Quote:
Originally Posted by Zehn - Vhex  That's your homework assignment for Tuesday Curt. You go to your staff, you ask them "Hey, has anyone started implementing anything that involves killing wolves or boars or other boring shit like that?" |
Here's the thing: you can create interesting and interactive story regardless of mechanics. In WotLK, there are very deep quest lines whose mechanics are very shallow and they're worth it for the lore alone if you're a fan. The question is how do you make content that engages the player in such a way that they're actually playing a *gasp* RPG in the day of database sites and rampant spoilers.
Many devs have gotten lazy and given up trying to one-up the dataminers and include all information inside the game. Look at WAR, which came with what you'd normally alt-tab to a database site to find built into its journal. People want to stop alt-tabbing to play MMOs, but I think many companies assume that means making everything stupidly simple instead of coming up with a way to serve fresh content you don't
want to alt-tab for.
I think truly the only way you can continue the quest-leveling paradigm that has become dominant since WoW is to randomize chain quests based on a preset number of events and then use metadata to chain them together in a coherent pattern. In that way database sites would only include the constituent parts (which locations/mobs within those could be randomized too) and not a full walkthrough. The trick is designers have to be willing to award critical thinking and problem solving just as well as killing. If you have a 'solve a mystery' quest line which takes actual effort and lasts 2 hours, it should award just as much if not more exp than 'kill 30 wolves/dire wolves/wolfmother/felwolves/wolfgod' chains.
