[WoW]WotLK

[Flight]

I suspect what Kaplan is getting at is having more of the Death Knight starter type areas in the game, rather than just wanting to do away with endless text.


Expect to see much of this area 'development' and phasing used in story and quest telling in their next MMO, while much of the competition will be focused on turning out more MMOs like they have in the past and adapting it to be WoW like.

[Ninen]

While I appreciate fully voice acted quest/dialog/monolog/whatevers; in every game that's given me the choice, I turn subtitles on.

I read faster than the characters talk. I'm a visual learner, I retain wtf I'm supposed to be doing better. And if some fucker in the background (in game or IRL) decides to scream/holler/wtf-ever for some reason at the wrong moment, I don't miss anything.

Plus there's some minor humor finding places where the dub and sub don't match.

Assuming the voice actor isn't' Gilbert Godfree reading War and Peace, I'll still listen to the spiel.

[Grave]

Eh, even voice overs wouldn't do much for most people. EQ2 tried to have voices going along with what the NPC was saying, and people still just barreled through the dialogue choices until it let them accept the quest.

The fact is if we're supposed to be heroes in this world, we shouldn't NEED someone telling us where to go and what to do every step of the way. Some guidance is fine, like maybe some wounded guy is sitting in a village and warns you against going into a cave to the northwest. That's enough right there. I'm going. When I get there, tell me the story as I experience it.

[FoghornDeadhorn]

Originally Posted by Flight

I suspect what Kaplan is getting at is having more of the Death Knight starter type areas in the game, rather than just wanting to do away with endless text.


Expect to see much of this area 'development' and phasing used in story and quest telling in their next MMO, while much of the competition will be focused on turning out more MMOs like they have in the past and adapting it to be WoW like.

Yeah, interesting of him since it's not his job any more and the people doing it have been pushing it in that direction already.

[Dumar]

Originally Posted by TheYanger

Way to TOTALLY fucking miss the point.
As noted, he's not advocating story be removed, but that people remember it's a fucking videogame and not a god damn book.

no, i completely got the point. kaplan misses the point that it's a videogame apparently.

it's a visual medium, duh. it's an interactive medium, more duh. the solution isn't to remove fucking quest text; the solution, as a game designer, is to give the tools and worlds to players to let them be their own and make their own experiences and stories. that's the benefit videogames provide, not removing quest text to show a story visually or with lame voice acting: that's a movie.

if you give players these type of tools and create a place for them to make their own history, there is a million stories and experiences that can be and to be played out everyday visually and in the players head, not through text.

he arrives at the right conclusion, but he's going about it the wrong way. you can't have a good static story provided to the player 'visually' because then you're making a movie, not a game. and CERTAINLY not an mmo.

[Zerai]

No. You give players the tools to make their own experience and you get giant dicks and furry sex.

Yes, 1 out of a million people can make awesome stories. That's why they go into game design to make the stories we can play. They're called the designers. Shitty designers make shitty games. Good designers make good games. Buy the good ones, reward the good designers.

[Jubee]

I made it a point to read every quest text the first time through and honestly most of the stuff worth seeing happens outside of quest logs anyway. Arthas fighting Illidan and the Scarlet, the Wrathgate stuff, the siege of Undercity, etc. Most of the quest logs for those important moments just give you a brief summary of how to start the event anyway.

Sure the other ones give backgrounds and explain how those armies got those Bear Ass Cloaks but I've leveled through 80 levels of providing mats for NPCs. If the next expansion quests are nothing but explaining who all the raid bosses will be, I'd be all over that. I've done Naxx in two different level ranges and I still have no fucking clue why I should care what Thaddius is up to. I understand the Alliance have a bit of Naxx lore in one of their quest hubs but I saw very little about Naxx/Sarth on my way up. They did a decent job with Malygos though.

[Dumar]

Originally Posted by Zerai

No. You give players the tools to make their own experience and you get giant dicks and furry sex.

Yes, 1 out of a million people can make awesome stories. That's why they go into game design to make the stories we can play. They're called the designers. Shitty designers make shitty games. Good designers make good games. Buy the good ones, reward the good designers.

game designers are not story tellers, especially mmo ones. if he wants to tell a story, he can make a single player game like MGS or go into film. we're talking mmo's here. i guess he missed that memo? i'm not sure.

his speech doesn't make sense. he talks about how he wants to convey the experience visually, through less text, but he still wants a story? huh? how do you want to convey it then? voice overs will not work, scripting npcs is so last decade. he's talking like a film maker about mmo games.

no, the way you do it is, as a game designer, and more specifically, a designer of massively multiplayer games, is to create a foundation, a world and provide many interactive elements and tools for each player. this will lead to many different and more complex stories than any quest designer could ever provide, and since it's dynamic, it will be a new story each day. the story evolves from many different things, depending on how you define the interactions with things and people in the world.

but no, he doesn't wanna concentrate on game design, on mmo design. he wants visual scripts, whatever that means. it's dumb.

[Ninen]

Originally Posted by Dumar

Stuff

And thus Dumar has found another way to tie his Sandbox Agenda to a random subject.

[Dumar]

Originally Posted by Ninen

And thus Dumar has found another way to tie his Sandbox Agenda to a random subject.

it has nothing to do with sandbox. it has to do with taking advantage of the opportunities certain mediums have to offer.

you don't play poker by yourself, although i guess you can. you don't design mmos to be a static visual script, again whatever the hell he means. you design them to exploit the massive part of the acronym, the interaction of thousands of players.

[Grave]

Originally Posted by Dumar

his speech doesn't make sense. he talks about how he wants to convey the experience visually, through less text, but he still wants a story? huh? how do you want to convey it then? voice overs will not work, scripting npcs is so last decade. he's talking like a film maker about mmo games.

It's pretty simple if you think about it. Yes, it is sort of similar to film in that you need to convey information visually, but there's nothing wrong with that. MMOs do not have to be sandbox games. I personally WANT a glorified single-player RPG that lets me also group with others when I'd like to. You have to accept that some (a lot of) people want this even if it doesn't mesh with your idea of what an MMO is supposed to be. You want sandbox, we get it. How's Darkfall?

Anyway, imagine you're running around in the world and you come upon this village shrouded in mist. You go further in and start looking around and all you see are corpses. You can click the corpses and a simple note pops up on screen that they seem to be completely drained of blood.

You've just communicated to the player, visually and interactively, that vampires or some other blood-sucking creatures have attacked this village. Not the most exciting example, sure, but it works. It even sets up the atmosphere for the rest of the zone if you have other areas fitting this theme. You can then lead the player to other clues or get a story going through their own actions and let them see a story unfold as they progress. It's honestly no different than how a lot of single-player games work.

[Dumar]

Originally Posted by Grave

It's pretty simple if you think about it. Yes, it is sort of similar to film in that you need to convey information visually, but there's nothing wrong with that. MMOs do not have to be sandbox games. I personally WANT a glorified single-player RPG that lets me also group with others when I'd like to. You have to accept that some (a lot of) people want this even if it doesn't mesh with your idea of what an MMO is supposed to be. You want sandbox, we get it. How's Darkfall?

Anyway, imagine you're running around in the world and you come upon this village shrouded in mist. You go further in and start looking around and all you see are corpses. You can click the corpses and a simple note pops up on screen that they seem to be completely drained of blood.

You've just communicated to the player, visually and interactively, that vampires or some other blood-sucking creatures have attacked this village. Not the most exciting example, sure, but it works. It even sets up the atmosphere for the rest of the zone if you have other areas fitting this theme. You can then lead the player to other clues or get a story going through their own actions and let them see a story unfold as they progress. It's honestly no different than how a lot of single-player games work.

okay right, so where's the mmo part of the mmorpg in that example then? your example, in an mmo context, should be that the town was attacked by other players, not static npcs sitting idly nearby.

just admit it's for sub fees only.

[Twobit Whore]

Shut the fuck up.

[Gryzx]

I wonder how feasible it would be to have a significant amount of your quests be tied together to one or more other quests that represent the other side of the quest. Making questers themselves play the parts of the connected quests.

The simplest example to explain what I mean, is Quest A you're the Hero sent out to kill the bad guy that is actually a player doing Quest B, where he's the Hero sent to kill the bad guy from Quest A. So you end up having to fight another player rather than an npc. Possibly you could have triggers that if it doesn't detect a player from the opposing quest it creates an npc to finish your quest.

That is a very simplistic version though, you could have all kinds of interactions, even such as "take my loaf of bread to Npc C" could actually be having you give a loaf of bread to another player who is playing the role of Npc C.

Mixing quests like that together and you could get all kinds of interesting interactions.

[Grave]

Originally Posted by Dumar

okay right, so where's the mmo part of the mmorpg in that example then? your example, in an mmo context, should be that the town was attacked by other players, not static npcs sitting idly nearby.

just admit it's for sub fees only.

The only thing I want out of the "MMO" portion is to be able to go on these story-based adventures with friends and strangers I meet in the world. Massively to me simply means thousands of others are logged on and in the world with me. I don't care if they influence what I'm able to do or not. If you'd like to start calling these games MORPGs instead of MMOs, be my guest.

That doesn't mean there isn't room for a game like you want. Maybe someone will come along and make a Darkfall that doesn't blow. Mortal Online looks cool. Doesn't mean every MMO has to be sandboxy just because that's what you define the genre as.