SWTOR

[Velorath]

Having a "writer" sitting away from the game design and churning out prose doesn't seem too useful. So having a large team of content creators who can "own" quests and do what they can to make them interesting is more productive. Even Metzen is I believe much more about invention, consistency and direction than actually writing in game content.

They aren't mutually exclusive.  It's just that in the case of SWTOR it's more expensive to make content because you have the writer, voice actors, and cut-scene animators in addition to they guys actually coding the quests.  It could be argued that the cost of all those extra people could have been used to hire on more quest designers instead, but there's no guarantee that EA would have approved as high a budget for the game as they did without Bioware presenting story and voice-overs as a somewhat unique selling point.

[DraconianOne]

Until Starcraft II, where they hired former Bioware employee Brian Kindregan as lead writer, it doesn't look like Blizzard has ever really gone out of their way to actually hire writers for their games.

Most of the criticism of Starcraft II I've read was levelled at the story and how it was so tedious/clichéd/trite that it just got in the way of the game. Having not played it, I don't know how much truth there is in this.

It is possible to play Wrath all the way though without any pause for thought as to why you're reading quests. It's not necessarily the fault of the writers though - while the writing in and of itself isn't going to win any great literature prizes, there are (imo) some great little quests with intriguing little stories that will be totally overlooked by the players who just click "Accept" and go off to do the quest. It's far easier to do this now because the UI has been modified to show the quest list, the quest objectives, the location of the quest objectives (on the map screen) and a note in the mobs tooltip to say if they are part of the quest objective. So why do I need to read the quest know why I'm killing "Big Roy" the sealion or travelling around the game world for Crusader Bridenbrad?

It's easy to blame Blizzard for implementing these changes to make the game more simplistic but in truth, it's the players who made it this way by originally developing the addons that Blizzard incorporated into the default UI. Player developed quest tracking, map and tooltip mods all existed for a long time. Even now you've got addons like Tourguide which can give you a (player written) list of quests to do and in what order so that you can speed level. When coupled with TomTom, you even get a fucking great big arrow on the HUD pointing you in the direction you need to go! Why read the quest text?

Remember that scene in Aliens on the Sulaco where Ripley is briefing the marines? She's trying to explain the background to them but all she gets is Hudson saying "Is this going to be a stand-up fight or another bug hunt?" and Vasquez saying "Look man, I only need to know one thing: where they are..."  That's what MMOs are like; Ripley is the quest-giver and the marines are the players who don't give a shit about the background.

Bioware are taking a gamble with the story but I guess they're falling back on the old argument "Story is what we've always done."

As an aside, I read yesterday that there was an SE version of Planescape: Torment that was fully voiced. Is this right? Never mind. Irrelevant.

[Merusk]

Now, the good thing quests have going for them is you end up killing a variety of things and they move you from area to area.  However you can do these things on your own if you want, and if you are such a slave to the dinggrats that you camp one spot for 40 hours in a row, well..you have no right to complain it isn't fun to do that when there are plenty of other things to do.

This is the part where someone explains to you it doesn't matter what you want to do, because if XP grinding is what the other 90% of the players are doing and you're forced to group.. guess what you're doing too.   In any game where grinding is the only leveling mechanic, you're going to be forced to group or you're going to be fighting to kill a single mob for anything - mats, xp, whatever - regardless of if your avatar can solo the mob or not.

I'll note that EvE is an exception, but that's because it's world design is 99% empty space and so it was easy enough to generate enough worlds/ spawns to accommodate 0.0.   Highsec space still follows the above example, as anyone who's tried to rat hisec can attest.

[Velorath]

Until Starcraft II, where they hired former Bioware employee Brian Kindregan as lead writer, it doesn't look like Blizzard has ever really gone out of their way to actually hire writers for their games.

Most of the criticism of Starcraft II I've read was levelled at the story and how it was so tedious/clichéd/trite that it just got in the way of the game. Having not played it, I don't know how much truth there is in this.

It is possible to play Wrath all the way though without any pause for thought as to why you're reading quests. It's not necessarily the fault of the writers though - while the writing in and of itself isn't going to win any great literature prizes, there are (imo) some great little quests with intriguing little stories that will be totally overlooked by the players who just click "Accept" and go off to do the quest. It's far easier to do this now because the UI has been modified to show the quest list, the quest objectives, the location of the quest objectives (on the map screen) and a note in the mobs tooltip to say if they are part of the quest objective. So why do I need to read the quest know why I'm killing "Big Roy" the sealion or travelling around the game world for Crusader Bridenbrad?

It's easy to blame Blizzard for implementing these changes to make the game more simplistic but in truth, it's the players who made it this way by originally developing the addons that Blizzard incorporated into the default UI. Player developed quest tracking, map and tooltip mods all existed for a long time. Even now you've got addons like Tourguide which can give you a (player written) list of quests to do and in what order so that you can speed level. When coupled with TomTom, you even get a fucking great big arrow on the HUD pointing you in the direction you need to go! Why read the quest text?

While most people click through quest text in WoW, I'd bet a lot of those same people paid attention to the Wrathgate cutscene in Lich King.   Anyway, we can have this chicken or the egg debate about whether developers don't put a lot of effort into MMO stories because the players don't care, or whether the players don't care because developers don't put a lot of effort into story, but I can only speak to my personal tastes.  I liked Tortage in AoC, and what little of the story stuff I saw in FFXI and LOTRO (games I didn't stick with, but for reasons other than story, and I'll actually probably give LOTRO another try when it goes F2P).

Really, for me the problem I've had with story in past MMO's breaks down to two aspects, one being the story quality, and the other being how the story is presented (personally I don't really care about the "you aren't really changing the world in an MMO" stuff, but YMMV).  Right now, MMO's generally have lackluster story, presented as boxes of text that are easy to click through.  Improve the quality of the writing but not the presentation, and a lot of people will still likely click through the text out of laziness.  I like Mass Effect's story, but replace all the dialog in the game with text boxes, and even I'd have trouble making it all the way through.  Improve the presentation but not the quality of the writing and you end up with something like FFXIII that people might sit through at first until they realize the story isn't going to get better.

Writing quality is obviously somewhat subjective.  I typically like the writing in most of Bioware's game, but there are also people out there who love Warcraft's lore for whatever reason.  Presumably, people who aren't fans of Bioware's writing wouldn't be interested in SWTOR anyway, but whatever.  I understand not being interested in the game on those grounds.  As far as presentation goes, a lot of video games have moved away from text and towards voice-overs as technology has allowed it.  It would stand to reason then that most gamers prefer a cinematic style of presenting story (the dialog choices also make the storytelling interactive which is a plus in an interactive medium) rather than a static scene with text boxes.  For all the complaints about voice-overs in this thread, walls of text feel pretty archaic in games today.

So what are the options then when it comes to story in an MMO?  You can either do it like the vast majority of other MMO developers do, and half-ass some story in text because you figure nobody is going to pay attention anyway.  You can go the sandbox route and do something where most of the "content" is player generated.  Or you can actually put a lot of resources into trying to tell a story.  We've seen a lot of implementations of the first option, a handful of the second, but only incomplete attempts at the third (AoC).  If SWTOR fails, I'll accept that MMO players will never care about story, but at least at that point it wouldn't have been for lack of anyone trying.

[Malakili]

This is the part where someone explains to you it doesn't matter what you want to do, because if XP grinding is what the other 90% of the players are doing and you're forced to group.. guess what you're doing too.

Just because a game doesn't let you quest to max doesn't mean you must spawn camp with a group for 40 hours.   I still think that if you just took WoW, and instead of having quests, gave the player a XP bonus = to a quest reward after every 25 kills (or simply upped the experience of monsters to make the leveling time the same as it is now), the experience honestly wouldn't change all that much.

[Kageru]

Well you're pretty much fine then since most of the korean cash-shop MMO's have pretty much that as a levelling experience. However I suspect more people see that as a tedious and repetitive grind rather than a lucky opportunity to escape the dreaded "quest grind". Certainly most big budget MMO titles see a reasonable amount of directed content as being required for market acceptance and retention

I will happily champion the argument that if you are not a big-budget MMO the worst thing you can do is try and generate the WoW quest experience. Fallen Earth effectively spent all their money on PvE content and would have done much better focusing their limited resources on re-usable and player driven game mechanics. But even then having a "go farm mobs" approach to levelling would just be to husband their limited resources rather than actually a desirable outcome.

[Malakili]

But even then having a "go farm mobs" approach to levelling would just be to husband their limited resources rather than actually a desirable outcome.

I've been leveling a WoW character again because I got back in touch a friiend I hadn't seen in like 7 years and he suggested we play WoW together, and the leveling really is "go farm mobs, but go farm these particular mobs."  Granted, now you can dungeon finder to victory too.  Maybe be like being just given a list of tasks and crossing them off more than I realize.

[Kageru]

That would probably be why the next expansion is doing a refresh of 1-60 environments and gameplay so they can update now ancient content with some of the lessons they've learnt.

But hey, tell your friend "let's just sit in the middle of this field and farm mobs as they re-pop" and see how thrilling he thinks that suggestion is.

[Malakili]

But hey, tell your friend "let's just sit in the middle of this field and farm mobs as they re-pop" and see how thrilling he thinks that suggestion is.

How many fucking times do I have to say that you don't need to do it this way.  You can just as easily say "hey, lets go explore those mountains over here"  and then a hour later you've "farmed" a lot of mobs and seen some neat things.  Like I said, I didn't really "farm" what I played Darkfall, I did things that were useful to me and ended up killing alot of shit along the way.

All of this is to miss the point anyway, SWTORs focus on story isn't what "the people" want anymore than than EQ style mob spawn camping.

[Kageru]

"Moving around too much drops your XP/hour noob. I looked up on GrindHead and this field has the fastest re-pop of mobs with less HP than the level average. That hill has crap for mob-density."

Agree though, this conversation has little to do with SWTOR which is more likely to have players wishing the talking would stop so they could finally go kill something.

[Sky]

If you think that every game should be designed around what the playerbase has been trained to do, go fuck off cause you're part of the problem.

Or just write another few hundred posts about a game you seem to have no intention of buying I guess.

[Malakili]

"Moving around too much drops your XP/hour noob. I looked up on GrindHead and this field has the fastest re-pop of mobs with less HP than the level average. That hill has crap for mob-density."

Agree though, this conversation has little to do with SWTOR which is more likely to have players wishing the talking would stop so they could finally go kill something.

That sounds like a players losing their minds over efficiency problem, not a game problem.  Then again, maybe where WoW really succeeds is managing and directing that attitude.

[Lakov_Sanite]

I liked the wrathgate cenematic the first time I saw it, after that it got tedious.  If you can't skip the cutscenes in SWTOR people are going to get tired of them very, very quickly.  Also it's not a matter of if people will accept nothing but voiced quests and cutscenes it's that there is no way bioware will be able to keep up with it and still have enough content.

[Reg]

Has anyone actually working on SWTOR actually said "NO YOU CAN NEVER SKIP CUT-SCENES!!!1" Why the hell are people obsessing over this? If by some miracle you can't skip cut-scenes and if it turns out some huge number of players have wandered in by accident having no idea that Bioware writes story driven games then I'm sure that they'll fix it.

What is wrong with you people?

[Cyrrex]

To be honest, if you don't like KOTOR style cutscenes, which are basically what fucking made that game a success, then why would you even play this game?  It's KOTOR online, for crying out loud.

[Malakili]

To be honest, if you don't like KOTOR style cutscenes, which are basically what fucking made that game a success, then why would you even play this game?  It's KOTOR online, for crying out loud.

Well thats really the crux of it isn't it?   Are people willing to pay an MMO pricing model for a KOTOR game with content additions. 

[Zetor]

Guild Wars had plenty of cutscenes (at least one in every mission), and they were all skippable (everyone had to press 'skip' in the group for it to work, though). I don't think SWTOR will do any different.

Regarding the earlier wow questing / grinding tangent (and generalizing it to other DIKUs such as lotro): it's not as simple as "here's a quest to kill 10 of mob x and 6 of mob y, then you return here to get 5000 extra xp and some bracers" in a vacuum. Well-designed quest zones get multiple quests in an area and don't keep you going back to the same place 50 times, so when you're doing an 'involved' quest (such as "interact", "retrieve", "escort"), you're taking care of the objectives of other quests that are incidentally along the way and doing a 'guided tour' of the zone as well. Maybe you spend an extra 5 minutes to knock off the rest of the objectives after you're done with the main quest.

An actual example from the first WOTLK zone in wow isn't really far from your 'go hiking in the mountains' idea: you go into a cave to retrieve mcguffin_01. On the way you find a key on a mob that you use to unlock a cage, and talk to another prisoner to trigger a jailbreak escort quest. By the time you're done with all that and leave the cave, you're almost done with your kill quest as well. That's like a ding-gratz-athon!  

[Lucas]

Space Combat video (1m 21s), straight from the EA Gamescom conference in Cologne, Germany (click on the arrow thingy for downloadable versions):

http://www.swtor.com/media/trailers/space-combat

Pretty colours!! And...shoulderpads!!! :D

Edit: Dissection of the video over at Darth Hater:

http://darthhater.com/2010/08/17/dissection-of-space-combat-video/

[Cyrrex]

To be honest, if you don't like KOTOR style cutscenes, which are basically what fucking made that game a success, then why would you even play this game?  It's KOTOR online, for crying out loud.

Well thats really the crux of it isn't it?   Are people willing to pay an MMO pricing model for a KOTOR game with content additions. 

As long as it is more like KOTOR 3, 4 and 5 as I've heard mention, I think so.  If it has some Co-op and MMO conventions to help it live longer, all the better.

[Sky]

Space Combat video

Nice. Looks mouse-driven, though. I hope there is a gamepad option and a wing commander feel to flight.

[Cyrrex]

Space Combat video

Nice. Looks mouse-driven, though. I hope there is a gamepad option and a wing commander feel to flight.

Yeah, it certainly looks the goods.  Control will be huge, though, as you say...better also have a flight stick option.

[Lucas]

"Chalk up another one for the Maniac!!!" 

[koro]

I'd rather have X-Wing/TIE Fighter free-range combat, but I'll take a StarFox/Rogue Squadron rail shooter too.

[DraconianOne]

Same gameplay as Clone Wars Adventures?

Not necessarily complaining - at least it's not Rebel Assault.

[Lantyssa]

I was really hoping it wasn't a rail shooter. I wonder if maybe one day we can get Jump to Lightspeed again.

[Tannhauser]

I'm surprised the Sith put up with sass like that!

[Velorath]

But hey, tell your friend "let's just sit in the middle of this field and farm mobs as they re-pop" and see how thrilling he thinks that suggestion is.

How many fucking times do I have to say that you don't need to do it this way.  You can just as easily say "hey, lets go explore those mountains over here"  and then a hour later you've "farmed" a lot of mobs and seen some neat things.  Like I said, I didn't really "farm" what I played Darkfall, I did things that were useful to me and ended up killing alot of shit along the way.

All of this is to miss the point anyway, SWTORs focus on story isn't what "the people" want anymore than than EQ style mob spawn camping.

Sorry, MMO players aren't trained to play that way.  Your ideas will never work, and it's not what "the people" want.

[Malakili]

But hey, tell your friend "let's just sit in the middle of this field and farm mobs as they re-pop" and see how thrilling he thinks that suggestion is.

How many fucking times do I have to say that you don't need to do it this way.  You can just as easily say "hey, lets go explore those mountains over here"  and then a hour later you've "farmed" a lot of mobs and seen some neat things.  Like I said, I didn't really "farm" what I played Darkfall, I did things that were useful to me and ended up killing alot of shit along the way.

All of this is to miss the point anyway, SWTORs focus on story isn't what "the people" want anymore than than EQ style mob spawn camping.

Sorry, MMO players aren't trained to play that way.  Your ideas will never work, and it's not what "the people" want.

OK, this thread is fucking stupid now, I'm done.

[Goreschach]

Now?

 

[Fordel]

The space combat looks WAAAAAAAAAAY better then their actual supposed primary people game combat.

[Dark_MadMax]

 Fallen Earth effectively spent all their money on PvE content and would have done much better focusing their limited resources on re-usable and player driven game mechanics. But even then having a "go farm mobs" approach to levelling would just be to husband their limited resources rather than actually a desirable outcome.

I am not sure that it was the case "player driven mechanics" vs PvE game. I think it was more the case the had very competent art and environment designers, who at the same time had no slightest clue how to make multiplayer let alone competitive multiplayer games. PvP in this game is an abortion, but not for the lack of resources imho - because the systems they already designed  shows that they are flawed from the ground up, if same people spent more time designing it they would not make it better. I

Fallen Earth is an example of a quality pve game with great atmosphere. Unfortunately it has no end game content  but it advertised its aborted pvp as such.

[Ratman_tf]

In addition what exactly is the alternative to quests for levelling? Back to the EQ path of chain-pulling mobs to the zone line? hell no.

Frighteningly, I've seen newer to the genre players in some of my guilds say they wished the game played like this.  When asked if they'd played EQ, they said No.   I proceed to explain, in detail, how much it actually sucked but I don't think they listened.

I don't think they want EQ. I think they want the freedom to go off the rails. Sometimes in WoW I'd do some shit that had little do do with leveling, loot or questing. I had a Hunter who I'd take to hunt down all the rare mobs in vanilla WoW. I'd post screenshots of the kills on a webpage I hacked together. It was fun. It was self-directed content.

[Ratman_tf]

It has to do with the fact that it doesn't matter why this guy at the guard tower wants you to kill 12 gnolls. It has no effect on anything. Want to know why? Because if you do or don't don't kill 12 gnolls, hes still fucking standing their 9 months later asking people to kill gnolls.  This utter lack of responsiveness from the game world has trained people just not to care, because it just really doesn't matter. Phasing tried to address this, but I think it does so in a half assed way.  Guild Wars 2 has been talking a good game with regards to this, but its hard to know if they'll deliver.

Short Version:

The MMO playerbase has been trained to pull a level and get a treat, not to care whos making the level work, or why they are being asked to pull it in the first place.  They could probably replace all the quest dialog in the game with gibberish and most people wouldn't notice, it has nothing to do with the quality of the writing.

If you think that every game should be designed around what the playerbase has been trained to do, go fuck off cause you're part of the problem.

Or just write another few hundred posts about a game you seem to have no intention of buying I guess.

This is what we're given by the devs. Like in EQ when they'd nerf the fuck out of every approach to the game that wasn't within their narrow band of accepted play.

If you give a person checkers, don't expect them to play chess.

[Ingmar]

Buh? That's not what is being described at all. Try "they already know how to play checkers, so if you give them a chess set they'll just try to play checkers with it anyway, so you may as well just give them bigger checkers."

There, now we have the right ridiculous analogy to go with our ridiculous argument.

[WindupAtheist]