Howdy, Stranger!
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
Quick Links
Linear content vs. Non-Linear content, which do you prefer?
Vermillion_Raventhal
Member EpicPosts: 4,198
Or would you prefer something in the middle?
A pure linear game you don't choose any quest. You are just forced do what the narrative tells you.
A pure non linear game you aren't told to do any quest at all and you can do them in any order.
Questhubs are generally considered linear. Most times you do have options of tracks you can level on. Meaning you can level at A or B spot to do quest. You also get to choose some of the order of quest you want to choose at each hub or skip them.
Skyrim like. This type generally has a main quest, optional main quest and optional quest lines. You can generally choose what order you do most quest outside of the main quest. Sometimes the optional main quest disappear when you make choices during the main quest. Side quest generally stay there unless something big happens in the story making you lose access.
Or you like fill in the blank content style.
A pure linear game you don't choose any quest. You are just forced do what the narrative tells you.
A pure non linear game you aren't told to do any quest at all and you can do them in any order.
Questhubs are generally considered linear. Most times you do have options of tracks you can level on. Meaning you can level at A or B spot to do quest. You also get to choose some of the order of quest you want to choose at each hub or skip them.
Skyrim like. This type generally has a main quest, optional main quest and optional quest lines. You can generally choose what order you do most quest outside of the main quest. Sometimes the optional main quest disappear when you make choices during the main quest. Side quest generally stay there unless something big happens in the story making you lose access.
Or you like fill in the blank content style.
Comments
Epic Music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vAigCvelkhQ&list=PLo9FRw1AkDuQLEz7Gvvaz3ideB2NpFtT1
https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_msdos?&sort=-downloads&page=1
Kyleran: "Now there's the real trick, learning to accept and enjoy a game for what it offers rather than pass on what might be a great playing experience because it lacks a few features you prefer."
John Henry Newman: "A man would do nothing if he waited until he could do it so well that no one could find fault."
FreddyNoNose: "A good game needs no defense; a bad game has no defense." "Easily digested content is just as easily forgotten."
LacedOpium: "So the question that begs to be asked is, if you are not interested in the game mechanics that define the MMORPG genre, then why are you playing an MMORPG?"
Console Games - Linear, story-driven
..because we're gamers, damn it!! - William Massachusetts (Log Horizon)
So what does one do? Just do a little a research or use your gut but also try something different every now and again. As Daniel Tiger will say/sing, "You gotto try new foods because they might taste goooood!". I have my 4 year old son to thank for that bit of wisdom.
"If I offended you, you needed it" -Corey Taylor
Boy: Why can't I talk to Him?
Mom: We don't talk to Priests.
As if it could exist, without being payed for.
F2P means you get what you paid for. Pay nothing, get nothing.
Even telemarketers wouldn't think that.
It costs money to play. Therefore P2W.
I like content that follows a standard narrative path, and I like content that's locality based and not contingent upon any other factors.
Take most Bethesda games, for instance. If I follow the strict, single storyline from beginning to end, then I'll miss the majority of the content in the game, but I will get a solid narrative. It's all I really need to play the game, but all of the incidentals in each completely skippable town gives the game character.
It's like the difference between TV shows that used to run 24-26 episodes per season, to the current standard of 10-12. With 10-12 shows you get a strict, solid single narrative with maybe a couple of subplots. Characterization has to happen very quickly. With 24-26 episodes, however, you have plenty of time to experiment with the characters and have entire episodes that diverge from the main plot entirely.
I prefer games that play like a 26 episode TV show, with lots of opportunities for side stories while still contributing to the overall narrative.
This isn't a signature, you just think it is.
The difference in games like skyrim and witcher 3 is that the level system isn't that restrictive and even though they have quite lengthy quest chains the game as a whole isn't linear in comparison to your typical mmorpg.
Still, what's important are the quests themselves, if all I get is kill 10 rats its not going to make much difference if they are stand-alone quests or if you make quest-chains. However, if you wish to create a strong narrative in the game there could be good reasons to go for linear method of delivering that narrative.
However, assuming you have more than one storyline in your game, I prefer the various storylines to be distributed non-linearly.
Like Skyrim. Each guild / main story is linear as you must complete any given quest before progressing to the next. But, you don't have to complete the mages guild before you can complete thieves guild before you complete the assassins guild etc. Its a good mix.
That being said, I don't like stories in my games in general, but especially not in MMOs. I like my gameplay and freedom, but to tell a good story you need to restrict those things. So, I prefer non-linear content in my MMOs - I'd like to be able to explore, go pretty much anywhere and find interesting content. Might be out of my league if I'm not powerful enough, or might be trivial, but I like defining my own path and discovering new and interesting things to do.
Story-building as opposed to story-telling would be the crux there. Not many games really have the concept of story building as a component of the play. Many sandboxes for example just go lite on the narrative so that players aren't bogged down by a linear directive.
However, there is the principles behind collaborative storytelling and the concept of retroactive story building which are concepts that would work remarkably well in open world and MMO type games.
Example being a storytelling mechanic where the narrative of the game is assembled for each player by tracking their play activity and generating dialogue based on their chosen activities. This can be extended by tracking player behavior and seeding relevant events into the world around them to create a very personalized and potentially complex/detailed narrative, yet it comes from a source that almost completely lacks linearity.
Even in the case of creating an overarching meta-plot that players follow (which would technically be a linear component), you can delineate it by using a system similar to the one mentioned above to generate a variety of activities that are unique to the user as well as a consequence of their own decisions to make the game play in a very non-linear fashion.
It's an annoyingly unexplored concept still with only a few small games really tinkering with the concept at this point, as it's directly reliant on the game possessing a relatively complex set of AI to manage it. However, it's something I feel should get pushed more as it's a design uniquely suited to MMO and social gaming platforms.
"The knowledge of the theory of logic has no tendency whatever to make men good reasoners." - Thomas B. Macaulay
"The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge." - Daniel J. Boorstin
One, Skyrim uses quest hubs as well a long overarching quests (along with a lot of "radiant quests" which are semi-random elements or scripted events that can trigger anywhere).
Two, quest hubs are generally a collection point for localized and directed activities. In other words, it's pretty heavily linear as everything that you do is focused around that location until you complete the hub provides and move on to the next hub.
Where the non-linearity comes into play is more often aligned with where players are given reign on the direction of their play and the narrative. Where the quests may have been designed in a linear fashion, the game itself can be non linear by virtue of it not holding the player's progress beholden entirely to a quest/activity (as in they have choice of many activities and quests across a range of locations as opposed to hub-hopping or having to follow a specific chain to completion).
"The knowledge of the theory of logic has no tendency whatever to make men good reasoners." - Thomas B. Macaulay
"The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge." - Daniel J. Boorstin
Believe it or not Vanilla WoW was perfect !
Each zone were for about 8 levels and you always had 3 zones to choose from. And you were not always restricted to a central quest hub within a zone. Because of this, it was able to tell a story.
Now this is important;
Vanilla WoW was a VERY LARGE GAME. And you need a large game to do this. You stayed level 22 for hours !......Find any of this in the crap being developed now.
How about you write the code to do it. Think of it as a proof of concept. Then get back to us.
Epic Music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vAigCvelkhQ&list=PLo9FRw1AkDuQLEz7Gvvaz3ideB2NpFtT1
https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_msdos?&sort=-downloads&page=1
Kyleran: "Now there's the real trick, learning to accept and enjoy a game for what it offers rather than pass on what might be a great playing experience because it lacks a few features you prefer."
John Henry Newman: "A man would do nothing if he waited until he could do it so well that no one could find fault."
FreddyNoNose: "A good game needs no defense; a bad game has no defense." "Easily digested content is just as easily forgotten."
LacedOpium: "So the question that begs to be asked is, if you are not interested in the game mechanics that define the MMORPG genre, then why are you playing an MMORPG?"
Beyond that, as I said (in the post you quoted no less);
"...it's directly reliant on the game possessing a relatively complex set of AI to manage it."
This isn't something anyone can just proof out and pop a prototype of. It's a system that has a lot of moving parts and relies on tracking a large amount of data to generate responses from. Making a non or minimally interactive mock-up would be about the only option, and you'd have time better spent on a proof of concept dealing with other core components of the game that can deliver the overall concept of the user experience that is far easier to quickly assemble.
There's very simply a lot of programmers I wouldn't even trust to pull off the development of the AI and server architecture (for example this is the kind of person that does end up tackling the concept, an ex-intelligence behavioral expert), because it's a mix of intelligent systems and network programming to which both are rather hard to get really good people for.
It's a difficult goal as it's a concept that has high demands for it's development, and it's rather unexplored as a way to deliver narrative in an interactive medium.
"The knowledge of the theory of logic has no tendency whatever to make men good reasoners." - Thomas B. Macaulay
"The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge." - Daniel J. Boorstin
The only thing I can really picture in my head is content triggers. For example, if I'm playing a dwarf and I go out into the world and slaughter hundreds of orcs, the game would track my actions, notice that I'm killing a higher proportion of orcs compared to other races. At some arbitrary point, it would generate some orc assassins who would track me down when I'm in game. At the next arbitrary point, it would send a small army against my favourite dwarf hangout (whilst I'm online) and give me clues as to the leader. Then I would be able to track down the orc leader and kill him, removing the threat (for now).
Such a thing does, admittedly, sound a lot better than the current way quests work and would make it a bit more personal when leveling, but I can also imagine a lot of people missing out on some fun stuff.
It's still a very rough concept and what we do have tends to be niche and indie games from people willing to toss money at completely random experimentation.
From my perspective, it's a tool that would greatly help in turning the user experience into something that's more dynamic, more novel, and more customizable through the ability to react to, infer from, and predict behaviors that we can build stories out of as a consequence of a player's interaction within the game.
The idea that people will "miss out" is certainly a fair one, but on that same token what they miss of some other user's experience they are making up for with an experience of their own.
"The knowledge of the theory of logic has no tendency whatever to make men good reasoners." - Thomas B. Macaulay
"The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge." - Daniel J. Boorstin
I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been -Wayne Gretzky
The best design is areas packed with interviewing stories... but having multiple "areas" to choose from... so you don't have to level through the same areas over and over with new characters...
Game designers needs to think of "replay ability" when they design these games...
No doubt such webs would be even more expensive to make than GW2's dynamic events.
I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been -Wayne Gretzky
For a simple example you have quest A. Quest A has 2 choices. Choice A1 will give you a random scenario from 1-100. Choice A2 will gives you 101-200. You choose option A and get scenario 45. 45 has 2 options A and B with 15 random scenarios each.
A system like this can be expanded with adding scenarios. Problem comes into methods of expanding scenarios to fit you and NPC involved. Also making sure each connection makes sense. Lots of scenarios so it doesn't seem like you are given the same quest over and over.
Your system doesn't help with the problem at all.