f13.net

The subject of Story has come up again, but it's currently buried in the TR thread (http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=9009.175). It's come up (http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=9771.0) before (http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=5671.0) So, hoping to hear what folks who don't read that thread think, it's broken out here:

It started with Vinadil:



Calandryll then provided some awesome insights into UO. Definitely worth reading the whole thing (page 6), but the summary is the best, covered across two posts:

Ok, so the primary goal was to collect loot. However, I think this focuses too much on loot, allowing people to think "mmotard loot-whores killed UO". I think the real problem was that players were looking for a reason to participant.

The real problem with this genre in terms of story isn't the quality of the story. It's that the story doesn't matter to one's character abilities. It's the same thing we'd been discussing in the LoTRO Taxi thread. Yes, it's nice that a big selling point of LoTRO is story. However, that story, good though it is, can be completely ignored. Because, again, knowledge of that story does not contribute to you being better or worse at the game. Basically, the story and the game mechanic are mutually exclusive.

That's not a dig on LoTRO, nor any MMO. They all do it. Or, actually, don't do it.

The reason stories don't matter is because there's very little choice to make in MMOGs these days. You are either progressing or you are not. You can't make wrong decisions except those that incur XP debt or a lost shot at a rare loot. That's not choice. That's not getting the pellets.

Real stories fundamentally link to character accountability in the game. And it's not just about reading some solo quest. It's about making choices that affect the world. The last real NPC accountability system I've seen in this genre is EQ1's Faction system.

But there's a reason I said "NPC accountability." Player to player accountability is already here, in Eve, in SB, in any full PvP game where your actions affect the game world and those playing in it. Of course, this also exposes a deeper insight into just how many people want this level of immersion.

So to me we need to flesh out the NPC accountability, to bring Ultima IV back to this genre, to make stories and actions have a noticable impact on the public space, or at least zones in which people can go.

Yes, that means the game will be different three years after launch. So? The tech is there now to let the live team focus more than ever no content. And anyone who thinks MMOGs are the same three years later even now hasn't quit one shortly after launch and returned three years later.

Embrace the change. Then facilitate it. Let old timers be veteran demigods in the game, even if it's just statues named after them.

I think this is what AC1 was trying to do. Why it's only been AC1 since, I'll never understand.

As a genre that seemed to be "birthed" out of the single-player RPG... it has really surprised me how little of the true RPG feel the MMOs have contained.  While reading your post my first thought was actually of EQ as well, when my paladin had to make a decision about some Fiery Sword.  If I completed the quest for the sword, then I was KOS in Freeport (my starting city no less) and had to use the sewers and such.  It was actually interesting on multiple levels (beyond the loot at the end) because it forced me to make a game changing decision.  (Of course I think we even found a way around THAT with some simple quest exploit that allowed us to gain the faction back while invisible or something).

But, I am all for changing game worlds.  I don't even care if you use repeatable quests.  Let the first 1000 people go and kill 20 Murlocs.  But, at some point the Murlocs should be killeded enough to stop coming back.  Reserve the location on the game map where they "live" and after XX time let a small camp pop back up which sets the Quest giver back into giving the quest.

If people will believe the current setup (the one where NOTHING changes no matter what you do), then they would probably believe any nonsensical reasoning you could develop to describe why a quest line that was once completed has now come to be Again.  Players like myself would even be thrilled with small steps... and not WoW's attempt at a small step like what they required with the opening of... whatever that zone was in the desert.

In your RTS there is an enemy.  The enemy has a base.  That base is un-assaultable by You, the player, at first because he has technology and resources that dwarf your own.  With time, though, you build up your own technology and resources until the time you are ready to bring the final battle.  This just seems like a model that would fit Perfectly into a MMO.  Set your players out with a storyline that will take them 6-12 months to complete (you DO have some say over this since you can mess with things like spawn rates and mob difficulty... not to mention how much tech you release to the playerbase and when).  During that 6-12 months you work on the X-pack that reveals the new plot-line.  If you manage to create a PvP game where there are 3 PC sides and 1 NPC side (or heck multiple NPC sides), then you have even More grace with developer created content.

I know that developers who have more gaming and market insight then me have had these same thoughts... so there Must be some truly logical reason I am missing that this has not happened.  Could it be that the gamer who actually Wants dynamic content is part of a Tiny minority of paying customers?

Actually, what you are describing is very similar to what we did in the second Scenario in UO. Basically it went something like this:

-Players discovered the hidden Gargoyle city and learn that gargoyles are actually intelligent and benevolent. The city is over-run with enslaved gargoyles forced to fight for an unknown master.
-Players also discover a dungeon, but they can't enter it. It's protected by a magic shield.
-Arcane Mages start appearing in the world along with their golem constructs.
-About a week later, the Arcane Mages begin spawning magic devices (they look like pillars with a control panel). These devices seem to be the first step towards an invasion.
-Players learn they have to destroy these devices to learn how the magic within them works to build their own device to take down the magical barrier around the dungeon. This invovled playing a puzzle game and destoying the devices over a period of time until enough were destroyed. This takes about a week.
-Once enough knowledge was gathered, an NPC figures out how to build his own counter-device. He asks players to deliver wood, metal, etc. to help build the device. This takes about a week.
-The device is built and the magical barrier is destroyed. Players can enter the dungeon where they learn Exodus is behind the Gargoyle's enslavement.
-Players must fight their way through the dungeon and destroy Exodus' link to this world. Doing this takes about 3 days.
-The Gargoyle city is saved and the gargoyles become NPC shopkeepers. Doing this also opened up the Glassblowing and Stoneworking skills for players to create new items. The gargoyles also share what they have learned about golems, allowing players to build their own golems as well.
-The entire scenario ran for about 6 weeks. Most of them lasted about 6 - 8 weeks with a small break in-between.
-All of this was lead up towards the LBR expansion which continued the story in a third and fourth Scenario.

I think of the four scenarios we did, this was my favorite. It had a story that harkened back to the single player Ultimas and it allowed players to really change the face of the world they played in. We also made sure that the Scenarios delivered content that could be used once the story was over, that way we weren't spending resources building stuff that could only be used once. While I wasn't happy with the technology aspects of the story (we had no choice with that) I think we incorporated them as best we could, using Exodus as the catalyst.

All of that said, I have a lot of thoughts about the problems with trying to do dynamic content that allows players to affect the world and give that single-player rpg feel. I'm a big fan of the idea, but there are a LOT of pitfalls. If I have time, I'll write something up and post it in this thread later.

I don't know if I have ever missed playing UO more than in these last few days... because this kind of stuff is Exactly what I am talking about.

It's very easy to say, "Yes, all the servers will be different 3 years later, so what!?"  when it's not you having to maintain them.
 Each iteration removes the servers exponentially from the others.  In the Yew example.. suppose someone comes up with an idea that the swamp things organize and rise up against the next town.  Again, some servers will win some will lose and you have even further fractured the world

Of course, you can't do that on the servers that won, so you have a different event that fractures them as well.

Soon you have a unique lore for each and every server out there, and your live team has to know the back story and details of each one and issue content relevant to them for the past X years.  If you're doing quarterly updates and your game only has 5 servers that might not be a big deal.  How about 12 servers, something easily attainable if your game hits a mild level of popularity.

   12 servers with quarterly updates means a total of 48 unique content updates a year.  Why unique?  Well, because they'd better be relevant to each server, or what was the point of all this anyway?  If they're not relevant to that server's lore, then it doesn't matter if the world's "Dynamic" or not.

I've always thought that a really dynamic story-driven MMORPG would have to be a niche game with just one server.  Otherwise, as Merusk pointed out, logistics becomes a huge problem.

The real question is how many people can you put on one server, and is it even feasible to give it a shot?

But it would be really cool to have player actions drive development.  On the small end, they kill lots of foozle A, so foozle A becomes extinct or at least much less populated.  On the large end, they fail to successfully get all parts of the uber staff of psychic energy which would have led them to defeat lord whatshisname.  The uber staff of psychic energy would have allowed them to teleport to a different planet (expansion A), but instead, they get lord whatshisname causing a cataclysmic event resulting in expansion B.

Obviously, you wouldn't be able to match that brilliant story-line in game, so you'd have to dumb it down a bit, but you get the idea.

As you describe it here, though, there is no choice in this.  Players are stuck at each step until they complete it according to the prescribed script.  As such, this is pretty much like any other "quest", where the choice is "take the quest" or "don't take the quest".

Either way, the developers need to have both expansion A and B in production in case the players pull off either option. Then they've wasted their time on one of the two, or it gets renamed and repackaged and turns into expansion G somewhere down the line. That's just the simplest of cases. If three or four of such branchable storylines are going on at any given time, or if a storyline has three or four available branches, the produced content rapidly outruns any possibility of recycling.

If Asheron's Call's storylines had made it more popular than (or even as popular as) Everquest, we might be seeing development teams willing to risk that kind of investment, but it didn't. Part of that was graphics and custom content, but mostly the efficient ding-grats and limited customizability made players more happy than an open-ended world with complex customizability. Asheron's Call was a more immersive world, but Everquest was a more addictive game.

At the extreme end of the world/game mess are things like Castle Marrach (http://www.skotos.net/games/marrach/) where story and social connections are practically all that matters. I believe that it has upwards of thirty players... almost fifteen online simultaneously!

Even if this is true, my understanding is that you cause the players to feel like they are contributing to a world. They didn't -have- to unlock the gargoyle city, they could've left it alone.

Of course.  Darniaq said it first, all you have is storyline that is intertwined with game mechanics / advancement.  Then he said something about choice, but that's not really neccessary.  Or maybe it is, and it just hasn't been implemented in MMOG's yet, which may have been his point.

Pxib, the one thing I keep seeing is how "half [of content] is wasted" when in fact it isn't.  Some of the shards will choose one way, others will choose another, and in the end both A and B are being consumed by your playerbase at the same time.  It's the way crowds act, as opposed to one individual making choices. 

In my opinion, the trick is this:  instead of trying to reduce expenses by reducing the number of choices you have to code for, increase revenue by increasing your playerbase BECAUSE you provide choices.  Hopefully you advertise your game in such a way that the fact that you've built choices in results in a bigger playerbase than you'd otherwise have with an MMO.  You provide A and B, and hopefully you get twice the players, or more, because of that.

I don't know if this is viable.  Probably not.

But I would love to see an MMO with an epic storyline designed for (and told from the perspective of) a crowd, rather than one hero.  With a backstory that reads something like "Stuff happened, and the population did that, did this, and they shrunk in size due to war but managed to do this other thing, and here's where we are now."  No specific persons named, no kings, no heroes, just how the mass of people reacted to events.

That's true. But the world was affected to a signifiacnt degree once the quest was completed, the quest was persistent, meaing it was going on whether you "took" it or not, and it was global, meaning the entire shard could participate, all at the same time. So I wouldn't say it was like any other quest. This was only our second Scenario though. The latter two had choices and consequences for failure, such as Yew remaining covered in a swamp in the shards that failed to defeat the plague monsters.

As I think more about how I feel about this, I wanted to post something quick just to get feedback. The way I see it, there are two major types of dynamic content that gives a player a connection to the world. Personal and Global.

Personal is the world reacting to you, and only you. NPC factions would fall into this category. Basically the concept here is your actions affect how the world sees you, but has no affect on the world itself. The other players don't care and aren't affected by the fact that the Drow NPCs hate you. You could expand this to be guild based also, but again, the reactions from the world would only affect your guild which still makes it personal. IMO, this is the easier of the two types to implement and I wish we saw more of this in MMOGs. Not to harp on a cancelled title, but UXO's virtue system was all about this type of dynamic world with the NPCs reacting to the choices you made in quests.

The second, Global, is about your actions affecting and changing the world in a way that affects everyone else too. An example of this would be asking the players to choose a side between two kingdoms. When the battle is over the power and allegiances of the realm change. This change would have global implications and affect how everyone else (wether they participated or not) plays the game - for example, perhaps if the evil side wins, the evil spawn in the good side's realm increases, becomes more powerful, or maybe the good side even loses control of a town. Etc. This is much more challenging for a variety of reasons and I think this is the crux of what Darniaq is talking about.

Either of these types could include linear (set path) or dynamic (making choices) aspects. Those are more of a detail within the two types.

Do those two about cover it? Is there a third type that doesn't fit with either of those two?

It's fairly well accepted the genre owes more to the text based combat MUDs than to single player RPGs. As for "true RPGs", you may be better looking at renaissance faires. Ew.

Possibly a third type of dynamic content, and that would be something that has nothing to do with player input, yet the world changes. 

A spaceship lands and aliens disembark and settle, so there's a new bunch of mobs or npcs to deal with.

Expansions fall into this category, but so would natural disasters or a weather system.  Hurricane wipes out town, that sort of thing. 

Player input doesn't come into play until after the event.

Yea. Darniaq was specifically talking about player actions, but for the sake of completeness, I think adding the third type you described is important. Good call.

You can also have personal-interactive events with global consequences - such as the transmission of or immunization against contagious diseases. Stuff like that doesn't (necessarily) fall neatly into personal/global content.

From how you've described "Personal", you could expand it from character to guild to alliance to realm to server-wide, theoretically, and it would still keep its essence of being "the world doesn't change but views your group differently", even if "your group" is "everyone".  It's one of those asymptotic functions.  You can expand it until it becomes "Global" in effect, but even then in your mind it will be distinct from the actual Global type.

I think you'll run into problems with your argument due to this.

Actually, you can shrink Global down to only have a localized effect.  I should probably give examples:  the NPC's changing their faction standings towards you, your guild, your alliance, everyone on the server would be "Personal", right?  A whole new continent appearing as a result of some war, Global.  But, as a result of a war, if the only change is an extra tower built into the palace of one race's cities, with 3 extra NPC's inside, that's a Global change but with a minor effect.

Woah there. Then players on both sides will feel like they've been ripped off  because they didn't get access to the cool content over on the other server... or they'll change over to the other server and play there because it's more awesome. The fewer shards make a particular choice, the more resentful they'll be of the shards that made the rarer (and thus more "valuable") choice.
Increase risk by increasing expenses in order to impress players who may or may not like your game for a thousand other reasons? I don't think so. There's still money to be made in the low risk quality-DIKU market. I'm not sure that there's actually a particularly big market interested in making a difference just for the sake of making a difference. In fact...
...this goes against all myth ever made. Nobody writes stories like that or makes movies like that or starts religions like that. Although Howard Zinn (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_People's_History_of_the_United_States) and his ilk provide ample evidence that history is written by the people, the people tend to prefer charismatic leaders mounted up like signposts along the way. If all the players of your MMOG can say is "Stuff happened, and the population managed to do this other thing, and here's where we are now," they're not going to feel like they're part of an epic story.

"I fought at the battle of Teapot Hill in the third of the Daisy Wars. We were commanded by General Yorgo the Impatient, but a small contingent led by Lady Cotton performed a brilliant flanking maneuver and truly won the day. Some troops wanted to overthrow Yorgo's leadership for Cotton's, and the force split when he would not cede control. All would have been for naught had a team of assassins, led by Nightwatch Doriac, not successfully slaughtered the diplomats at our enemys' alliance talks in Caer Bennet."

If you were part of Cotton or Dorian's elite forces, you feel like you truly made history. If you're part of "The Great Army of the People's Struggle" you're just a cog... but so long as every player has at least the opportunity to join Yorgo's army (or that of his enemies), they still get a signpost to point to.

"I fought with Yorgo. His glory is mine." Therein likes the loyalty, patriotism, and nationalism of which mythic history is made.

My knowledge of server architecture is rusty and vague at best (I've never let that stop me before), but couldn't the "shards" actually be virtually combined so that there's only one shard?  Parallel shards rather than discrete shards. 

Or is that still too complicated a model for an mmo?

If not, then what happens on all affects "the world."

Absolutely. Then some created content is "wasted" and we're back to square one: A lot of risk and expense for something that isn't as effecitve a draw as addictive gameplay.

I disagree that resentment would happen because I assumed that it would be possible to either transfer (paid, or limited), or start anew on the "better" realm without limitations.  In any case, dealing with crowds, it doesn't matter which players move.  It's like a liquid, it'll fill whatever space is provided, taking all available choices at once, proportionately to how "awesome" they are to the median.  It doesn't matter where individual molecules of the liquid go, you just make the choices equally balanced and viable, and they'll get filled.

Increased risk...  that's the same as spending more in order to have a polished game, delaying release in order to have polish or x feature, or what not.  Without experience, perhaps I'm talking out of my ass, but it should be possible to "sell" yet another potential risk if you can demonstrate it will result in a bigger profit.  I did say the aim was to increase the player base.

As far as the epic storyline, that's how history is written.  The Romans did this, the Allies did this, the Spartans did that.  People do reminisce about being in the war, personally, and being heroes or with heroes, and achieving things, and my point was that if you wanted to create a setting where players can be heroes, then you'd have to write a history-like background, not a hero-background.  I don't know how to put it...  give me "the Star Wars universe and you can be a Jedi," don't give me "Vader and what he did and you can be like Vader too."

Personally that is why I emphasize NPC story that allows players to change the world rather than the more open kind. The big thing here is that unless you've got a uniserver game, you really can't afford for all of your servers to evolve over time to be completely different stages of a storyline. That'd effectively require you manage that server almost as a separate game, because there's always bugs to fix, tech to improve, people to manage, etc.

But like the WoW events, it feels very contrived.

Ultimately, I want a uniserver fantasy-themed MMOG with a compelling storyline, accelerated clock, events conducted by NPCs, events triggered by players, where the world evolves and is affected by players partaking in NPC storylines. And for Calandryll to run it :)

Yes, with Xanthippe's add. This is the other reason I emphasize NPC story. Ultima V was a game world that was alive. The player was one additional inhabitant in a land where NPCs close up shop, sleep, are concerned for your attitude, all that thing. UO managed to keep some of this, particularly with events, but even aside from those in some cases. NPCs not at their shops 24/7. The horror!

Actually, that's exactly what I was geting at. By personal, I meant your character or group. And yes, a group could be an entire realm IF you have the concept of a realm having it's own stats in the game. So for example, in the case of a guild, the guild's "stats" (such as reputation) may change, but everyone's individual character in the guild doesn't. When I mentioned guilds, I was thinking of the concept of a guild basically being treated as a character wth it's own stats.

Keep in mind I'm, not necessarily looking for a perfect definition either. Just something to create a baseline.

Edit: Thinking about it more, I am wondering if groups need to be a fourth type separate from personal. I think it's a safe assumption that any change to a guild would affect everyone in the guild, so yea, I think you're right Ajax. The main difference being I can opt out of the changes created in the group that affected my character. In a Global change, my only option is to leave the game/server if I don't like the results. But if a Guild change results in something I don't like, I can leave the Guild and no longer be affected by the change.

So maybe what we have is:

-Personal: The world changes only affect my character.
-Group: Guild/Faction, etc. Has an affect on all characters in the group, whether direct or indirect. Player can "opt out" without leaving the entire game/server.
-Global: World changes impact everyone on the server.
-Static: Change to the world created by the developers that players cannot influence or control and did not result because of any player actions. Usually has global implications.

So you're not making a distinction between physical changes (new continents, cities being razed or appearing, NPC races dying out or appearing, etc.) and socio-political changes (areas stay the same, but suddenly you're KOS with the elves)?

And "Static"...  that word seems to imply that the game doesn't change once it's been released, even though the situation mentioned where a spaceship crashes into the world could happen several years after the game was released.  I'm not sure what a better word would be.  Maybe developper-controlled?  Acts of God?  Random chance?  Unforeseen?

I'm not making the distinction in this case, because both of those would be subtypes within the major types. So a Global change could be a landmass addition or a KOS change. I agree those two things are very different within the Global type though. The common theme is that the change in the world affects my gameplay. A new landmass means a new place to hunt, a race dying out might mean I need to find a new place to camp, and KOS of course means I gotta be more careful around those NPCs.

Yea, static is a bad word in this case. How about Predetermined?

Try to write an entertaining story about the Star Wars universe without heroes. You're going to have a hard time getting people interested in a story without heroes. "You can be a Jedi" doesn't mean anything unless Jedis are heroes. It's like saying you could be a soldier, or a farmer, or a bicycle repairman. People don't start salivating at the thought of paying $15 a month to play Uncle Owen... they want to be Han Solo. At the very least they'd like to feel that Jabba or Lando cares about whether a particular misadventure succeeds or fails. Knowing that Jabba has put a price on your head is more entertaining than knowing that the "bounty hunter faction" has upgraded you to KOS. Maybe you'll never piss him off to the point that he'll use your frozen body as wall art, but imagine even being in the same guild with somebody who did.

"I upped my ranking with this faction" is meaningless. If that mechanic even exists, it should be entirely hidden. "I stole weapons from a government installation and sold them to a terrorist group" only exists if that government installation and terrorist group matter to the player. Otherwise it's just "I completed a quest to up my ranking with one faction that lowered my ranking with another." Having those facitons be player controlled is the easiest way to turn the second sentence into the first... NPC heroes (or player heroes) shortcut around the whole mess allowing your character to help known individuals and share their successes.

Hmmmm....what if you could take over towns as a guild, and NPCs guards then took on your Guild's personally set standings with other guilds.

Some people would try to be tough guys, and set everyone to hostile. This wouldnt last long. You would get smoked. Diplomacy then matters. Relations then matter. If your town has the only place you can get "X", it would be a very valuable commodity. Over time there starts to have that actual hate built up..."God I hate the 'Turdburglars Clan'. They have held 'Shitowne' for weeks and I know 'Leet dudes' and 'The Band of Brothers' dont like them...we should team up and take the place."

Guild rankings, when agreed upon, allow for FFA PvP anywhere in the world. I don't know...I'm trying to think of ways that inspire giving a shit about towns and other guilds and other NPC factions. Sorry for rambling :)

People have written entertaining Star Wars stories without referencing any of the official IP heroes.

The player can never be Han Solo.  The MMO mechanics prevent it.  At best, the player can be is a bounty hunter, soldier, or something that has Jedi powers but isn't a Jedi (hero) and instead is as common as 10,000 other characters that have the same powers.

You can make a game whereby you try to trick the player into thinking they can become Solo, Vader, Luke, and trick them into trying and paying your monthly fee for 2-3 years.  Or, you can make your game happen in a non-descript period of time, with no named heroes, and let players, guilds, realms actually accomplish something with the world, and thus become heroes, to be quoted and emulated by other players.

In a way, we're arguing whether IP's are more popular than games where the lore isn't based on a pre-existing IP, but is rather invented on the spot.  But that's not the argument I was trying to get into; I just wanted to discuss the possibility of an "epic" story being designed so it features a group, a nation, as the "Hero", rather than one particular character.  Humanity triumphs, vs. the hero gets the girl. 

EDIT:  On second thought, nevermind.  I'm describing a "story-driven MMORTS" that lets the players affect the world drastically.  That's the problem with Internet discussions, you often reach conclusions that others have thought of already, long ago.  EVE has RTS elements, but the story kinda sucked as far as my tastes go.  WAR has some of the elements too, and maybe a good story.  I guess we'll see.

Heroes are inherently reactive entities. They do quests that outside forces assign. Things go wrong and heroes deal with it. In other words, something obvious has to be broken for players to fix or they can't be heroes. This requires NPCs.
Yes, it seems we're saying the same thing with different words. I don't believe folks like stories centered on "the group" rather than "the individuals", but I might be wrong. I didn't mean to imply that the player could actually be HAN SOLO(tm), but being a well-known bounty hunter is definately within a player's abilities. Han is actually a great example of what a player hero would look like. He'll do quests for anybody who pays him enough money. He doesn't have any abilities outside those of other bounty hunters, but he's got a nice ship, some powerful friends and enemies, and a lot of character and charisma. You'll meet folks like that on any RP server in any game you choose to name.

Vader is an example of an NPC hero. He's got force-powers not available to normal Jedi, and he does quests for the Emperor (who isn't a hero at all, just a plain old NPC), but he distributes most of those commands to his minions. Players could take part in battles which Vader was personally directing, and might even meet him... but he isn't out adventuring on a regular basis. He's got people to do that for him. People like you. He spends most of his time as a stationary NPC.

Leave too much initiative in the players' laps and they'll get bored. They're here to be entertained, not to entertain eachother. I don't think that having NPC heroes precludes player desire (or ability) to be heroes themselves... especially if they are acknowledged and rewarded (or cleverly punsihes) when they do.

One story element that I enjoyed was that Vhazilok chain in CoH where you ended up infected with the disease and had the flies buzzing about you. It gave you a real reason to continue the chain (the debuff sucked) and it also was noticeable to others. It did pretty much require that you have a group to complete the mission, but I managed to solo through it once.

I dunno, I rather liked that.  Story that only impacted me, but required I get others involved and gave a very real drive to advance the story.

Yep.  It would really suck if parts of the game stopped being accessible because of a thing like time, which could screw over a percentage of your population that wants to do something simple like shop or sell their items before going back out on the adventure.  Basic services should always be available to a player at all times (being in the same location as the player being exempt, naturally).

This is a good philosophy: "A story or setting is good so long as it doesn't get in the way of the game."

Xanthippe beat me to this, but I still think it is worth another quote:

What about just having changes that have nothing to do with players; aka time based? I know in a few MUDs I have played in evil portals and whatnot have opened up and wrecked major cities and whatnot. How would you have liked to see the halflings in EQ1 overrun Neriak until players helped the Dark Elves regain control of it? I think this is a good way to implement your "players have choices" schema. Maybe we should combine two and three into just one?

Edit: Yeah, I should have read the whole thread before I jumped to replying. Sorry.

It will work in a single shard MMO like EVE online. But as someone has mentioned, creating unique content for 20 over servers depending on how events turned out would be a little messy.

See, the thing about single-servers is.. they don't work either.  Sure, they're ok for the day-to-day, but it's wayyyy too easy to overload them and crash the whole 'node' or whatever you term that distribution when 1/2 the game's populace runs to that area because ther'es an event going on.  It's bad enough in EvE when they just have 2 fleets fighting.

If you were to do any kind of event, it would have to be fast, so you could wrap it up before word got out.  If you remember the old  EQ events and how badly they used to lag/ crash or leave you feeling left out, multiply that times 20 for a single server.   

Actually, where I was going with that was it sucking that vendors were there 24/7. Nothing says "slot machine" like a world in which only the lighting conditions and sky texture change.

There's a lot of ways to handle this while enhancing immersion. Long and short though is you want an accelerated clock, and for the sorts of activities players do all the time (like getting new skills and selling vendor trash) to be always available. Enhance immersion by at least replacing the models and names of those NPCs. Or replace legit shop owners with Fences. You can sell to the Fence right away, or wait for the shop to open to get a better price.

Some people would complain, but you do know if Blizzard did it, they'd adapt.

This cannot be a system considered unto itself. If you want this level of immersion, you need to design it into a much larger system. You want to know how often you want players to go back to social hubs, how many you'd expect (not want) to be nearly-full-time crafters, how fast the average or median character levels and therefore needs a trainer (personally though, I loved the EQ1 approach of being able to pre-buy abilities and carry them with you to be learned the moment you leveled).

This could be an entire discussion unto itself, because the whole point of this thread is to highlight that a good story does get in the way of gameplay. Maybe then we could go from needing to continually attract more Achiever archetypes to getting the millions of others who like RPGs, or GTA, and so on.

You would need a story based game to really make a dynamic sharded world work. If you measure your progress by unlimited experience/loot accumulation, people are just going to move to the shard with the optimal history. Soft cap the loot and experience gain, so people can fairly easily do “enough” on any shard to reach the max loot and experience gain. Then the game becomes not about how much you have, but about the story of how you got it.

A story based game would maintain a lot of server history about each character’s adventures. Which would be the basic gameplay, rather than acquisition. Making the max character power pretty easy to obtain would remove one area of complexity from the developers plate. Perhaps leaving enough resources to deal with tracking the varied histories of each server. I’d like to see someone try it at least. Maybe something like it has been done in the text MUDs?

Absolutely. But here again is a whole new topic.

To me, you can't have compelling story in a game built on DIKU loot game. The game mechanic is fundamentally at odds with narrative as long as the only method of character growth is killing stuff. I long for the days when letting something escape (Ultima IV) was a good thing.

This is why I rather like LoTRO's Deeds (and EQ2's Collection Quests). These are ways to advance a character without having to kill stuff dead all the time. You can't rely on them exclusively for advancement, but it's a start.

All in all though, thinking about a narrative-based MMO is most important because it's thinking differently at all. There are so many different ways to give both short and long term goals to players while wrapping them in an immersive 3D environment. It seems so few with the cash are willing to take the chance to design it.

And yes, I know why. But I can still dream :)

Late to the thread, but wanted to interject a couple of comments:

The main reason this type of dynamic state to the world has been avoided by so many has been stated by a couple of folks, but the most important one is market perception of being cheated. SoE proved this with the whole Waking the Sleeper deal making a permanent change to the game world--endless amounts of follow-on players complained bitterly that "we didn't get to see that content that we paid for!"...and I'm not sure the market has matured enough yet (in fact, I think it's gone the opposite direction with the mass of WoW MMO noobs in the market now). Hell, I believe that being denied content and the endless complaints is what brought around the whole concept of instances--the anger over uberguilds clearing all the boss mobs on servers was endless and profound, and instances helped to resolve those complaints.

That being said, I still strongly believe it can be done, and should be done. I still lay claim to the whole concept of "faction" in the first place--I was a beta tester on TES:Arena and part of the community design team for TES:Daggerfall--and Daggerfall was one of the first games where you had reputations that defined how the NPC's interacted with you--and that was my idea.

In my mind the problem is however that this hasn't ever gone past the "personal" (or single player) stage as folks have mentioned above--faction is only persistent for you as a single player, and ultimately there is no change to the game world.

Someone above mentioned it somewhat--but to me the perfect MMO has no developer created content at all. When a server starts up, it's geography, raw materials and resources, some npc breeder AI's that start to form NPC communities, and underlying mechanics for player and NPC's building villages, towns, then cities.

If an NPC city is overwhelmed by players (or other NPC's) it is gone, and the area changes--either becomes fallow, or the winners take over.

Mobs don't spawn repeatedly--NPC "communities" breed up, level up,and when they die, they are gone.

I fully admit there are some huge systems and technology issues to overcome before this becomes reality, but it's not as difficult as it sounds--hell, I coded breeder mobs and self-terraforming terrain for my DIKU mud (ACK!Mud 3.0 and beyond for anyone interested) back in 97-98.

There are challenges with players over-killing areas, but that's what GM events are for (invasions, etc). There are issues with lots of things honestly, but man would it be a fun game...

See, I don't think that 'breeding NPCs' will ever work until NPCs are equal in power and most intelligence to PCs.  Using breeding you're going to wipe lots of places clean - particularly on the server's first day - unless you greatly accelerate that 'breeding'  to the point that it's just "Random Spawning" like in current Dikus.  UO tried this and proved how badly lesser-powered NPCs got slaughtered, right?

To protect themselves, NPCs would also have to eliminate this pattern: "Hey Why's Thogg chasing human? Me stand here until me know more or Thogg call for help.  Hey sound like Thogg dead, wow suck for Thogg.... AGGH. I get you humanz!"    No.. you're going to penetrate the heavily-populated fortress, you're going to have to fight a fortress of mobs at once, not 2, 3 or even 5.   

But that doesn't fit into the Hero model of games.  That is the ultimate problem.  Even though you know subconsciously that there's thousands of other folks doing the same quest, saving the same lost NPC, it's still about your character the Hero.  Make players a cog in the wheel, just an average joe, and what's the turnout going to be?

This thread is really making me miss my early AC days. Two things about it stand out for me in relation. There was an event regarding the waking of "the Big Bad Evil Twinkie Eater".

Basically, certain goals in a new dungeon had to be achieved before he was released. So they put it in place and said "If anyone were foolish enough to go in this dungeon and break the big crystal, a terrible evil will awaken. Therefore everyone should make sure noone ever does this." So, naturally, half the server decided to try to free the bad guy. If I remember right, they even made the dungeon itself pvp+ on the non-pvp shards, and it took weeks of battling before the bad guy was released on every shard. They even put a monument in game commemorating the attempted defence of the dungeon, but only on the shard that held out the longest.

The other thing this thread reminded me of was brought up by Slayerik - the control of towns. We had that in Darktide, with litterally no ingame mechanics being involved. Since there were no town guards, everywhere was pvp+. Territory was based on where your character's lifestone was - that was your respawn point. If you held the lifestone outside a town, you held that town. It led to a situation where large guilds controlled very specific regions for long periods of time. What made it work though, was that there were in game advantages. Some towns had vendors with better rates, some were closer to good hunting areas, some had unique NPCs required for certain big quests. Therefore, guilds fought over them. Since you needed numbers to win, there were constant shifts in alliances and such, and you ended up with a very dynamic political situation.

It really was a unique and amazing situation. I admit, being in a game where you could be ganked every waking second wasn't everyones cup of tea - but it was definitely interesting. I think the biggest thing that hurt it in the long run was the good old Diku level system. In the early days, level differences weren't enough to prevent people from competing. Eventually though, the veterens grinded there way to the point that new characters couldn't affect things anymore, and the whole dynamic started to unravel somewhat. Was really fun while it lasted though.

I can't argue against any of your points, except that I'm not aimed at your standard MMORPG style fighting, levelling, or anything. Instancing may somehow fit into this as well, although I really am still against the whole idea due to break in immersion, maybe it's feasible with the proper background story (the world is multi-dimensional and exists on many co-existing planes for example?)

I just know at a deep level that until the re-spawn on a timer mechanism goes away, and real concept of NPCS and immersion is broken deeply.

So what is the answer? I very much think that the "hero" aspect of the genre is very much linked to the human element that John Vorhaus describes as "each of us is the center of our own universe." When you save random_npc01 from scary_dragon02, obviously you have exhausted the content, but to exhaust the content permanently from other players does not seem feasible. How does Random_Hero06 know that you have completed the quest already while he saves random_npc01?

On another note, what if you created a game that rivaled the market penetration of World of Warcraft? (Sure, this is a long shot, but roll with me here on this one.) I think that, from a dev perspective, one will run into problems creating alternate rolling spawns on different shards, creating alternate rolling spawns for 'content hogs' (intense players), and keeping the content updated when content is exhausted. Does the idea of the same content being played on different servers elicit the same response from you as a re-spawn timer on a single server? Each server has essentially the same game, and multiple people are playing the same experience.

Personally, I think the future of MMORPGS is somewhere in between a good game of Second Life (or whatever virtual world that is mostly PC oriented) and Defense of the Ancients. A good backstory plus engaging gameplay that has the "ease of entry but difficultly to master" equals a winner. There is something to be said about why PVP is so popular in World of Warcraft when compared to other games that have instituted it. By moving the focus from NPCs to PCs, I think that we, as an MMO community, move away from the respawn-timer culture.

The issue with WoW PvP, though, is that it is completely separate from the "world", except for the Loot you need to glean from it... in the instances that allow you to completely skip any other actual human players.  So, basically you have a part of the game where you never see other players (to get loot), and then a part of the game that is ouside the real world where you interact with them.

Don't get me wrong, I spent months and months enjoying myself with guildies in BGs and Arenas, and 2-man arena fights were some of the most fun I had in an MMO in a long while.

But, I just feel like they are missing out on some other fun things.  For example:

Imagine they had "resource instances" similar to a 20-man dungeon.  When they are first released the instance IS a 20-man dungeon, and the first guild to beat it would Own it.  Depending on the zone they would get some flower/alchemy/metal/whatever resource per Day.  But, every day at XX time they would then have to defend it just like a BG against all others.  Perhaps the window would stay open for 2 hours or so.  If they lost they would not lose anything except future gains, but it would be a way for guilds to "harvest" resources for Raids and such without flying around the world looking for random spawns.

It would also give players a way to make a mark on the game map.

I really don't think a player-driven world is all that difficult, especially given developers can always "repeat" content by just sending in another Invasion or some sort and having the player base rise up to beat yet Another evil ruler.

Maybe this style of play only interests a small part of the MMO market, but I think even that small part would be profitable for a company that could pull it off.

I think that that might be easier if you broke players into teams moreso than giving instances out on a first come, first served basis. I can -easily- see that being exploitable or gamebreaking. If you haven't seen good drama, go check out the EVE boards. It's worth it. Really.

Does anyone else remember all the dynamic story stuff that the Seed team talked about before it turned out that they didn't know how to code and the game went up in smoke?  Different NPCs with changing agendas using players as pawns, that sort of thing.  If any of it had actually panned out I think it would've been much more interesting than the "player event" type things that we generally associate with story in today's MMOs.

Seed was the mmo I was really looking forward to the most. Now there's just EQ clones as far as the eye can see. :( Well, not exactly but close enough that I'm not particularly interested in any of them.

Seed was perma-vaporware. Neat ideas ... but I'm pretty sure everyone knew that game wasn't going to be made.


PVP is cool when you give a shit about something. In Wow, its getting 'teh shiny' (like everything else in the game) and/or your title. In UO, it was your own survival / reputation / enemies loot / the IDOC loot / etc. In Shadowbane it was your city / rep / loot. In AO it was your title.

When designing your game, you need to know what you are aiming for your player to give a shit about. If you go...'hey, we have a pretty good PvE game we might as well tack on some PVP' ... it will be underwhelming to say the least. Give me something to fight for...be it survival, towns, resources, or reputation/points.

A lot of what has been discussed seems like ways to force story on to the player, as has been shown in the past people generally don't give a shit and simply go for the road that gives you the best pay offs. Take a look at WoW, there's loads of quest lines that are small storylines in themselves, but how many actually reads them? It would be cool if Blizzard did a survey on how many people simply skip to the bottom for the objectives or simply tab out to thottbot. I'm fairly certain the majority simply see quests as a way to earn xp.

I believe the root of the problem is that MMORPGs have a totally diffrent sets of motivators than normal RPGs. MMORPGs are much more achievement based, people accept a rougher leveling curve and a slower rate of content digestion in MMORPGs than in normal RPGs. This can be for numerous reasons, but I think it's a lot because achievements feels more rewarding since you can show of the epeen to others. When you sit down with a Final Fantasy game you easily get immersed and sucked in for several reasons. A very large reason for this is because you don't get interupted and constantly reminded of the presence of other real world player through for example chatting. Also, you don't feel like you're competing with other players.

Of course there's a niche within the MMO playerbase which I think would partake in an ongoing storyline of free will and not because of the rewards, and that's of course the RP playerbase.

In the end I think there might be a way to create a story which could add value to some customers, but I think the resources you need to spend to create it is way to large for the pay off, better to just focus that cash on making a better game.

The thing is... Achievement and Immersion do not have to be mutually exclusive.  I remember one time in SB (eeaarrly days) when we dwarves were on a small Ice island doing our normal thing and some GM/God/Dog thing entered the world.  We spent the next hour + chasing him down and killing him at which time our Guildleader was awarded a few trinkets to hand out as he would.

We enjoyed it, would have enjoyed more of it, but it was just impractical.  I don't know if THAT type of story event would ever be practical in an MMO because it would take teams of Live people to perform them as well as all of the "why them and not me" issues.

But, I don't think that it is fair to say: "Because people do not read the text in a quest they are not interested in a story."

Quests are NOT stories, at least not in any recognizable way.  A story is a re-telling of a linear set of events that either has happened or Is happening.  Once you read it, it is done.  When you get to the end... you have the end.  Quests are merely a collection of tasks/tests that random NPCs assign to us in order to see if we have what it takes to earn some XP and cash/loot.  Then when we level we move on to the next Taskmasters.  There is no other logical way to see them, and given enough time I think you will find the majority of people end up realizing this.

It is not a fault of the player, nor is it fair to say that "Players don't like stories".  I think it is more accurate to say that players like GOOD stories that Actually matter.  One of the things that will allow games like AC and Shadowbane (and EVE though it is still actually profitable as well) to live on for yeeaaars after they are actually played is the Stories that those games wrote.  Any given night I could start a conversation by just saying in Vent, "Hey, remember such and such time on this server when that happened?"  The story lives on because people like stories.  Even people who missed ONE event in the story got to see it unfold and be a part because it took Months to be written.  WoW just does not hit THAT spot, for me at least.  "Hey remember that one Kharazan run where this happened to soandso?"... "Oh you mean THIS time?"... "No, no, it was, you know THIS one."... "Hmm, you mean when we did that one boss?"

You get the point... the repetition of it all just drowns out any potential for a real or meaningful story.

I agree with that. However those stories are created without the devs presenting the players with a story. They're created by the players interaction with other players and the world.

Achivement and immersion doesn't have to be mutually exclusive, but when something is very achivement driven players often ignore the story and focus on what actions gives the best pay offs. That is if we're talking about dev created stories.

If there is achievement, then immersion will always be secondary.  Always.  It's the way folks are wired. You're not actually that little avatar on the screen, and you know that in the back of your head, even if you're pretending to be it.  However, the achievement is real and yours far more than it is the avatars.  As such, it becomes your primary motivator.

I say this as someone who DOES read quest text.


I wasn't arguing exclusively around your standard MMOs.  I was arguing in terms of broad design ideas.  Even if there's no leveling, diku-fighting, or any of that.. you'll still see that same stupid AI.  The same patterns of Mob behavior. Why? Because if mobs were 'smart' people would lose, or they wouldn't be able to solo.  Both are relative no-nos these days. 

As I see it, folks want single player games in a multiplayer space.  That's the 'I'm the hero' idea.  In a game that offers any kind of immersion, story or sweeping dynamic changes, you're going to need plebians who are the pawns and foot soldiers dying for the glory of the hero.  The nameless masses are what drive things in any story, you just don't pay attention to them because they're nameless.

  In a 24/7/365 live MMO those plebians are going to be those of us talking here, because we can't put in the time to become those heros.  Simple fact.  That's also why I'm fine with the current state of things.

Which is why I'm leaning more and more to the "humans" being heros, and the "fodder" being npc's lead by the humans...helps to bridge that gap, even if it does include a semi-forced game mechanic (almost like everyone being a pet caster I guess, although of course the interface would be quite a bit more powerful and complex).

I do think it may be an endless loop though--people won't be satisfied with being a platoon captain, they would want to be the general. And they wouldn't be satisfied with running a village, they would have to be the capital.

Never said this was easy ;)

Yep, exactly, everyone wants to be the 'big hero.'  Whatever that highest tier is, folks want to hit it. (Being willing to put the 'work' in to hit  that tier is another matter..)

I've been thinking about the NPC-as-fodder idea for a while now.  I'd love to see a game take that a bit farther, and start to introduce permadeath that way.  There you are, running around manuvering your party of vets when 'stalker' gets taken-out by an ambush.  AARG!  But that's the part of me that also misses X-com.

Heroes' stories end.

They are called upon to do great deeds and then either die gloriously or fade into an often bland retirement. The original Dungeons and Dragons only went up to level five because characters were expected to die or be retired before they got past that. The higher levels were added on as it was discovered that players come to love their characters and want to see them go on to become demigods and world rulers who still have time to hang out in bars with their friends and go on quests to kill gods and unnameable beings and save the world. Again.

Play D&D with a bunch of teenagers... the characters never die, and by the time the campaign has gone on for a few months they're all immortal anyway. These are superheroes, the sort we find in classic comics and Saturday Morning cartoons... not the mythic heroes of ancient lore. Superheros created, and that still exist, primarily to sell additional episodes... and although in the hands of a great writer they can be twisted to express mythic and eternal themes, they do not naturally lend themselves to literature. Their lives may be more exciting then ours, but only because somebody cranked up the dial on their reality to eleven. The jaded reader yawns when he sees yet another volatile supernatural madman just like the jaded trekkie yawns at just another time-space anomaly.

Just like we jaded MMOGers yawn at just another run through the epic "trash mobs" in the epic dungeon so we can please get our epic fucking gear this time goddammit.

It doesn't matter if we're controlling individual adventurers, commanding armies, or acting as gods to ecosystems that may one day spawn an interplanetary race of superbeings... until the story ends, the game is unfinished. "I got bored and stopped playing," is no more heroic an ending than, "I got tired of Spiderman and stopped reading." Either makes more financial sense than "and so we stopped making money because the story was over!"

Money vs. Myth is a pretty one-sided fight.

I'm yearned for a game to give perma-death a shot, but I find it difficult to imagine anyone taking that risk with the amount of investment (both software and hardware) it requires to make a MMO. I've always felt that perma-death would not only increase the excitement a game provides on a daily basis ("No way in hell I'm going in there! You're crazy to try it!") and begin to remove many players from the cycle of progression and more into the day-to-day fun that real risk can provide. There would need to exist a robust set of 'barely risky' activities for the peaceful types to co-exist with the risk-takers and some sort of mechanic to provide the player with some sort of reward (maybe in the form of starting bonuses) for the players that have succeeded in a past life.

On the contrary, there's many issues that I'm sure have been beaten to death somewhere on this forum. I expect there would be a psychological revolt against the concept, with many players leaving in disgust after losing their persona in an unfortunate accident or due to the stupidity of another player. Plus, the inevitable technical glitches (getting bugged and falling down a cliff repeatedly into a campfire is an example from a recent game that comes to mind) would need to be addresses without giving players a get-out-of-death free card at every turn. Not to mention that many players have become lazy due to the forgiving death mechanics of recent games (both online and the save mechanics of offline gameplay) and just can't muster the focus to maintain the vigilance required to keep themselves alive.

The problem with a lot of modern MMOs is that the "immersion" in most dev created stories is imaginary, even within the context of the game being set in an imaginary world.  They expect people to play along for nothing but the sheer joy of playing along.  And some people do.  But most people are going to think (correctly, in most cases) that the "immersion" is just text, and nothing else.  It has no meaning aside from whatever meaning you personally choose to impart on it, because that's generally the extent of the impact.  If you complete the quest or not, it's not going to change the world.  If you kill the dragon, he'll be right back there the next day.  You can pretend you're a noble knight or a sinister brigand, but to anyone not intimately up-to-date on your character's backstory, the difference is not really noticeable.  This is why role playing in most MMOs is the digital equivalent of LARPing; you're basically running around pretending that you're rescuing princesses or whatever, but you're not really doing anything, aside from maybe attracting a few odd looks.

I do think that a dev who wants to write a compelling story for their MMO needs to include a lot of achievement as motivation for the heroes.  Either in the form of huge rewards (e.g. granting access to a rich zone or phat l3wt), or to protect themselves from huge losses (e.g. the town with all our stuff in it got burned down), but you really ought to give players some kind of incentive other than "isn't everything else in this game more boring than this?".  The number of epic dramas where the heroes main motivation is "I was bored and didn't have anything better to do that day" is pretty small.

Even the window dressing that CoH gave by having chatty civilians talk about you was enough to make me smile. I actually got the biggest kick out of hearing -other- superheroes names mentioned because it let me know that other people were hearing about me. Hear that, mom? Some NPC thinks I'm something special!

That and the random folks on streets who'd come back and thank you after you "saved" them from the local thugs.

Little details, big payoff in immersion terms.

I was out leveling in Bricktown with a roleplaying technology blaster named The Last Desperobo. We saved a woman from some Freakshow thugs and she runs back to him and says "I hope my kid grows up to be just like you."

"YES MA'AM. ONE DAY YOUR SON'LL BE A GUN TOTING ROBOT. YEE-HAW."

..and she runs off. I lol'd.

The players would certainly do the storylines in that case, but I still don't think they would actually give a shit about the story. I think people would just go to their thottbot equivalent and take a look at the walkthrough. I don't think you can force the story on to the playerbase. The story must be intresting and feel meaningful to advance from a story pov, not because there's some carrot at the end of it. And I think that's the reason for why it won't work very well in a MMO environment.