MMOs Are Not a Storytelling Medium
Massively Multiplayer games have long been the de-facto standard for narrative in games. How can you get better than the deep and unique interactive storytelling of that quest chain you skipped over when Allakhazam found you an easier one that gives better loot? Oh, wait...
MMO quests are still boring? Not to worry--Bioware to the rescue! As Gamasutra wrote last year, Bioware's upcoming Star Wars: The Old Republic is poised to finally prove story can drive MMOs. "We're going to build the largest writing team by a factorial [degree] in BioWare history."
Genius. I'm pretty sure the logic behind this went:
- Players are screaming for more content
- Narrative content is extremely expensive to produce
- We have lots of money
- Let's make a story-driven MMO!
How compelling can a story be when the player knows 10,000 others have completed it prior? How engaged can players be when the sole net effect is the loot or XP rewarded?
MMOs provide a rich environment to facilitate emergent player interaction. It doesn't play to those strengths at all to force the player to complete generic, painful quests repeatedly. The best story MMOs can tell is HISTORY--written by the players.
In Asterax, the game doesn't tell you stories, you tell stories about the game.
UPDATE: Psychochild blogged about the difference between what players say they want in MMO story, and what they really want here. No matter how great your story is, if it doesn't affect the way I play the game at all, I just don't care.