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RE: Being the protagonist in MMO stories - Caspar - 12-13-2015
I think I can only really echo bits and pieces of what's already been said here. I like being part of a living world that would function perfectly fine as a narrative without your presence in it-but if you're making waves and fighting gods and demons, it seems illogical you wouldn't eventually be noticed, no matter how much Green Jesus overshadows you. I guess it's more a matter of execution and how seriously the story takes itself rather than one or the other? Or rather, I feel that it may be a meaningless struggle to begin with given the medium. Either way, I appreciate visible effort on the part of a motivated lore team.
I think that overall the classical MMO structure doesn't really lend itself to really powerful storytelling, but the only constant is that players seem to dislike feeling irrelevant in the lore. So ultimately the "savior" plot will always be there. But because the gameplay structure gets in the way, I have to keep that in mind when I take into account how I perceive the writing quality. If the game is not entirely taking itself seriously, or if the gameplay interferes with the narrative, I can wall those things off very easily from how I perceive the rest of the game. It's always sort of been my thing to essentially give the writers the benefit of the doubt and basically attempt to enjoy it the way they intended. From there on it's their job to convincingly sell me on being either just another grunt or hero of the world.
RE: Being the protagonist in MMO stories - Kellach Woods - 12-13-2015
(12-13-2015, 07:25 PM)Valence Wrote: The ones playing extensively are part of the QA department, as well as beta testers. And they do it more than most of us.Â
Then again, on the various points you raise, I can try to bring some answers as I work in the industry myself.
- On the inconsistency between the story and the game, it is something that I usually find very sad yet true: the game takes precedence. The main issue when developing games is that nothing is set in stone and things are always in motion. The end product barely has anything left from early drafts. When you have already laid down most of the lore and story, and when the QA feedbacks tell that the game is not good, not fun, or that some things have to change, then they have to. And then all the other department have to take that into account and modify what they did as much as they can... All of this during heavy time constraints. Most of the time, the more advanced is the development, the more inconsistencies tend to appear. Of course yes, I think that the stories offered by themepark MMOs often don't quit fit the kind of game they serve, as you say. I don't have an answer to that, maybe then that's the themepark model that is flawed... But if you remove those badly fitting stories, what is left to keep the grind... I mean, leveling, compelling, at least a little?
- "Gameplay issues" is subjective. Most players tend to state that X or Y is obviously OP or UP, or broken and should be fixed, based on their own experience. The mistake they do is always to assume that because they came to that conclusion, everyone else did. They often answer to that that you just have to read "forums". Which means, a vocal minority most of the time. I have found out most of the time that when something is not fixed or corrected the way some people expect it, it's often because they are actually the minority, and that the devs don't necessarily cater to their whims. Players, simply put, often lack the bigger picture. Of course, you also have the gamebreaking bugs that are not totally blocking you to play the game, but are not fixed for years, and that, even if companies have to prioritize heavily what is to fix first, can be quite telling of the quality of the service, yes...
- For features that nobody likes, it's always a gamble. You think that your feature or game is fun or compelling, or should work fine, and your QA has been enthusiastic about it. And yet, it fails to meet the expectations. That can happen. Creating "fun", is maybe the most volatile and subjective task ever invented. What is "fun"? Will all those different players find something fun too? Then of course, there is also the features that gets added because marketing asked them to be, no matter what...
Hi, person who works in QA outsourcing here.
- We cannot do script-editing of the title. If shit makes no sense, it has to be caught on dev side. Trust me there are many, MANY times I wished I could put what would be basically a "script makes no sense who the fuck proofread this?" bug and was thoroughly denied.
- Most of the gamebreaking stuff I've seen on titles I've worked on were stuff that we did log, but were completely ignored. The only time I've seen that we missed a thing was a disastrous launch where we simply could not have foreseen what happened, as well as another really dumb thing later on down the line that we should have seen, but didn't :/
- We typically only give our feedback when it's requested by the client. Which is almost never.
I know at this point I'm probably the 10,000th person saying this, but still bears repeating because for some reason I keep hearing people blaming the QA when all they really do is say "there is a bug there, here's how you reproduce it, here's our assessment of how bad it can be with proof".
* * *
In so far as script, I'd say before MMO plots can truly reconcile the personal with the global experience with both being fun and engaging, they need to drastically change the formula and that's not going to happen.
RE: Being the protagonist in MMO stories - LiadansWhisper - 12-13-2015
(12-13-2015, 08:36 PM)McBeefâ„¢ Wrote: It's a balancing act.
If you look at games like early WoW, it seems kind of silly that your character is going around slaying gods and dragons and stuff, but NPCs just treat you as some murder hobo.
Same thing in a game like FFXIV, you're treated as the hero you are, but it ends up being absurd when there are 1000 other people standing next to you.Â
The oldschool way of doing things was to make the truly fantastic achievements be so ludicrously hard that only a few people could do them. Then you get respect from fellow players. However that doesn't really work these days. A good example was how PVP ranks worked in vanilla wow, only so many people could be a certain rank, and you all had to compete weekly. If you saw some high level Knight Commander show up to a fight you knew they were about to kick some ass.
They did try to rectify that issue in WoW. In WoD you are like, some kind of great commander or whatever and you're leading the charge for the Alliance or Horde into AU Draenor.
The execution needs some work, tho.
RE: Being the protagonist in MMO stories - Valence - 12-14-2015
Personally, i'm not blaming the QA, quite the contrary.
RE: Being the protagonist in MMO stories - Kellach Woods - 12-14-2015
I was just doing the explanation from the job side of things.
RE: Being the protagonist in MMO stories - C'kayah Polaali - 12-14-2015
Most MMO stories are pretty ridiculous, and FFXIV really sits at the far end of the ridiculous scale. Don't get me wrong, it's entertaining! But the nature of an MMO is that you're playing it with a bunch of other people. Having a backstory where you're The Oneâ„¢ doesn't jibe with that. MMO players aren't stupid as a rule, we all know when we jump into that first party that despite what the story tells us we're not the only one in the group that matters. That leaves players to either dismiss the story as silly hyperbole or... well, that's really the only option.
Sandbox MMOs tend to do better here. EVE Online, for instance, lets you know that your character is a god among men, but makes it clear that the universe is populated with an uncountable number of your peers. In the French MMO Dofus, you're likewise an adventurer (which is great!) in a world where adventuring is a fine profession, but you are still only one of many.
There are quite a few "guided storyline" MMOs that do a good job with this, though.
In Star Trek Online, you start out as basically a random low level officer on a small starship during a large scale battle with the Borg. Literally everyone who outranks you on the ship has been killed in the fighting, and you're thrust into assuming command. While there are individual missions that are very singular, the overarching story is one where you're a random mook who's got to rise to the occasion.
Lord of the Rings Online is interesting because the MMO literally is based around a set of books that already have protagonists. Instead of trying to do something to put you into the Fellowship, you start out a random mook and you eventually (if you follow the story) end up being conscripted by the White Council to do things that help the Fellowship. You're very explicitly put into the position of being a supporting castmember to a group of people that you only occasionally see, and mostly from a distance. It's interesting.
RE: Being the protagonist in MMO stories - Alexandra Leyland - 12-19-2015
I don't mind my character being powerful in the main story. That's not the story I'm going with for her, so it hasn't got much effect on me. It's more of a... neat side thing than anything else.
RE: Being the protagonist in MMO stories - Mia Moui - 12-21-2015
I don't pay much attention to the story itself. Â I take the things I like and I ignore the rest.
For example, my character is not a Warrior of Light, doesn't have the Echo, doesn't fight primal gods, and while she does have some gifts, they are not especially powerful or even helpful.
She's traveling all over Eorzea, doing odd jobs, dangerous jobs, stupid jobs, demeaning jobs, all to make the gil to sustain the search for her sisters.
That's it. Â That's the whole story so far.
Betrayed by the matriarch of her outlaw family and handed over to the Coeurlclaw to settle a debt, Mia Moui searches to find the sisters that joined her in servitude.
That's the description of her story on her IC blog.
She's just an unusually tall Miqo'te, possibly the sole survivor of her family, thrust into an adventure she did not ask for and does not want.
RE: Being the protagonist in MMO stories - Cato - 12-23-2015
As far as MMO's go FFXIV's storytelling is actually pretty great compared to how bare bones a lot of stories in various other MMO's tend to be. The developers do try their best to build an interesting and immersive game world - and the MSQ's have been a lot better in 3.0 compared to how they were in 2.0.
I do, however, dislike being treated like the 'main character'. Obviously it's impossible for the developers to offer enough options to let people approach quest objectives in whichever manner they wish but FFXIV is very guilty of taking the easy route and forcing the player character into being a generic 'good guy'.
I hope that when we move forward with the story that there's more focus on the Warrior of Light screwing up. Such as being told to kill someone, doing just that and then realising that they've made a grave mistake.Â
At the very least the story could highlight that all those generic soldiers that are slain actually have families and people that care about them as well as their own hopes, dreams and loyalties. I was hoping that they'd do something with Lucia along those lines when it was revealed that she was related to Livia...but they pretty much just made her completely fine with the entire affair.
RE: Being the protagonist in MMO stories - Mavis - 12-23-2015
I personally am neither for or against it. I only do story quests in mmos for progression, or to learn lore from interaction of characters and seeing key parts of whatever happens to plague or be in the worlds mind at that time. So to me it doesn't matter if my avatar is treaded as the super special awesome chosen one or someone else, I'm only there for research basically.
Word has to be said about SWTOR though. That story was great. Granted, the only good thing about the game, however that story had me invisted, all the way.