mortal online is gonna have this and fail because of no story line.
I think that is a pretty flawed theory
Mortal Online will likely fail because it isn't made very well. Not because it lacks story.
MO has lots of bugs, a interface that no sane persone would consider userfriendly and quite a lot of features that are missing at this point. I also think the character models are ugly, and animations in the game are not good either.
I think they do have quite a bit of lore for the game. But I am not completely up to date about MO so some of the things I mentioned might not apply to the current version of MO.
You can read about other people's lives, or write your own story. Some prefer the latter.
In the typical MMO, the sum of your experiences is the same as everyone else's.
1) Problem is: your own written story, isn't real except for you, and it will never be real, because you can't force other people to accept that and they can't force you.
This 'own written story' is not even part of the game mechanics and relying on it is simply an excuse to make an uninteresting game experience.
Take any single player experience, take away all context and background and depth and leave only a combat experience of running through a world killing things while you urge people to 'imagine the rest'.
Any such game would get absolutely destroyed by reviewers and players alike, but yet a lot of mmo's are exactly that, uninteresting shallow experiences where you have to kill things over and over.
Fantasizing about how you're a great hero who is killing the evil boars of the nether attacking the village in distress doesn't take away the reality that you're playing an uninteresting game.
It's about freaking time mmorpg's are held up to the standards of the rest of the industry.
2) Yes, and that is exactly a problem that will never be changed by leaving things up to mere fantasy, because the actual game and the actual experience stays the same.
I do not understand people using this lame excuse to keep defending this very same model of game.
I'm all for people having an impact on the game, but that is not connected to the narrative or any of your own fantasies.
on the number 1, in a game like eq1 you dont play alone, so you dont make the story yourself, you experience it - unless you are an RPer and they actually do accept your story....for the most parts ;P
either way think OP have taken a stronger position than he meant to...sure aint agree with a MMO without story lines....but agree that an MMO must not be 1 mio diffrent story lines, really boring games like that when told what to do in every single aspect of the game.
would wish for a proper modern sandbox MMO, Darkfall is awesome..and even that game got a sense of cause, you get your specializations. and ofc to most go clan vs clan, create alliances and that kind, just no my thing + dont care to read about body parts all day.
its a bad MMO without a sense of direction, but its also a bad MMO if you cant choose YOUR direction
Story Driven MMOs and Non Story Driven MMOs are better descriptors than: . Sandbox. . Or Themepark. . Face it, pretty much everything in an MMO was created by some dev for you to ride on. . Except for the Second Life MMO
If you are the type of player who just has to follow some linear plotline, with breadcrumb trails laid out before you, then MMO's are the wrong type of game for you.
Stories RUIN MMO's. "SETTING, FACTION, and CONFLICT" is what MMO's need. WORLDS, not stories.
I'll tell you a secret: In a good MMO, the players make and are their own stories. You setting off from a starting village to become a blacksmith or a hero or a diplomat or explorer or anything else IS your story. Your gameplay writes your story.
When someone tries to force a linear storyline upon you, they're just taking your freedom. They're telling you that you do not have enough imagination, initiative, or common sense to play your character and to find your own direction. Basically, you have fallen into the trap of mediocre games designed by mediocre devs.
I have heard the "players make their own stories" thing before, but I find it hard to believe that people do not see the clear and obvious difference between the "stories" made by players and the stories made by devs.
Player made stories, which are made through simple interaction with the game, are all focused around playing a videogame. All the stories you create are about you playing a videogame. People behave as if they were playing a videogame. I do not think player made stories have any depth to them at all.
Developer made stories can deliver the level of depth needed to make for an interesting story. I am not saying devs always do this but that developer stories have much more potential to deliver a deep story than player interaction can. Where as player stories are always focused on playing a videogame, unless you are with a bunch of roleplayers, developer stories can focus on your character in a world.
All men think they're fascinating. In my case, it's justified
Story Driven MMOs and Non Story Driven MMOs are better descriptors than:
.
Sandbox.
.
Or Themepark.
.
Face it, pretty much everything in an MMO was created by some dev for you to ride on.
.
Except for the Second Life MMO
Oh, yeah. Second Life. Player created content galore. Thanks for reminding me how stupid that game is (in my opinion) and how I never want to see another game like it.
Sounds like some other people in this thread would advocate something like that, too.
You want to make the story more meaningful and individual? Allow only one attempt of each quest. If you die, or time runs out, or the NPC you were escorting dies - that quest fails, and you can never try it again with that character.
"" Voice acting isn't an RPG element....it's just a production value." - grumpymel2
As others have said already, even within the most linear, themepark-y game, it is still possible to create one's own story and do as one wishes. In my own experience, the only thing limiting me within the games I choose to play, despite how they've been developed (with or without specific stories prewritten by the development team), is my own imagination. I don't have to stick to the story the developers wrote for a quest if I don't choose to; I can simply give my character her own motivation for completing the quest - whether it has anything to do with the reason the questgiver gave me or not.
If a player doesn't care for the ongoing storyline (for those of us who played MxO, we're very familiar with hating what the devs were doing with the storyline), there's no hard and fast rule that says they have to abide by the storyline (and in MxO, many of us ignored some of the stupid, stupid things the devs came up with and came up with our own stories while sticking to the lore). Most MMOs today have some kind of lore accompanying them, so there's no real need to stick to a specific storyline if you don't care for it so long as one at least loosely adheres to the lore - at least in my opinion.
"You are obviously confusing a mature rating with actual maturity." -Asherman
Maybe MMO is not your genre, go play Modern Warfare...or something you can be all twitchy...and rank up all night. This is seriously getting tired. -Ranyr
i think the state we're in now is that MMOs are trying to provide two experiences at the same time - one an MMO story experience and the other a single / multi-player RPG story exprience. From a story perspective, a game like AoC or LoTRO strives to give you everything you'd get in a single-player RPG like Baldur's Gate or Fallout.
And obviously many players enjoy this type of experience, hence why they enjoy it in their MMOs.
The problem is that this type of storyline that it is exactly the same from every players perspective (you killed the dragon, you saved the city, you got the unique legendary sword, you are the hero!). This in turn creates a paradox on the MMO side of things and takes away from the world as a whole. (There can't be 3000 people that are each "the chosen ONE").
In my opinion though, the solution is not to get rid of storylines altogether. I think the next evolution will be an MMO that fully embraces a storyline created for EVERYONE (all 3000 people on the server or whatever). So rather than "i am the chosen one, i killed the dragon", it will become "we are the chosen ones, we killed the dragon". Of course you can't have 3000 all killing one dragon on a regular basis. But that's the point, maybe different types of stories need to be told by MMOs than single-player RPGs. There are plenty of stories about armies and empires and things that involve more than 1 hero. These are the kindf of stories MMOs are ideal for telling.
"Id rather work on something with great potential than on fulfilling a promise of mediocrity."
- Raph Koster
Tried: AO,EQ,EQ2,DAoC,SWG,AA,SB,HZ,CoX,PS,GA,TR,IV,GnH,EVE, PP,DnL,WAR,MxO,SWG,FE,VG,AoC,DDO,LoTRO,Rift,TOR,Aion,Tera,TSW,GW2,DCUO,CO,STO Favourites: AO,SWG,EVE,TR,LoTRO,TSW,EQ2, Firefall Currently Playing: ESO
In my opinion though, the solution is not to get rid of storylines altogether. I think the next evolution will be an MMO that fully embraces a storyline created for EVERYONE (all 3000 people on the server or whatever). So rather than "i am the chosen one, i killed the dragon", it will become "we are the chosen ones, we killed the dragon". Of course you can't have 3000 all killing one dragon on a regular basis. But that's the point, maybe different types of stories need to be told by MMOs than single-player RPGs. There are plenty of stories about armies and empires and things that involve more than 1 hero. These are the kindf of stories MMOs are ideal for telling.
Or just make the protagonist(s) of the story someone else but the player...
The players can well act as the side-kicks, and affect the future of the world.
Using LOL is like saying "my argument sucks but I still want to disagree".
I love story and quest based MMO's... After all, they created the game not me, it's the Dev's world, not mine, I'm just a guest and what is going on around me in the world helps determine what/who I am/become in their game.
If I wanted to tell my own story, I'd learn how to program my own game.
One thing that can be done better in MMO's is that that should include multiple storylines, so players can walk different paths in their world, and allow for the game experience to be different for alt characters etc.
In my opinion though, the solution is not to get rid of storylines altogether. I think the next evolution will be an MMO that fully embraces a storyline created for EVERYONE (all 3000 people on the server or whatever). So rather than "i am the chosen one, i killed the dragon", it will become "we are the chosen ones, we killed the dragon". Of course you can't have 3000 all killing one dragon on a regular basis. But that's the point, maybe different types of stories need to be told by MMOs than single-player RPGs. There are plenty of stories about armies and empires and things that involve more than 1 hero. These are the kindf of stories MMOs are ideal for telling.
Well said.
In a way, 3,000 players can kill THE Dragon - if there is a community effort required. Destroy a hundred pillars of power with explosives (which require massive amounts of raw materials which even lowbies can gather), all within an hour or so, to open a portal. The portal allows five groups of players through to defeat sub-bosses in different locations, which drop five pieces which combine to make a key which allows entry to THE dragon's lair. Once the dragon has been killed - loot is portioned out based on level.
"" Voice acting isn't an RPG element....it's just a production value." - grumpymel2
Looking at the solo games... . 1. Dragon Age Origins, almost a pure story drive RPG . 2. Fallout 3, you can roam the country side, but there is a main story to follow if you choose to follow it . 3. Oblivion, much the same as Fallout 3, also written by Bethesda . Looking at WoW, original WoW had the dark iron dwarves epic story line. You first met the dark irons at level 9 or so, met them a few more times as you leveled up to 60, and assault their city in Blackrock Depths, and they were the base of the first raids in WoW, The Molten Core where you go and kill the dark iron dwarves god. . Can you skip the story line in WoW, sure. Did it make the game more interesting for me? Sure. . Second Life. No story. No quests. Nada. You make up your own stuff, your own house, etc. Is it fun? I think so. . Why are we even having this argument? If you like it, go play it.
In a way, 3,000 players can kill THE Dragon - if there is a community effort required. Destroy a hundred pillars of power with explosives (which require massive amounts of raw materials which even lowbies can gather), all within an hour or so, to open a portal. The portal allows five groups of players through to defeat sub-bosses in different locations, which drop five pieces which combine to make a key which allows entry to THE dragon's lair. Once the dragon has been killed - loot is portioned out based on level.
You're describing more of an "event" type of thing, there has to be a way to make it more regular. But yeah, that's the idea.
Also, you might want to know, RIFT is doing something like this with loot and mobs (but i don't think with story)
"Id rather work on something with great potential than on fulfilling a promise of mediocrity."
- Raph Koster
Tried: AO,EQ,EQ2,DAoC,SWG,AA,SB,HZ,CoX,PS,GA,TR,IV,GnH,EVE, PP,DnL,WAR,MxO,SWG,FE,VG,AoC,DDO,LoTRO,Rift,TOR,Aion,Tera,TSW,GW2,DCUO,CO,STO Favourites: AO,SWG,EVE,TR,LoTRO,TSW,EQ2, Firefall Currently Playing: ESO
this thread confuses me a lil bit. i understand lore and storyline, and i think they work well together. seperatly it is a very hard thing to accomplish.
a mmo pvp game for example can do well without storyline. i.e shadowbane. open world, you build your city, it gave you a little lore, and then said do what you want and kill whoever you want.
ive felt this guiding hand of fate before that the op is talking about, which i will refere to as storyline. i dont think it ruins the game, i think its just a different experience for some. i really loved the storyline in ffxi. that thing could guide me into hell and i would gladly follow it there with a smile.
on a personal note though, i do tend to have more fun in a game with more lore, less storyline.
1. Dragon Age Origins, almost a pure story drive RPG
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2. Fallout 3, you can roam the country side, but there is a main story to follow if you choose to follow it
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3. Oblivion, much the same as Fallout 3, also written by Bethesda
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Looking at WoW, original WoW had the dark iron dwarves epic story line. You first met the dark irons at level 9 or so, met them a few more times as you leveled up to 60, and assault their city in Blackrock Depths, and they were the base of the first raids in WoW, The Molten Core where you go and kill the dark iron dwarves god.
.
Can you skip the story line in WoW, sure. Did it make the game more interesting for me? Sure.
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Second Life. No story. No quests. Nada. You make up your own stuff, your own house, etc. Is it fun? I think so.
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Why are we even having this argument? If you like it, go play it.
Good post.
I don't understand why it has to be one or the other. Can't we have both type of mmos?
I played LOTRO since beta. The storylines are very very fun! I don't see what you are complaining about. And it doesn't force you to do the storylines either. This isn't final fantasy.
Tell me, what are you going to do in an MMORPG if you don't follow the storylines? Run around for hours imagining quests and pretending that your character is growing? Craft endlessly? That doesn't sound very fun at all.
A game needs a storyline. The storyline is what makes the lore. If nothing ever happened, then there would be no lore. It would just be a bunch a scenery and random people with no purpose.
I played LOTRO since beta. The storylines are very very fun! I don't see what you are complaining about. And it doesn't force you to do the storylines either. This isn't final fantasy.
Tell me, what are you going to do in an MMORPG if you don't follow the storylines? Run around for hours imagining quests and pretending that your character is growing? Craft endlessly? That doesn't sound very fun at all.
A game needs a storyline. The storyline is what makes the lore. If nothing ever happened, then there would be no lore. It would just be a bunch a scenery and random people with no purpose.
Quests don't have to drag you through a major storyline. They can be individual stories that you choose to take a part in. Some players don't really enjoy the being dragged through a canned story. I always logged into UO and EQ feeling like there was something that I wanted to do or some goal I was working on, even though I was not paying any attention to the official story. In WoW (my current subscription game) and LoTRO, I feel/felt confined by the storyline quests.
There might have been a storyline to EverQuest, but up until they started having progression (that is, a series of tasks to unlock zones or raids), you could easily not even know what it was... and after they started having progression... well, it was still optional, and a lot of people would get their info from guild boards or fansites and still ignore the official story. The real story was something more like, "You should have seen us down in zone A. Someone sat down too close to a door and we were fighting off adds for 45 minutes. It's a miracle we didn't die!" or "I had to go to the Plane of Fear 78 times before my epic piece dropped, and then I lost the roll... Here's to it not taking 78 more trips!"
Lore can be in the game in many ways-- NPCs, monuments and ruins in the landscape, events, areas that have a particular meaning (e.g. the Plane of Fear in EverQuest. It's the home of Cazic-Thule, god of Fear... obviously enough) , descriptions and choices made at character creation, bits of history included in the quests, books lying around. There are people out there who enjoy finding and cataloging facts about a virtual world and posting them on the Net for less exploration oriented players. Where's the fun in having it all spoonfed to you? There are entire play styles being underserved out there!
(EDIT: Oh, and meaningful factions! There was something special about being an iksar or a troll back in the days of EQ when faction *really* mattered. Being KOS everywhere you go can bring the lore to life for sure. (LOL))
If you like storylines, there are plenty of games out there. I think that the OP would just like to see more games that are virtual worlds.
I played LOTRO since beta. The storylines are very very fun! I don't see what you are complaining about. And it doesn't force you to do the storylines either. This isn't final fantasy.
Tell me, what are you going to do in an MMORPG if you don't follow the storylines? Run around for hours imagining quests and pretending that your character is growing? Craft endlessly? That doesn't sound very fun at all.
A game needs a storyline. The storyline is what makes the lore. If nothing ever happened, then there would be no lore. It would just be a bunch a scenery and random people with no purpose.
Quests don't have to drag you through a major storyline. They can be individual stories that you choose to take a part in. Some players don't really enjoy the being dragged through a canned story. I always logged into UO and EQ feeling like there was something that I wanted to do or some goal I was working on, even though I was not paying any attention to the official story. In WoW (my current subscription game) and LoTRO, I feel/felt confined by the storyline quests.
There might have been a storyline to EverQuest, but up until they started having progression (that is, a series of tasks to unlock zones or raids), you could easily not even know what it was... and after they started having progression... well, it was still optional, and a lot of people would get their info from guild boards or fansites and still ignore the official story. The real story was something more like, "You should have seen us down in zone A. Someone sat down too close to a door and we were fighting off adds for 45 minutes. It's a miracle we didn't die!" or "I had to go to the Plane of Fear 78 times before my epic piece dropped, and then I lost the roll... Here's to it not taking 78 more trips!"
Lore can be in the game in many ways-- NPCs, monuments and ruins in the landscape, events, areas that have a particular meaning (e.g. the Plane of Fear in EverQuest. It's the home of Cazic-Thule, god of Fear... obviously enough) , descriptions and choices made at character creation, bits of history included in the quests, books lying around. There are people out there who enjoy finding and cataloging facts about a virtual world and posting them on the Net for less exploration oriented players. Where's the fun in having it all spoonfed to you? There are entire play styles being underserved out there!
(EDIT: Oh, and meaningful factions! There was something special about being an iksar or a troll back in the days of EQ when faction *really* mattered. Being KOS everywhere you go can bring the lore to life for sure. (LOL))
If you like storylines, there are plenty of games out there. I think that the OP would just like to see more games that are virtual worlds.
That's it. Just give me one virtual world in a first line AAA MMORPG and I'll be gone from these boards.
So far, I'm going on 10 years to replace what was pre-Luclin EQ. DAOC was close. Shadowbane was admirable (although I'm not really a PVP'er).
Hoping that FF XIV or EQNext delivers. I need a game soon, I'm just not gaining any levels in RL.
Well I think Ultima Online is still to me the most fun I had in an MMO. With SWG Pre-CU being second... maybe followed by DAoC and EQ. Tho I actually enjoyed anarchy online.
I was on the interest team in UO and enjoyed creating little quests or events. The thing is they were optional...
I used to think games didn't have enough quests... now I hate quests. Which of course ties directly into "story" because story telling in MMO's is now all about quests. As opposed to I find this old ruin (think of UO T2A or vairous parts of EQ... and either try to figure out what it was.. or find stories here and there.
I miss camps... I miss a group getting together and just... being social and advancing...
I do not enjoy "ok run up this hill" "ok run back down the hill" "ok run up the hill and kill that heroic mob" .. run down the hill yahoo...
when devs include a story as a guide every player has to follow, there are essentially combining their demo perspective as required gameplay.
lore is great, as it open a world and its plumbable potential for players to create stories.
When storylines are present, the MMO has essentially become a single player game.
(not to mention most MMO storylines are pathetically simple cliches, with any interesting development potential completely eroded by the fact that they apply equally to all players)
Shadowbane, for example, had no enforced storyline. this meant that all players were constantly up to their eyeballs in fast evolving complex world stories, completely dependant on the circumstances created by all players. you truly could play any role you could think of, from spies that secretly played merchants guilds off eachother, to nobles who tried to build empires and enforce laws and structure, to ravenous raiders who had to fight constantly to control their bloody thirsty chaos clans, and on and on...
a formalized story line prevents a games playerbase from defining itself.
If you are the type of player who just has to follow some linear plotline, with breadcrumb trails laid out before you, then MMO's are the wrong type of game for you.
Stories RUIN MMO's. "SETTING, FACTION, and CONFLICT" is what MMO's need. WORLDS, not stories.
I'll tell you a secret: In a good MMO, the players make and are their own stories. You setting off from a starting village to become a blacksmith or a hero or a diplomat or explorer or anything else IS your story. Your gameplay writes your story.
When someone tries to force a linear storyline upon you, they're just taking your freedom. They're telling you that you do not have enough imagination, initiative, or common sense to play your character and to find your own direction. Basically, you have fallen into the trap of mediocre games designed by mediocre devs.
[Mod Edit]
I don't see any way to tell you that you are wrong about your opinion or what you look for in games, don't even care to tell you that you are wrong or that you need to change your mind. But I likewise don't see anything in your post to change my mind I enjoy video games pc,console,offline, and mmo's and I tend to like some story to them all regardless of what type of game it is and I have seen many games that claim to be open worlds without a story involved in the world provided and it has only pointed me to lazy devs who put a world together and maybe some pve enemies possibly a crafting system and if you are lucky some type of factional play that allows you to have some political intrigue which has always come off to me as a system designed to favor those with the most time or drive to dedicate to one game which is no longer my playstyle.
I don't think it's for any one person to determine "who mmo's are for" I don't or won't try to convince devs to not make open ended sandbox games devoid of lore or life (with the exception of not subbing to them). But I also don't think it's your place to tell us that we shouldn't play the types of mmo's we enjoy (which come around more often than open ended games I might add). Do what the rest of us do speak with your wallet if you don't like the games don't sub.
but yeah, to call this game Fantastic is like calling Twilight the Godfather of vampire movies....
I did not read the whole thread. Some at the start, little at the end. It touches upon complaints I have made here and there over the years about games that are not persistent worlds, but instead are persistent stories...persistent not being a good thing in this case. The reason being, nothing that you do matters. It is all meaningless.
You and some friends just killed the latest uber bad guy for where you are in your progression. Woot! Oh wait, thousands if not millions of players before you have done the same thing and thousands if not millions of people will do the same thing after you. It gets even better, if it is a dungeon or raid uber bad guy - well, you can frag the guy multiple times in a day! It changes nothing. Nothing that you do matters. You are just spinning your wheels in a 3D chatroom version of a repeatable single player or co-op game...yawn. Still, some people enjoy that and that is fine. Have to admit that playing a MMORPG is a lot cheaper for that solo/co-op play than buying a regular game that lasts a few days.
Still, I think MMOs do need stories. But they need grand stories that play out over a period of time. They need stories that the players influence - not stories that players have to follow. Think about the various games which have had live events or triggered events, eh? Some people will complain that if they were not a sub during that event that they will have missed it - tough. You should have been a sub then. However, you will have a part in the future events and how the story unfolds. Does this mean that the devs have to come up with interesting stuff as the game goes along instead of just dropping out some canned crap that everybody is forced to repeat over and over until they drop out their next canned crap? Yeah, it does. This would bring it more in line with what all the PnP people were used to...even if they were following some prefab module. I guess it comes down to the games needing DMs/GMs and a big idea.
This is not my most coherent post. So much of it has been gone over previously, over and over and over. We have these discussions. They go nowhere. We continue to play our timesinks.
I think about some of the games I have played recently and why I quit them. There was no point for me. Nothing that I did mattered. I might play them for a month or so, but eventually it gets back to the point that I am just spinning my wheels and passing the time. Sure, it is just a game - it is hard to say that anything you do in a game is going to matter; but then I think about games like Shadowbane where there was risk and what you did mattered. Sure, it was missing things of its own and I quit that during the beta for Oblivion to move to the beta for WoW because WoW had some promise at the time regardless of the Fisher Price graphics. Yet WoW is just a canned gear grind, and it was always hard to sub for more than a month at a time without realizing there was no point. EVE comes pretty damn close as far as offering the repetitive quest/mission grind some like and the what you do matters risk/reward system with sovereignty. I ragequit EVE over the ninja salvaging though, because of the inconsistencies in game mechanics and what the devs were saying made them look incompetent. CoH, DDO, LotRO, and so many other games - themepark games, well... think about a themepark, you might go a few times a year and have fun with the rides; but would you want to go to the same themepark day in and day out, spending a couple of hours or more there...?
MMOs need stories, in my opinion. Grand stories, that take years to play out - that do not repeat themselves, where what the players do affects the progression of the story, where it is interactive - where what you do matters in the least...
/end rant/ramble
I miss the MMORPG genre. Will a developer ever make one again?
Comments
I think that is a pretty flawed theory
Mortal Online will likely fail because it isn't made very well. Not because it lacks story.
MO has lots of bugs, a interface that no sane persone would consider userfriendly and quite a lot of features that are missing at this point. I also think the character models are ugly, and animations in the game are not good either.
I think they do have quite a bit of lore for the game. But I am not completely up to date about MO so some of the things I mentioned might not apply to the current version of MO.
MO is going to fail because it sucks, not because it has no story lol.
Playing: Rift, LotRO
Waiting on: GW2, BP
on the number 1, in a game like eq1 you dont play alone, so you dont make the story yourself, you experience it - unless you are an RPer and they actually do accept your story....for the most parts ;P
either way think OP have taken a stronger position than he meant to...sure aint agree with a MMO without story lines....but agree that an MMO must not be 1 mio diffrent story lines, really boring games like that when told what to do in every single aspect of the game.
would wish for a proper modern sandbox MMO, Darkfall is awesome..and even that game got a sense of cause, you get your specializations. and ofc to most go clan vs clan, create alliances and that kind, just no my thing + dont care to read about body parts all day.
its a bad MMO without a sense of direction, but its also a bad MMO if you cant choose YOUR direction
Story Driven MMOs and Non Story Driven MMOs are better descriptors than:
.
Sandbox.
.
Or Themepark.
.
Face it, pretty much everything in an MMO was created by some dev for you to ride on.
.
Except for the Second Life MMO
Well shave my back and call me an elf! -- Oghren
True. Everything else is complete bullshit.
I have heard the "players make their own stories" thing before, but I find it hard to believe that people do not see the clear and obvious difference between the "stories" made by players and the stories made by devs.
Player made stories, which are made through simple interaction with the game, are all focused around playing a videogame. All the stories you create are about you playing a videogame. People behave as if they were playing a videogame. I do not think player made stories have any depth to them at all.
Developer made stories can deliver the level of depth needed to make for an interesting story. I am not saying devs always do this but that developer stories have much more potential to deliver a deep story than player interaction can. Where as player stories are always focused on playing a videogame, unless you are with a bunch of roleplayers, developer stories can focus on your character in a world.
All men think they're fascinating. In my case, it's justified
Oh, yeah. Second Life. Player created content galore. Thanks for reminding me how stupid that game is (in my opinion) and how I never want to see another game like it.
Sounds like some other people in this thread would advocate something like that, too.
You want to make the story more meaningful and individual? Allow only one attempt of each quest. If you die, or time runs out, or the NPC you were escorting dies - that quest fails, and you can never try it again with that character.
"" Voice acting isn't an RPG element....it's just a production value." - grumpymel2
As others have said already, even within the most linear, themepark-y game, it is still possible to create one's own story and do as one wishes. In my own experience, the only thing limiting me within the games I choose to play, despite how they've been developed (with or without specific stories prewritten by the development team), is my own imagination. I don't have to stick to the story the developers wrote for a quest if I don't choose to; I can simply give my character her own motivation for completing the quest - whether it has anything to do with the reason the questgiver gave me or not.
If a player doesn't care for the ongoing storyline (for those of us who played MxO, we're very familiar with hating what the devs were doing with the storyline), there's no hard and fast rule that says they have to abide by the storyline (and in MxO, many of us ignored some of the stupid, stupid things the devs came up with and came up with our own stories while sticking to the lore). Most MMOs today have some kind of lore accompanying them, so there's no real need to stick to a specific storyline if you don't care for it so long as one at least loosely adheres to the lore - at least in my opinion.
Firebrand Art
"You are obviously confusing a mature rating with actual maturity." -Asherman
Maybe MMO is not your genre, go play Modern Warfare...or something you can be all twitchy...and rank up all night. This is seriously getting tired. -Ranyr
i think the state we're in now is that MMOs are trying to provide two experiences at the same time - one an MMO story experience and the other a single / multi-player RPG story exprience. From a story perspective, a game like AoC or LoTRO strives to give you everything you'd get in a single-player RPG like Baldur's Gate or Fallout.
And obviously many players enjoy this type of experience, hence why they enjoy it in their MMOs.
The problem is that this type of storyline that it is exactly the same from every players perspective (you killed the dragon, you saved the city, you got the unique legendary sword, you are the hero!). This in turn creates a paradox on the MMO side of things and takes away from the world as a whole. (There can't be 3000 people that are each "the chosen ONE").
In my opinion though, the solution is not to get rid of storylines altogether. I think the next evolution will be an MMO that fully embraces a storyline created for EVERYONE (all 3000 people on the server or whatever). So rather than "i am the chosen one, i killed the dragon", it will become "we are the chosen ones, we killed the dragon". Of course you can't have 3000 all killing one dragon on a regular basis. But that's the point, maybe different types of stories need to be told by MMOs than single-player RPGs. There are plenty of stories about armies and empires and things that involve more than 1 hero. These are the kindf of stories MMOs are ideal for telling.
"Id rather work on something with great potential than on fulfilling a promise of mediocrity."
- Raph Koster
Tried: AO,EQ,EQ2,DAoC,SWG,AA,SB,HZ,CoX,PS,GA,TR,IV,GnH,EVE, PP,DnL,WAR,MxO,SWG,FE,VG,AoC,DDO,LoTRO,Rift,TOR,Aion,Tera,TSW,GW2,DCUO,CO,STO
Favourites: AO,SWG,EVE,TR,LoTRO,TSW,EQ2, Firefall
Currently Playing: ESO
Or just make the protagonist(s) of the story someone else but the player...
The players can well act as the side-kicks, and affect the future of the world.
I love story and quest based MMO's... After all, they created the game not me, it's the Dev's world, not mine, I'm just a guest and what is going on around me in the world helps determine what/who I am/become in their game.
If I wanted to tell my own story, I'd learn how to program my own game.
One thing that can be done better in MMO's is that that should include multiple storylines, so players can walk different paths in their world, and allow for the game experience to be different for alt characters etc.
Well said.
In a way, 3,000 players can kill THE Dragon - if there is a community effort required. Destroy a hundred pillars of power with explosives (which require massive amounts of raw materials which even lowbies can gather), all within an hour or so, to open a portal. The portal allows five groups of players through to defeat sub-bosses in different locations, which drop five pieces which combine to make a key which allows entry to THE dragon's lair. Once the dragon has been killed - loot is portioned out based on level.
"" Voice acting isn't an RPG element....it's just a production value." - grumpymel2
Looking at the solo games...
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1. Dragon Age Origins, almost a pure story drive RPG
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2. Fallout 3, you can roam the country side, but there is a main story to follow if you choose to follow it
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3. Oblivion, much the same as Fallout 3, also written by Bethesda
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Looking at WoW, original WoW had the dark iron dwarves epic story line. You first met the dark irons at level 9 or so, met them a few more times as you leveled up to 60, and assault their city in Blackrock Depths, and they were the base of the first raids in WoW, The Molten Core where you go and kill the dark iron dwarves god.
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Can you skip the story line in WoW, sure. Did it make the game more interesting for me? Sure.
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Second Life. No story. No quests. Nada. You make up your own stuff, your own house, etc. Is it fun? I think so.
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Why are we even having this argument? If you like it, go play it.
Well shave my back and call me an elf! -- Oghren
You're describing more of an "event" type of thing, there has to be a way to make it more regular. But yeah, that's the idea.
Also, you might want to know, RIFT is doing something like this with loot and mobs (but i don't think with story)
"Id rather work on something with great potential than on fulfilling a promise of mediocrity."
- Raph Koster
Tried: AO,EQ,EQ2,DAoC,SWG,AA,SB,HZ,CoX,PS,GA,TR,IV,GnH,EVE, PP,DnL,WAR,MxO,SWG,FE,VG,AoC,DDO,LoTRO,Rift,TOR,Aion,Tera,TSW,GW2,DCUO,CO,STO
Favourites: AO,SWG,EVE,TR,LoTRO,TSW,EQ2, Firefall
Currently Playing: ESO
this thread confuses me a lil bit. i understand lore and storyline, and i think they work well together. seperatly it is a very hard thing to accomplish.
a mmo pvp game for example can do well without storyline. i.e shadowbane. open world, you build your city, it gave you a little lore, and then said do what you want and kill whoever you want.
ive felt this guiding hand of fate before that the op is talking about, which i will refere to as storyline. i dont think it ruins the game, i think its just a different experience for some. i really loved the storyline in ffxi. that thing could guide me into hell and i would gladly follow it there with a smile.
on a personal note though, i do tend to have more fun in a game with more lore, less storyline.
Good post.
I don't understand why it has to be one or the other. Can't we have both type of mmos?
I played LOTRO since beta. The storylines are very very fun! I don't see what you are complaining about. And it doesn't force you to do the storylines either. This isn't final fantasy.
Tell me, what are you going to do in an MMORPG if you don't follow the storylines? Run around for hours imagining quests and pretending that your character is growing? Craft endlessly? That doesn't sound very fun at all.
A game needs a storyline. The storyline is what makes the lore. If nothing ever happened, then there would be no lore. It would just be a bunch a scenery and random people with no purpose.
Quests don't have to drag you through a major storyline. They can be individual stories that you choose to take a part in. Some players don't really enjoy the being dragged through a canned story. I always logged into UO and EQ feeling like there was something that I wanted to do or some goal I was working on, even though I was not paying any attention to the official story. In WoW (my current subscription game) and LoTRO, I feel/felt confined by the storyline quests.
There might have been a storyline to EverQuest, but up until they started having progression (that is, a series of tasks to unlock zones or raids), you could easily not even know what it was... and after they started having progression... well, it was still optional, and a lot of people would get their info from guild boards or fansites and still ignore the official story. The real story was something more like, "You should have seen us down in zone A. Someone sat down too close to a door and we were fighting off adds for 45 minutes. It's a miracle we didn't die!" or "I had to go to the Plane of Fear 78 times before my epic piece dropped, and then I lost the roll... Here's to it not taking 78 more trips!"
Lore can be in the game in many ways-- NPCs, monuments and ruins in the landscape, events, areas that have a particular meaning (e.g. the Plane of Fear in EverQuest. It's the home of Cazic-Thule, god of Fear... obviously enough) , descriptions and choices made at character creation, bits of history included in the quests, books lying around. There are people out there who enjoy finding and cataloging facts about a virtual world and posting them on the Net for less exploration oriented players. Where's the fun in having it all spoonfed to you? There are entire play styles being underserved out there!
(EDIT: Oh, and meaningful factions! There was something special about being an iksar or a troll back in the days of EQ when faction *really* mattered. Being KOS everywhere you go can bring the lore to life for sure. (LOL))
If you like storylines, there are plenty of games out there. I think that the OP would just like to see more games that are virtual worlds.
That's it. Just give me one virtual world in a first line AAA MMORPG and I'll be gone from these boards.
So far, I'm going on 10 years to replace what was pre-Luclin EQ. DAOC was close. Shadowbane was admirable (although I'm not really a PVP'er).
Hoping that FF XIV or EQNext delivers. I need a game soon, I'm just not gaining any levels in RL.
Well I think Ultima Online is still to me the most fun I had in an MMO. With SWG Pre-CU being second... maybe followed by DAoC and EQ. Tho I actually enjoyed anarchy online.
I was on the interest team in UO and enjoyed creating little quests or events. The thing is they were optional...
I used to think games didn't have enough quests... now I hate quests. Which of course ties directly into "story" because story telling in MMO's is now all about quests. As opposed to I find this old ruin (think of UO T2A or vairous parts of EQ... and either try to figure out what it was.. or find stories here and there.
I miss camps... I miss a group getting together and just... being social and advancing...
I do not enjoy "ok run up this hill" "ok run back down the hill" "ok run up the hill and kill that heroic mob" .. run down the hill yahoo...
I agree with OP.
when devs include a story as a guide every player has to follow, there are essentially combining their demo perspective as required gameplay.
lore is great, as it open a world and its plumbable potential for players to create stories.
When storylines are present, the MMO has essentially become a single player game.
(not to mention most MMO storylines are pathetically simple cliches, with any interesting development potential completely eroded by the fact that they apply equally to all players)
Shadowbane, for example, had no enforced storyline. this meant that all players were constantly up to their eyeballs in fast evolving complex world stories, completely dependant on the circumstances created by all players. you truly could play any role you could think of, from spies that secretly played merchants guilds off eachother, to nobles who tried to build empires and enforce laws and structure, to ravenous raiders who had to fight constantly to control their bloody thirsty chaos clans, and on and on...
a formalized story line prevents a games playerbase from defining itself.
I don't see any way to tell you that you are wrong about your opinion or what you look for in games, don't even care to tell you that you are wrong or that you need to change your mind. But I likewise don't see anything in your post to change my mind I enjoy video games pc,console,offline, and mmo's and I tend to like some story to them all regardless of what type of game it is and I have seen many games that claim to be open worlds without a story involved in the world provided and it has only pointed me to lazy devs who put a world together and maybe some pve enemies possibly a crafting system and if you are lucky some type of factional play that allows you to have some political intrigue which has always come off to me as a system designed to favor those with the most time or drive to dedicate to one game which is no longer my playstyle.
I don't think it's for any one person to determine "who mmo's are for" I don't or won't try to convince devs to not make open ended sandbox games devoid of lore or life (with the exception of not subbing to them). But I also don't think it's your place to tell us that we shouldn't play the types of mmo's we enjoy (which come around more often than open ended games I might add). Do what the rest of us do speak with your wallet if you don't like the games don't sub.
but yeah, to call this game Fantastic is like calling Twilight the Godfather of vampire movies....
I did not read the whole thread. Some at the start, little at the end. It touches upon complaints I have made here and there over the years about games that are not persistent worlds, but instead are persistent stories...persistent not being a good thing in this case. The reason being, nothing that you do matters. It is all meaningless.
You and some friends just killed the latest uber bad guy for where you are in your progression. Woot! Oh wait, thousands if not millions of players before you have done the same thing and thousands if not millions of people will do the same thing after you. It gets even better, if it is a dungeon or raid uber bad guy - well, you can frag the guy multiple times in a day! It changes nothing. Nothing that you do matters. You are just spinning your wheels in a 3D chatroom version of a repeatable single player or co-op game...yawn. Still, some people enjoy that and that is fine. Have to admit that playing a MMORPG is a lot cheaper for that solo/co-op play than buying a regular game that lasts a few days.
Still, I think MMOs do need stories. But they need grand stories that play out over a period of time. They need stories that the players influence - not stories that players have to follow. Think about the various games which have had live events or triggered events, eh? Some people will complain that if they were not a sub during that event that they will have missed it - tough. You should have been a sub then. However, you will have a part in the future events and how the story unfolds. Does this mean that the devs have to come up with interesting stuff as the game goes along instead of just dropping out some canned crap that everybody is forced to repeat over and over until they drop out their next canned crap? Yeah, it does. This would bring it more in line with what all the PnP people were used to...even if they were following some prefab module. I guess it comes down to the games needing DMs/GMs and a big idea.
This is not my most coherent post. So much of it has been gone over previously, over and over and over. We have these discussions. They go nowhere. We continue to play our timesinks.
I think about some of the games I have played recently and why I quit them. There was no point for me. Nothing that I did mattered. I might play them for a month or so, but eventually it gets back to the point that I am just spinning my wheels and passing the time. Sure, it is just a game - it is hard to say that anything you do in a game is going to matter; but then I think about games like Shadowbane where there was risk and what you did mattered. Sure, it was missing things of its own and I quit that during the beta for Oblivion to move to the beta for WoW because WoW had some promise at the time regardless of the Fisher Price graphics. Yet WoW is just a canned gear grind, and it was always hard to sub for more than a month at a time without realizing there was no point. EVE comes pretty damn close as far as offering the repetitive quest/mission grind some like and the what you do matters risk/reward system with sovereignty. I ragequit EVE over the ninja salvaging though, because of the inconsistencies in game mechanics and what the devs were saying made them look incompetent. CoH, DDO, LotRO, and so many other games - themepark games, well... think about a themepark, you might go a few times a year and have fun with the rides; but would you want to go to the same themepark day in and day out, spending a couple of hours or more there...?
MMOs need stories, in my opinion. Grand stories, that take years to play out - that do not repeat themselves, where what the players do affects the progression of the story, where it is interactive - where what you do matters in the least...
/end rant/ramble
I miss the MMORPG genre. Will a developer ever make one again?
Explorer: 87%, Killer: 67%, Achiever: 27%, Socializer: 20%
i agree that mmos dont need stories to be good or to even be mmos
but the other stuff the op said doesnt make much sense
Guild Wars 2 is my religion