The question at hand is my second biggest concern with SWTOR right now. The first, of course, being how they handle the business model. Bioware has, in their own words, made it their mission “to create the best story-driven games in the world” with “compelling, interactive storylines” being a significant innovation in their game’s design. A good story is important in most games. Let’s be honest with ourselves though, with Star Wars as their IP it’s hard not to have one of the best stories out there. However, can a story really carry a (MMO)game?
Bioware has been saying things in their videos and previews that paint the gameplay as a choose your own adventure. The usual “your decisions matter” and “we’ve got a 4th pillar” cliches have been tossed out there for people to gobble up.  Nothing too exciting there. Then there are statements like “irreversible story decisions” which are still unique enough to raise eyebrows.  But it’s the “create your own personal Star Wars saga” and “your decisions have consequences that affect the world around you” that really pique my interest.  Bioware starting to talk about capturing the same feelings of salvation that Darth Vader brought about or the betrayal from Lando leading to the loss of Han – in a MMO?
I don’t doubt Bioware’s ability to tell a story or to perhaps even deliver on these promises. How they’ll go about it is where I start to worry. What interests me most is how they’ll accomplish allowing individuals to create such unique stories and interactions within the world while still maintaining that sense of “massively multiplayer”. What happens if my personal saga leads me to betraying the Jedi master that you’re currently sucking up to still? Will he be standing there next to me talking to you still or will Bioware employ some sort of phasing technique like we’ve seen in WoW? Phasing could work – I’m a fan – but can you imagine phasing it thousands of different ways based on different people’s decisions? Realistically it’s not going to happen this way because we would eventually all be in our own little phased out world. Instancing sounds like the only practical solution but that’s taking a step in a direction that obliterates the sense of contiguity in a virtual world when it’s over used.
Each class having as much choice as an entire standard Bioware game sounds amazing to me. How it’s handled, how they connect the world through a process which seems impossible without disjointing everything, will be something to watch closely as SWTOR continues down the road of development.
AoC proved that it can but at a high cost in developer resources. The Tortage storyline was one of the best things I’ve seen in MMOs so far.
Whether Tortage was a multiplayer experience is of course another matter. It wasn’t, at least the very immersive cut-scene laden Nighttime quest wasn’t.
To make things multiplayer but story-driven you need a dynamic world. Say you have a mighty Imperial Fort that if the Rebels put in a huge effort can be burned out and turned into a dungeon area. However Imperial players are incentivised to reconquer the dungeon area and rebuild the Fort on which point all your old Imperial Fort content re-activates. Rebels then don’t have the dungeons and get persecuted so they band together and rip down the fort.
OK it’s not exactly a deep story but it is more of a story than: there’s the Imperial Fort. You can’t attack it. Sorry!
Personal storylines seem even easier. Once you make friends with the Goblins the Dwarves hate you. You can’t enter Dwarven areas, Dwarven quest givers won’t give you their quests.
In both cases the reason these approaches haven’t been done much is because you have to design twice as much content since you’re closing off half of it to any given player.
But sure it can work and no reason to think TOR won’t do a good job
Blizzard made WoW a blend of quest driven singleplayer game mixed with MMO light.
I think what turns a lot of people off is that they try to guide players so much. Some want more freedom. A storyline does not give players too much room for deviation, OK, we can deviate for sidequests and so on, but it inevitably comes to an end.
They should not make a GAME, but a world. WoW is not a world, contrary to popular claim, but a game.
http://www.wolfsheadonline.com/?p=1592
Wolfshead sums it up nicely what I dislike about heavily quest driven content delivery.
Not sure what you mean by phasing… but when I played LotR ages ago, they had some storeline NPCs in rooms that you could only access at particular points, allowing them to be ‘many places at once’ while you yourself could only come across them at place given where you were in the story.
Massive and world-changing… public quests? 😛
I am not sure that I can be sold by quest driven MMOs anymore. They usually just turn into single player games that are not as good as true single player games.
I must say that I am enjoying the sandbox (freedom) style very much. They are much less restrictive, which suits my play style perfectly. I really hope to see more sandbox MMOs, without levels, in the future.
>made it their mission mission
Typo there.
“can a story really carry a game?”
In my view, yes. Because it’s the story that carries me on through games.
I’ve played some truly shocking games in my time, ones that range from the SNES up to now-a-days, and sometimes the game play has been butt-clenchingly bad. But yet I’ve carried on because I’m interested in the characters, the development of the plot line and eager to see what else will come from it. What twists and turns will there be to make my journey through this story interesting.
Gameplay is secondary to me if the game itself has a lush, full, story. Except to have that sort of awesome story you also need characters you can associate with and ones that you grow likes and dislikes for. Which is some what hard to do in an MMORPG because of how static everything is and how easy it is to forgot a character (be it a PC or an NPC) within the world. That’s crucial in my view to keeping an awesome story – the characters. Can they keep all those intertwined? As much as I would love to think so I don’t see it happening unfortunately because of how current day MMORPGs work.
I personally don’t mind seeing different things than others, but maybe that’s just cuz I don’t need them to see it too for validation/immersion. For interactive things though that’s where it gets tricky cuz I could be putting out a fire that isnt there for someone else and they could be wondering what the heck I’m doing. That would break their immersion, though not necessarily mine. Hmm one solution might be to give “accomplishment” rewards that change the character and his/her storyline and make it so nothing is invisible but everything you’ve already done is no longer interactive and you can have a little switch maybe that shows you “your phase” or the “generic phase” where you see what they can see.. meh just kicking around ideas.
I’ve updated the blog post (to fix the duplicate word/typo) and to reword the “can a story really carry a game?” to include specifically that I’m referring to MMOs.
Story can definitely carry a single player game. The greatest games of all time owe much to story. In a mmorpg – a game designed to provide a “massively multiplayer” experience – can that level of story telling (the level Bioware wants) be achieved while still maintaining the contiguity of a massive and connected world?
The reference to AoC’s Tortage is a good place to start. That story is linear. Within that linear story you have 3 options that everyone who plays must go through. Thus, you are splitting the populace only three ways. Players are only apart from one another while doing the “story missions” – but do you recall that all of these story missions became a single player game? To achieve that level of story, the player was forced into his own instance and the multiplayer word was cut off. Now recall how the redundant instancing of the world (Tortage 1, Tortage 2, etc) split the population even more. Think of what will happen if this type of split is applied to the entire world and people have hundreds of paths to diverge.
My problem with this is not so much Bioware or how they plan on making this MMO. It’s the fact that it is Star Wars IP and we have been bombarded with crap from Lucas Arts for so long I’m nearly completely turned off from the franchise.
I suspect they will do “phasing” like WoW/LoTRO and call that their altering the world. I really don’t have much hope for this game other than for the Star Wars fans. I don’t think it will draw many gamers that aren’t already Star Wars fans.
Yea I’m with Wickidd. I honestly could care less about the story. I’m thinking FFVII was the last game I was somewhat interested in the story. And I can’t think of one quest in WoW that comes to mind that I “really” read.
I don’t know if it’s really the stories I don’t care about, or just the fact that I hate to read! If all the quests had voice overs maybe that may change my mind.
Thou I have been enjoying some of the “story/drama” in the DF vent…but I don’t have to read that! eheheh.
I love a deep story and plot. But I don’t think it can successfully coexist with MMO elements.
The storyline of a game is supposed to immerse you into the universe to almost a roleplaying level, whereas the MMO part always takes you right out of it.
I can’t feel like i’m immersed in a storyline if i have other people running around that i KNOW are not in ‘my story’.
Yeah, I just saved that princess from the castle, but so did all these other guys on the server. The princess wasn’t “real” she’ll be in the castle forever, waiting for all the other schmucks and all my alts to come rescue her.
The Phasing in WotLK was cool alright, and some of the storyline was above and beyond the same old “collect 10 hogs tails” quests. But you were always ‘unimmersed’ when you helped your friends with old quests you’ve already done, or doing other MMO type stuff.
Let MMOs be MMOs, and leave the storyline stuff for the single player RPGs. that’s where they excel.
Making a story worth caring about in an MMO is hard. For example, opening of the AQ gates in WoW is really cool — you can read about it on wowwiki, if you’re curious. But it only happened once per server — and only one person got the really cool bug mount! But for those couple of weeks of grinding resources and trying to beat the other side and ringing the gong and the whole deal, it was really awesome.
Having an MMO with a string of public, world changing, BIG quests would be awesome. However, it would require a whole lot of effort by the GMs/developers. Those “save the princess, gather the bug horns, etc.” quests are pretty lame.
SWTOR will look like a massively single-player game to me until Bioware starts advertising community-oriented experiences. It might be a game mostly for small groups in instanced experiences, ala DDO.
In any case, I think it’s significant that the first feature Bioware chooses to advertise is individual stories and not a community story or community events. My guess is that’s telling about their focus.
People enjoy stories in the great stories because they’re engaging and allow people to immerse themselves in the world.
Great games have effective and wonderful stories because it immerses the individual and allows them to move through the world at their own pace.
I can’t see a way to effective blend this feeling with thousands of other people also at the wheel.
Imagine this-
You’re moving through the epic campaign of Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic and the story is unfolding. As you move a new area, you see other people that are steps ahead of you, furthering the story in their own ways. This would ruin any sense of immerse or believable the world had.
So, what if they used the “instancing” idea instead? Is it even a MMO in that case? No interaction with other people, outside of a small scripted battles or “missions” that required them?
I am having a hard time envisioning a middle ground that would effectively reach both sides of the field. If it leans to far in one direction or the other, it loses something.
This whole thing conjurers visions of Guild Wars. That makes me a potentially sad panda.
It is the dilemma of MMORPGs. In order for the “story” to have meaning, the world must change noticeably from the perspective of the player. However, how can multiple people play the same story and change the world their own ways, but still interact with everyone else.
In a way I would almost argue the EVE and Darkfall are better at creating a story type of environment for the players since there is no (or limited to pre-game history) story in those games. The players create the story.
Yeah Eve/Darkfall are an interesting contrast because the game is there for the players to “create” these game-changing quests and events by engaging in the politics, and sieging.
I guess if you go up the ladder from “collect 10 bear organs” to lotro/WotLK phasing, those pre-defined experiences always seem to break as soon as you involve more players in it. Or does it always have to?
I like the idea of instancing the world so that as you progress through the game, you also move on to new instances where the story is unfolding differently.
Because let’s face it. There hasn’t been an MMO where the grind from 1-Cap has had ANY impact on the end game as a whole. Why not make it a multi-instanced “choose your own path” where people might get split up in different instances based on the path they are taking. Who cares if friends can’t play together if they make different choices, the end game is the goal anyway?
Other people here mentioned it too, but what if you had a world where you slowly became aligned to a faction. Kinda like the wow aldor/scryer, but on a much more meaningful plane. Kinda like you have horde/alliance, but everyone starts neutral, and by the time you reach “the end game” you have reached a permanent (or semi permanent) factional alignment based on how you played the leveling grind?
We all loved the ultima Tarot class assignment mini game.. What if the leveling grind WAS that mini game, it was fun and meaningful, but you knew where it would lead you – to your final class/faction/alignment?
I’ve been thinking about this for a while and i think the answer is actually rather simple.
In Wow, the hunter and priest classes had special quests from drops in MC; and other classes had various quests throughout the games: for new pets, new moves, new weapons etc. i bet that SWTOR will be like this just bigger, i guess.
Also, keen I think you are underestimating how scale works with computers. So if you have 6 classes and each decision has two options, with say, 20 decision points. You not going to have to have 6 X 2 X 20 X # of players different versions out there. You are only going to need 6 X 2 X 20 because those are the only options and inevitably some people are going to choose the same paths. So if you have a separate server dedicated to decision options then its not that much work. Especially if only one needs to be active per person per place. So if you made a decision on curasant, then only on curasant does that decision have to be shown or “active”. Or something like that.
You are either underestimating it, or overestimating what is actually gonna happen. Or I may be, reamains to be seen.
Addendum:
Or you could have some of the class decision points overlap, so two classes could have a decision point of whether to betray the jedi council or not, and that would reduce the amount of phasing.
I really hope they could do it good, but I don’t have a lot of confidence on it.
I share the same concerns with you. They’ve also said (I don’t remember the source, sorry) that there’s the big story that everyone follows, alongside the class quests. They have said the class quests will bring you from level 1-cap, but I wonder if the non class quests will do the same? It may be a bit unrealistic to think there would be that many quests, but we’ll see.
Also, here’s a good article you should read. http://www.tentonhammer.com/node/47133
It doesn’t give any real answers, but it does show their design philosophy a bit.
“What happens if my personal saga leads me to betraying the Jedi master that you’re currently sucking up to still? Will he be standing there next to me talking to you still or will Bioware employ some sort of phasing technique like we’ve seen in WoW?Instancing sounds like the only practical solution but that’s taking a step in a direction that obliterates the sense of contiguity in a virtual world when it’s over used.”
Please simplify for the not so over intellectual’s