Welcome to the amusement park. Sit down and enjoy the ride. Oh you already were on this one? Well it's still the same one, but maybe you'd like to enjoy it again? No, you want new things? Things changing? Well maybe we could rig a few puppets to look another way, make the cart stop suddenly once or twice, would that be good enough? Not at all, you say, well then I'm lost on what to do.
So, or very similar I expect many current MMO designers to feel like. It's a trap of their own doing. When I saw the Star Wars MMO, I felt like we are back to where we were with the first Diablo, just with prettier graphics. Even calling that an MMO felt a bit like a stretch. What has happened is the developers suddenly think that story is the overall guiding principle. Oh boy, how wrong they are.
This means huge production costs. As a player you should be interested in this as well, as that money goes to story instead of, say the bugs or other features you would actually enjoy. The even more important factor is that they run out, get boring, repetitive and that very quickly. And they lack something very important: Humans.
Why do players actually play an MMO instead of Diablo, Battlefield or the latest RTS incarnation? It's not for the graphics, which thankfully has peaked at a level where it no longer is the driving force. It's also not just the game play in itself, though that has to be appealing at least. The majority want this thing where other players, humans, are running around as well. This can be to have victims to kill, friends to hunt with, customers to trade with or even a potential love interest. People have met on MMO's and got married in real life. Friendships have formed and been broken over an MMO.
So why is it you have to come up with your own stories as a developer, if your number one resource for stories, is right there in front of you? Well the reason for that is simple, they want to tell their stories. Sounds like a plausible thing, doesn't it. Don't we all want to tell our stories in one way or another? Reality TV is entirely based on that. But wait a second, that means the players have the same basic urge somewhere. Or at least some do.
You don't have to have every single one of your players do something in order to get it right. Story is one of those things. Supply a background, a canvas so to speak, the map of Tattoine, the blue prints of the SS Enterprise,introduce them as fluidly as possible to the conflicts and dangers of the world, without a wall of text, and then let them do their own thing. Some players well revel in your rich world and start creating their own narratives, many of which will be horrible. But some of those narratives will be better than what you expect from professional story writers. And you will have the ones who don't give two cents for the story, they want to experience the world, level their character and so on.
Now who exactly is all that story for? The power leveler couldn't care less, for him the story is more an obstacle than anything else. For the role player, they are very important. Now I have not seen one number that would convince me how many of each are in a specific game, so there is no point really in justifying it by that means. Instead, why not simply assume a 50/50 split, and make it work for both?
So you give the player the needed information for their quest, for the tutorial, whatever. The minimal approach is here paramount. As much information as needed to get it done. As little as possible. Slight flourishes to enhance the prose is granted, but those are really just maybe five percent of the overall information presented. At the same time, the player is given the option to access the wall of text, get all the gritty background information and details. This is very well done for example in Civilization, where you get fast the important info on page one (what's it do for my game) and then the blather on what the actual history is, on page two. You see from my writing, I'm one of those that hasn't played the game for the historic facts.
But all those imaginary facts are also a large amount of work. Adding new stuff to it, is even harder, because you have sanctioned one history and now you can't contradict (at least by accident) your own words. So how can it go on, without eating up huge budgets and still giving a good story to the players?
Let the players write it. Give them tools to write it, let others rate it, then handpick from the top of the crop what goes into canon. Give credits to it. Let them tell about their real accomplishments but also their fantasized ones. No matter what your game is, the players imagination can come up with something even better than you can actually provide within the game mechanics. Or maybe they show you a cool new mechanic that way you could implement. Their story about a battle in a certain region is so cool, you publish it and make that area war torn to reflect the history. People reading about it, might visit the place and see what they read about. Or when players walk through it they might wonder why it is the way it is now.
Encourage the activity, nurture it. The world will be more alive, the budget more wisely used and the players much more involved in the world where their stories actually matter. How could a developer not want that? How could a player?
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