Cameron from Random Battle has a great article on How Do You Tell a Good Story In an MMOG? and a second part to it. While I agree that it is very hard to tell a good NPC based story in a MMORPG, as opposed to a book or film, I do think there is room for improvement up from where we are with games like WoW. Do people turn on instant quest text display and click "accept" without reading the quest because they don't want a story, or because the stories that World of Warcraft tells us with their quests texts usually aren't all that great?
One point is improving how the story is told. Everquest 2 quest givers have a voice, and in Final Fantasy XI the more important epic quest line stories are told in cut scenes. The epic "book" quests of LotRO also have cutscenes. Maybe we don't need that for every kill ten foozles quest, but those are errands, not quests. World of Warcraft has long quest chains, but they aren't marked as such, and would benefit from A) being visibly a longer story, and B) using other media than text for telling that story.
The other point is that stories in a MMORPG do not necessarily happen between players and NPCs, but the more memorable ones happen between players. And the instinctive reaction of "game developers have no influence over the stories that develop between players" is dead wrong. Game structure and rewards have a strong influence on player behavior, and that leads to the same story happening to different people on different servers. If I asked 100 of you to write an essay about "what happened to my guild when TBC came out", I'd get only around half a dozen different stories. When you read about some guild drama in a blog, half of the time you think "hey, the same happened to other people I know / heard about". There are archetype stories like "top raiders left our guild to join a stronger one" or "someone we trusted robbed the guild bank" which are built in the game mechanics of World of Warcraft. The guild bank robbery didn't happen before, because there was no guild bank, and the story will change in the future because Blizzard is still fiddling around with guild bank access rights setup options. The unhappy story of the top raiders rather joining a new guild than helping their old guild mates to advance could be turned into a much happier story of cooperation and loyalty if Blizzard would set up guilds to reward such behavior and discourage guild hopping.
What game devs need to decide is what kind of stories they want to have in their games, and then give the players the tools that enable those stories. If World of Warcraft is lacking stories of heroic self-sacrifice it is because there isn't actually a way in which you could heroically sacrifice yourself for the advantage of your team. The closest WoW has to that is the paladins ability to die to save somebody else, and that is usually just used when the group is obviously wiping and saving the priest is better than everyone having to run back. It would be neither useful nor heroic to do that in the middle of an encounter.
The force of MMORPGs compared to books, films, or multiplayer shooters, is that MMORPGs are cooperative multiplayer games. There is an endless story potential in people working together, building up trust, betraying trust, sharing, helping each other, being good or evil to each other. These stories already happen every day, but game developers could both increase the story potential and direct those stories into happy endings by giving the players the right gameplay options and reward structures. If World of Warcraft today appears as a game full of egoists and hermits, the game structure is certainly taking some of the blame for that.
No comments:
Post a Comment