Good post. This forum needs more like this. When will the gaming companies dare to try offer us something that can turn our toons into evil dirtbags?
Make us care MORE about our faction & world pvp!
RE: MMORPGs make you feel like a genetically cloned lab rat.
Not me. I feel like a cloned FedEx driver. Run here drop this package, go there collect this and run it over to that person.
As for quest variation. I don't see it happening soon. The current standard seems to be around 5 to 10 quests per hour. Given content for 100 hours gameplay, that could be up to 1,000 quests. Given 2 factions, 8 races, 8 classes, that is 128,000 potential variations. Other than using a mail-merge style processor (generic quests with no storyline relationship), the labor to create these would be extreme.
And another thing.
NPCs aren't even doing anything, except standing there so why don't they kill x amount of y or talk ot some guy.
:P
FEEL THE FULL
FREE-TO-FLAME
FANTASY.
Most NPC's I have met in MMO's have been plain idiots or retards. Ever repeating themselvf. And greedy. How much fur from wolves do they really need??
Make us care MORE about our faction & world pvp!
This is why I prefer the idea of sandboxes over this themepark stuff. I would rather start out as a no body and then work my way up and create who I am to be. If I want to be a wealthy merchant then let me choose that. I dont want to be the mystical crazy revived hero from legends. I want to be a little farmer boy, or perhaps a blacksmiths apprentice whos wares are so amazing that even the king knows his name. So the king invites him to create a beautiful set of armor and while delivering the armor I'm jumped by a group of bandits forcing me to decide whether I will use my silver tongue or a silver sword to determine my fate.
Thats why I like the ideas that GW2 has with character creation where you choose your bloodline (or whatever they are calling it). But in the end I think that one will be somewhat similar in the sense that you are a hero by destiny.
Do you have an agenda or something? Because I can only think of one game which is offering something even close to what you're suggesting, and that's GW2 with its DEs and individual personal stories. That mix of "every player gets a different story" and NPCs that don't just stand around....
If you're hyping a game you should just come out and say it. If you honestly hadn't picked up on that, you probably should check them out, as it seems like it's a good game for you to try when it ships.
Or there's SWTOR. I don't know much about it, but I believe there's a lot of tailoring stories to the player there, too. I know that Story is their big thing, but I'm not sure how much variety they offer and how much is just an emphasis on good story and fully voicing, IYSWIM.
Reality Bites. I'm only Barking
I was thinking about GW2 when I read the OP but I was hesitant to reply with what would have probably come across as an obnoxious out of nowhere GW2 advertisement here in the pub. But since the door has been opened, I can safely reply.
I think the dynamic events system is great for this because it's not like everybody is getting the same "you're the only one who can save us from the bandits" quest. Bandits attack, people band together to stop it. You're not the chosen one, you're part of the population. Then there is the personal storyline which really helps because you're instanced and solo. You can be like, "good thing those other people were there to help with the bandits, but this here is something only I can deal with."
I'm actually most interested in the dungeon story mode of GW2, because I think you can really make the argument that in GW2 you are not, and never will be, "the chosen one." The dungeon story mode is separate from your personal story and tells the tale Destiny's Edge, a disbanded group of adventurers. It's a 5 person dungeon mode where you help one or more members of that group with the overall theme of reuniting them. In that regard, you're not the chosen one, you're the guy behind the guy. It would be like you, Sam, Merry, Pippin and Boromir trying to help Frodo, Aragorn, Gandalf, Legolas and Gimli work it out. Everybody being the #6 guy in the world is at least somewhat more believable in an MMO than everybody being the #1, imho.
"Gamers will no longer buy the argument that every MMO requires a subscription fee to offset server and bandwidth costs. It's not true you know it, and they know it." -Jeff Strain, co-founder of ArenaNet, 2007
I think the problem is that quest based games are static.
Currently in quest based MMO one can plan out their play sessions hours ahead of time and then execute that plan exactly.
Instead MMOs should be about events. Ie. when you log in, part of what you do should be figuring out what is going on. This will make the world and the experience fresh. Many events can be known to occurr is various places and the events themselves could even be known as to how the play out but what exactly is going on in the world should never be known by players.
This is what Rift has tried to do with its rifts but Rift is still very much largely a static, plan your route, quest based game which is the main contribution WoW has had on the MMO world. Its played out.
Part of the reason people get involved in social scenes in general is the thrill of figuring out "What going on". Many languages have this very phrase as a common greeting. "Hey man, what's going on", "Commo esta", etc.
MMORPGs of the last few years basically lack this idea entirely outside of PvP (with a few notable exceptions) and thus they get old and tired very fast since all you do is plan a route.
This is why some people say sandboxes have more longevity or whatever even though its not entirely about snadbox. This is why some peopl hate these database sights that tell you about quests. Because then people just plan out what thye will do because that is the smart way to be efficient. Then they rail at people for acting reasonably.
Don't blame the players for finding fast and efficient ways of doing things. Blame the world that make the fast and efficient way be what you don't like. When the world is "known" it will be planned out and lose all its luster.
I agree.
I'm hoping that GW2 brings more of this "dynamic" element to MMORPGs with their dynamic events. I really think it could go either way at this point. If they make them too common and predictable, they will basically become just branching public quests. However, if they make some of them rare, or add new ones as time goes on, I think the world could start to feel really dynamic.
As you say, it's all about the players' capacity to predict and map out the world. Once the world is a known quantity, it ceases to be interesting.
Are you team Azeroth, team Tyria, or team Jacob?
Dynamic events are a buzzword.
GW2 is trying to make us quest in a different and hopefully more fun way and stop us from queing up a whole bunch of quests in our log and do them at the same time.
That is very interesting andn the first real evolution to questing since M59 in 1996. They are still not that dynamic however, they will appear in a certain area when a condition or more have been fullfilled and some of them can be predicted by more experienced players or can be check up how and when they will happen on Wiki.
Really dynamic events isn't possible until we can make a game with a true AI or have one where they have GMs actually creating events in game. Some games have had a few of those but not on regular basis.
GW2 is making a interesting experiment which I hope works and that maight change how we play MMOs forever, but they ain't that dynamic.
But at least will the world do stuff on it's own even if no players are there and hopefully will that make the world feel more alive than in a world that only exist around the players, if no one is in a zone in most game nothing happens there at all.
I would actually argue that the reason why we are all "the chosen one" lies in the American ideal of individualism. The strongest of all American story myths is that of the gunslinger, the man who single-handedly saves the day because he is good at heart and willing to do what it takes (despite "what it takes" being largely evil - that evil is not as evil as that of the people he's fighting, so it seems good) to make the world a better place. The gunslinger is alone able to accomplish what groups of people couldn't do.
Of course, the individualism as an ideal was taken to its extreme in Ayn Rand's work (and many fantasy gamers follow the work of Terry Goodkind, who admits he is a follower of Rand).
As noted, the games to appeal to our sense of pride and self-worth, but those two things are founded in this gunslinger mythology. Success and self-help manuals (and, often, the proclamations of Opera Winfrey) are based in individualism and the belief that *I* and I alone can resolve all of my problems.
I'll avoid going into the political ramifications of this belief, but there are many.
Most of the rest of the world (barring, only to an extent, Western Europe, which has had the most influence from American culture), at least until recently, has taken the opposite approach, that of the betterment of society over the betterment of the self. The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the one. In a society-centered MMO, we would not be the prophesied hero who saves the day, but rather one cog in a mighty machine that works toward saving the day. We'd be a soldier in an army, maybe an archer on a wall, a footman with a pike, etc.
In our real army, this is how it works. There are heroes, but most people are simply grunts working together (and under orders) toward a common goal.
For me personally, I never want any NPC talking at me like I am the chosen one reborn and placed here to save the world from darkness. When someone talks to me that way I get that feeling that this guy is buttering me up to do all the hard work. I'd rather be one among many of the decent folk in a community. So as far as old school rpg's vs mmos storylines, old school didn't have other heroes to steal your glory, so you can't go into an MMO with the mindset you are special by default. Your reputation is what can define you.
As to the quest comments. While I have gotten sick of the quest driven gameplay, I don't think I would be ready to jump on board another evironment kill grind heavy or sandbox just to avoid quest grinding. What I wish they would do is make the quest fewer in number and longer in scale and tougher in difficulty, this would require more meaningful rewards and exp, but I would prefer that over doing 10 quests to get the same outcome. I don't enjoy running back and forth to NPC's nor do I like getting to a new location hub and rounding up all the request from lazy ass NPC's. Make each quest a challenge and require a little more effort on my part and I wont notice that I am grinding mobs as much.
Edit: to the post above I am American :P Don't lump us all together. It's rude.
RIP Jimmy "The Rev" Sullivan and Paul Gray.
not sure what you mean... I'm talking about American mythology, not individual American people. I'm an American, too.
I think that Rift did an OK job with this but they run into two major problems that made the experience fall kind of flat.
1) They are still a quest based game in a fundamental sense and the quest paradigm and the rift paradigm did not really play that well together. They did pretty good job of making each an equivalent track but they were kind of just to parallel roads and people mostly just fell into questing anyway and rift events could just be ignored.
2) The rift implementation itself was kind of too predictable. Rifts were decent but a little boring just too canned with standard waves. But also they just weren't really meaningful enough and often they just hung around in an area and were mostly ignored. The zone wide events were interesting when tons of rifts popped all around, but past that it was just something placed on top of the world it added some dynamic elements but was not a fundamental core part of the world. Yes you could spend all your time rifting but you could also just plain ignore the whole thing for the most part.
One interesting thing they had in Rift was you could find hidden quests by using ancient wardstones to spawn a quest giver using rift energy That quest giver only stayed around for a about an hour. This is more like what Rift should have gone with IMO. I spawn a quest giver and then some other player comes along and goes "Whoa sweet I needed this guy". However this was still something I could have planned out to do. There should be many more of these types of things and you should need to explore/patrol to find them even if you know they exist they should not always be accessible.
It like going fishing. They call it fishing not catching. Questing is just catching. Steady, predictable. Profitable but boring.
Looking at Rift I can definitely see that the devil will be in the details. A dev house will need to be very particular about how they attempt to do such things. Rift did a pretty god job with its rifts. They were balanced pretty well rewarded just about right. They do not overly hurt players but can be significant.
Yet they were still not really enough. Sometimes you got the feeling that the world was dynamic and a tond cools tuff was going but then you settled back into questing it was just same old same old. Then after a while even the rifts started feeling like same old same old. Part of the problem with rifts was they were basically very similar to the mob camp grinding of various old school games like EQ/SWG/FF etc.
I think the dynamic stuff will need to be pervasive. Need to be the expected way of finding some action. But I also think it will need to be more than just some dude walking up to you you have never seen before and saying "Hey kill ten rats for me".
At the same time it will also need to be reliable. Some hidden or special things can take a long time or be fairly rare. But there needs to be a way for people to reliably and fairly quickly find some action.
If you can't find some action in about 5 minutes their event system will have failed. Doesn't have to be the best action. Just some action. And most likely their should be events that are simply just better than others, so that just taking the first thing that comes along has some kind of decision to it.
This is another problem with quests. You look at the reward estimate the time and then do a value per time calculation. We should instead be presented with a number of semi-known things, a possibility of some other things, and then part of our play experience should be making a decision which we will do. Sometimes you go with the always around but less rewarding battle that is constaly being waged or perhaps you scope around for a while looking for something else. Will the extra time it took you to find something else be worth the extra reward? Decisions like this add spice to your time.
Quests become a slog because there are no interesting decisions other which ones are optimal.
How Rift has definitely shown that its not as simple as adding a fairly dynamic and well done element. The implementation still has many many open questions.
Except for maybe Aion, I can't recall an MMORPG where I started out as "the chosen one" or a hero. Isn't that the purpose of any RPG, is to start you out with nothing and you gain more as you level/skill up? Even then, when you hit max level, I STILL don't feel like a hero or chosen one. Most times I feel more like soldier in a larger war, just doing or not doing, my part.
I don't think quests are the issue. At least not wholly. Again, I think it comes down to the story and how involved in it I am and how it affects the world. 2 things to do to fix this.
1. Make the story a larger part of the game and make me a star in it. Seems to be where the genre is leaning, in SWTOR and GW2, so we'll see how that pans out.
2. Permanent changes to the world itself. We only have a small example of this in WoW and Lotro's phasing. Definitely something that needs to evolve though and I'm sure it will at some point. However, I think a massive overhaul of how NPCs interact with players is needed as well. GW2 I think is teasing at playing with this aspect, by having npc's follow their own schedules, conversations etc. What almost needs to be done is to have more AI developed for these NPCs so that they literally don't give the exact same quest or stand in the exact same area all the time. Make them travel the world and give quests dependant on where they are in the world.
Big undertaking, but eventually technology is going to get there. I keep looking at the holodeck on Star Trek as an example of where we could go with MMORPGs. Not holograms of course, at least not for a LOOOOONG time, but the capability of programming in NPC based on certain parameters and letting it's own AI go from there. In other words, Dynamic NPCs.
yeah the post wasn't written as a responce to yours. But after I submitted I read yours and thought I'd add that American mythology or not, we don't all think that way. I don't particularly enjoy stories that try to glorify an individual over all it's moving parts. Also being prior service myself I will agree that our military definately doesn't encourage being a hero or a loner. Quite the opposite.
RIP Jimmy "The Rev" Sullivan and Paul Gray.
We may not all think that way, but our thinking is, nonetheless, influenced by it. The very fact that you have the capacity to say "we don't all think that way" is evidence of this - you're defining your thought patterns as separate (and individual) from the collective societal thoughts.
And I think you are looking waaay to deeply into what was said and searching for more than there was though it was clearly laid out for you. On top of that I think you are hijacking a thread to throw philosophy and sociological beleifs into a forum on a video game........ yeah..... I can't speak for society and I only claim to speak for myself in forum.
RIP Jimmy "The Rev" Sullivan and Paul Gray.
GW2 will still be themepark still hold your hand and lead you true game, those dynamic events will not be so dynamic as most think. But maybe the game will be fun future will tell.
I think this distinction between individualism and societal thought is interesting but realistically somebody needs to make decisions, direct the herd as spontaneous organisation to do great deeds doesn't happen. IE even if society is moving in the right direction there are still individuals ,me the hero, making decisions and organising. This is definitly not a West/East thing or American mythology, look at Greek mythology or any and you will find its the same.
In games you can only implement what you are suggesting by making the devs this decision maker leader and us the herd, imo.
I don't think I have read many claiming it otherwise. I also don't think anyone who actually follows think there is gonna be zero hand holding. It's about presentation. As I stated in my origonal post to the op, if they cover it up I won't mind. But if you think it is pure themepark and all hand holding, maybe you should do your research since all of the info they have released with the exploration, abiltiy to raise or lower your lev to match a partners, no quest hubs sending you to a spot (the scout system is not the same) they aren't holding your hand from lev 1 to max. It's your choice how you get there. Also nobody makes people play so there is always the freedom to never buy it...... just sayen.
RIP Jimmy "The Rev" Sullivan and Paul Gray.
you were kinda forcing my hand there... and the one insisting I was in the wrong for it
The point of it was that these sociological underpinnings are what have driven the MMO industry to make games where you are the chosen hero of the story. I was only providing background for why it happened, and not suggesting what is "right".
That doesn't mean it has to be that way in the future, but I think that unless game writers face that reality and accept that individualism is the reason why these things always end up happening in MMOs, even in the simplest quest chains, then nothing will ever change. I'm also not suggesting there needs to be a change; rather, just that if you don't like "the chosen one" mentality and want to change, that's what it'll require.
The "fix" for it is to start seeing the player's character as a member of a larger group of people all working together for a common good rather than as a solitary hero.
Let me provide an example of what I mean:
Imagine you happen upon a small town (read: quest hub), and this town has rabid dogs everywhere. A quest designed with an unconscious individualistic mentality might read as follows:
A social quest, however, might be written as follows:
Do you see the difference? In the former, you alone are responsible for saving the town; in the latter, you are helping the town save itself. The result is the same - you still have to kill 10 dogs, but the difference is one entirely of perception. Are you the hero, or are you just a part of a larger society?