The Daily Grind: How would you like your story?

Story is on the mind of a lot of developers these days, whether it's the wunderkinds over at BioWare or veterans like Funcom's Craig Morrison. Predictably, there are wildly differing viewpoints regarding implementation. You have BioWare trumpeting thousands of lines of (spoken) prose as leading to meaningful narrative gameplay, and then you have people who think that story in MMORPGs is a marketing gimmick unless it is created by the players.

Yep, you heard me. EA/BioWare is spending umpteen bazillion Republic credits on voice acting, novel-quality quest dialogue, and who knows what else, but at the end of the day, all of it will pale in comparison to what can be done by a couple of roleplayers using naught but their imagination and a few in-game props. TOR will likely be a well-made game but at some point, the developer-generated stories will run out and repetition will set in.

If MMO devs truly cared about advancing storytelling in this genre, don't you think they'd design systems that facilitate player generated content? SWG's Storyteller system in particular should serve as a blueprint for any developer that spouts off about the importance of story. Without it (or a similar system), frankly, it's all just a lot of PR-speak. What say you, Massively readers? Do you prefer developer-crafted stories in MMORPGs, or would you rather players be given creative freedom and robust storytelling tools?

Reader Comments (29)

i think the sandbox sub-genre allows for some interesting story telling opportunities because the world is dynamic. but i'm not really sure that a themepark mmo will ever a viable roleplay venue due to its static nature. how can you immerse yourself in a world that is static? you can allow players to maybe craft minor storylines with mission/quest tools, but those are likely to be linear which will not help immersion.

Mr. Erickson's claim actually made my blood boil, I think I'm just starting to calm now.. ;P

Totally agree with your view on this, I think it would be really awesome if there were to also take into account player creativity, such as the examples given in the comments here.

There are writers, modders and artists in the BioWare community that are just great and I'd love to see what they would do in an online game like this.

no user generated content will ever match up with the work done by true proffesionals and there's a big PERIOD at the end of this one. take a good look at the modding comunity and at how their "work" pales before what was originally in the game. a figment of imagination in my personal story is always an improvement, but anything more than that will come off cheap, especially when it comes from the hands of another player

I disagree.

Where do you think Bioware (and other studios) get their new blood? The answer is from the modding communities. There are thousands of talented artists out there, many of them equally (or more) adept at creating stories than any of Bioware's writers.

Tell that to the guys who made Team Fortress or Counter Strike. Sure these aren't MMOs but the point is that they made people play games they grew sick of again. On the fantasy side of things I could also point out Never Winter Nights. The players made adventures lacked nothing when compared to the released campaigns.

I strongly disagree. As someone said before me, take a look at neverwinter nights! The original game was, in my opinion, garbage. Boring!

But the potential I got out of playing through countless mods by amateur artists? That was way cool. I still remember some of the storylines, and let me tell you...only a small fraction of them were unenjoyable.

The art, also, was a great surprise. You would be blown away at what some "amateur" modellers/skinners can accomplish.

Ah, Morrowind comes to mind as well. I never played the main story arc - couldn't be bothered. I downloaded mods, and made my own. The game was literally alive to me, and the best part was - it was MY game world, not Bethesda's.

So yeah, I think player-content has some obvious hurdles to overcome. But don't try and tell me that all amateur content is garbage, because it isn't.

Professionals are just amateurs with better offices.

"no user generated content will ever match up with the work done by true proffesionals and there's a big PERIOD at the end of this one"

Yes, that's why Encyclopedia Britannica is so much better than Wikipedia.

Collaboration is the future of MMOs. The insane popularity of WoW has sidetracked a decade of development as everyone tries to replicate it (by simply copying it).

Neverwinter Nights is still kicking in the top 20 games that sell on Amazon. This is because of the numerous player made worlds and communities.

The only MMO that had a story that managed to really pull me in was Anarchy Online.

The unique thing that managed to draw me in was that the overall story actually happened while everyone was playing, you had a constant stream of news from the ingame new-service that sometimes announced how political relations between the factions slowly evolved (and sometimes stuff to, like "Riots in the pie factory! Leet-pie production has been halted!").

There would be ingame events held by the GM department, together with volunteer RPers, which since AO only had two servers played together with all the other players.

The best "lore" memory I have from a MMO was from AO when the faction leader was about to hold a public speech but suffered a assassination attempt, with a following manhunt for weeks with heavily armoured police (played by GMs) invading the opposing faction's cities and "hang out" locations when they investigated and tried to capture suspects etc.

Basically, FunCom managed to create a feeling of a real, living, alternative world, where events played out no matter if you logged in or not. I'm not a RPer at all, but I still got drawn into the story and started caring about what would happen next.

I think it would be cool to have player-created stories, but I would want some tools for sifting through them - a rating system or a list of most accessed stories maybe. Maybe there could even be a way to subscribe to player story content. Content developers with high ratings or large followings could be given more resources or more freedom with creating stories as they went along, like a tools for creating cut scenes (which I love). You know, something like BombayTV.

I would still want the main story line to be driven by developer-crafted stories. But, I'd love to see player stories mixed in.

The Daily Grind: How would you like your story?

Reader Comments (29)

Posted: Jun 9th 2010 1:22PM karnisov said

Posted: Jun 9th 2010 5:26PM Cendres said

Posted: Jun 9th 2010 12:07PM Andur said

Posted: Jun 9th 2010 12:20PM Jef Reahard said

Posted: Jun 9th 2010 12:21PM Phone Guy said

Posted: Jun 9th 2010 12:54PM Birk said

Posted: Jun 10th 2010 7:54AM (Unverified) said

Posted: Jun 9th 2010 1:34PM (Unverified) said

Posted: Jun 9th 2010 1:40PM Enikuo said

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