Being the protagonist in MMO stories

[Nero]

This is something I am curious to know people's opinions about.

 

In the scope of an MMORPG's story and game world, do you prefer being "The Chosen One", being a nameless cog in the machine, or somewhere in between?

 

Personally, I've always found being considered the sole protagonist in the game world a little ridiculous. I'm specifically reminded of a brief moment I had in The Elder Scrolls Online where the Big Story Intro NPC gives some tirade about how my character is the sole hope to save the world, only for me to pop into a ship with about a hundred other armed and similarly dressed wahoos who were presumably chosen for the same task. Guild Wars 2 had this same problem as well, where after being told "YOU are the ONLY ONE who can STOP THEM" or some such nonsense, you pop out of cutscene land and smack dab into a crazed mob filled with other people who are also conveniently the ONLY ONES who can STOP THEM.

 

With that said, while I always find the trend of being the Chosen One in a game world populated by literally nothing else but other Chosen Ones and NPCs ridiculous, I will note that in no way does it significantly impede a game's ability to tell a good story. Star Wars: The Old Republic is a decent example of this, because even if there are a thousand other Grand Champions of the Great Hunt or Cipher Nines or Emperor's Wraths, I still liked the stories for the various classes and found them pretty compelling.

 

In FFXIV specifically, being the sole Warrior of Light in a game world populated by nothing but other Warriors of Light is a bit jarring to me and at times makes the story a tad absurd (I always think of the trials that require 8 people but the story treating you as if you defeated the big bad all by yourself and just poignantly ignoring the seven other people with you) but while it does affect my sense of self in the narrative, it doesn't really negatively impact the narrative as a whole.

 

Then you have games on the other end of the spectrum in MMOs like World of Warcraft, where you can be wielding weapons of legend and powerful enough to single-handedly defeat demigods in seconds and yet the player is consistently treated as less than an accessory to the various characters with little to no acknowledgement to the player character's contribution. Thrall is of course credited with the defeat of Deathwing because that rampaging horde of twenty-five loot crazed raiders were fairly non-essential, yeah? Well, probably.

[Warren Castille]

XIV runs into weirdness with that, too. YOU are the Chosen One but a lot of the quests say "Shit, find some friends and go stop the bad guy!" So... Are we all the WoL? WoL and his Entourage? How are the others on our scale? That all drops off in Heavensward, too, where the cutscenes reflect only the PC and his NPC allies.

 

It's a headache to figure out. I'm content to play a denizen in the world while the story shapes the narrative without my input.

[Virella]

I'm content to play a denizen in the world while the story shapes the narrative without my input.

I'm just going to echo Warren's words here, seeming that is exactly how I feel about it.

[Coda]

Honestly, I can't say which I prefer, and that's mostly because I generally don't enjoy MMO stories at all. For what they have to accomplish and what they're working with, MMO writers (and game writers in general) do a great job, but there's just too much working against them to truly write something exceptional. Suffice it to say that the well being of the game trumps the story in 99% of cases and because of it, the narrative will never be great. One can write a wonderful 'chosen one' arc just like one can write a 'random person' arc in any other medium. Either way, both will wind up being not very good or engaging when saddled with a game. In my opinion, of course.

[Lydia Lightfoot]

IMO, "one true hero" stories simply fall on their face in a multiplayer setting. Those are stories for singleplayer games. If it's a multiplayer game, then it needs either a "multiple true heroes" story or an "everyman" story. The astounding thing to me is that it wouldn't even be that difficult to take every "one true hero" story I've come across in an MMO and with relatively minor tweaking turn it into a story that accommodates a multiplayer environment.

 

But, then, I'm also a firm believer that game developers don't play their games. It's the only reasonable explanation, to me, for why the stories in the games often don't fit the type of game that the game is, why it's considered acceptable for QOL features to be missing, why there are sometimes gameplay issues that are baffling in their obviousness yet persist indefinitely, and why there are sometimes "new features" which get added to a game that kinnnnda nobody playing the game actually really likes or had been asking for...

[Miss Gaz]

I like playing the small cog, I don't mind just living in the world of the game. I always found it silly to play anything overly powerful or important. Hell I play a secretary and a doctor currently.

[Yssen]

Everyone is the protagonist of their own story, and people are telling many different stories. Each story mixes however many elements of the MSQ as on wishes. That can be all, or that can be none, up to the individual. That is the way it is.

 

As far as what the game itself assumes, that is not hugely convoluted. The game assumes there is only on Warrior of Light, as in THE Warrior of Light, the dude running running through MSQ and doing the things. There are, however, many Warriors of Light, meaning people who have the Echo and were were poofed away to the future when the stuff hit the fan at the Battle of Carteneaux. (There are also people who have the Echo and were not at the Battle of Careneaux at all, and other people discovering they have it a stuff moves on).

 

The game assumes your character is THE Warrior of Light. That your character runs around and does the things. That they are a member of the Scions, and work with other Scions to do all the things. That is where the party up people come in, that is your character's place in the story as an individual playing the game. Now, how much of that you RP? Purely up to you.

 

Personally, my character does not run around doing the MSQ stuff. (For the most part.) He does have the Echo, and he does his own thing as he figures out what having it means. Sometimes there are elements of the MSQ he is concerned about (Oppression in Ishgard, the plight of the Heretics and the people in the Brume, for instance). Other times he is not concerned. He is way more concerned with other problems in the world that the Scions seem to not to be focusing on. Yar.

[Verad]

I pay much more attention to the way in which I'm being shown to be just another mook or the true hero of the setting moreso than whether I'm one or the other. I get more from knowing that Warcraft portrays itself as a ridiculously cartoonish world in its plot, or from knowing that FFXIV is more straight-faced but with a dry sense of its own absurdity, than I do from my character's actual role in the story.

[Candor]

I've found that FFXIV is so inconsistent with itself that your character can be whatever you want it to be, John Everyman or Chosen One. Consider for a moment what makes your character the Warrior of Light - that would be the inability to be tempered by Primals. Everything else is circumstantial. The game begins with a vision of Hydaelyn, but like the many RPers that play crazy powers, this can be dismissed as a dream. Everything your character does up until the moment they meet their first members of the Scions of the Seventh Dawn is rather ordinary and could have been achieved by any member of the Adventurer's Guild. Then your character discovers that they possess the Echo, a quality not exclusive to your character. At that point the game becomes a repeating cycle.

 

Do relatively normal thing > Experience Echo > Immunity to Tempering

 

The rest of it is all jargon. The Scions spout off about you being the WoL, but do they really believe it? Is that why literally 90% of the game's quests are delivery or messenger jobs, when a courier or linkpearl would have done it faster and better? The game also completely fails to address the fate of the original WoL, and if your character is he or she, or if the original vanished into insignificance and your character picked up the reins. The only time we ever see the WoL status verified is by Midgardsormr, when he supposedly removes it, but again literally nothing changes for your character. He or she retains the Echo and still can't be tempered.

 

So the complete lack of the status of WoL meaning anything, combined with the world's gross mistreatment of the single most important person alive, combined with important NPCs constantly making arbitrary declarations based on absolutely nothing (ending the 7th Umbral Age), combined with your character only ever exhibiting a single extraordinary quality (the Echo) that he or she never loses throughout the entire MSQ, leads me to one conclusion:

 

You're a dude or dudette with the Echo, the Echo prevents you from being tempered, and you're not the only one. The Scions of the Seventh Dawn like their self aggrandized pretend time, but you're just a slightly less average adventurer.

[Chris Ganale]

If you were a Legacy player, they explicitly state in the 2.0 ending that you are that WoL come back, and it's reflected in how you start the game as well: instead of a carriage ride to your chosen city, you show up in a pillar of light.

[Aysun]

If you were a Legacy player, they explicitly state in the 2.0 ending that you are that WoL come back, and it's reflected in how you start the game as well: instead of a carriage ride to your chosen city, you show up in a pillar of light.

 

No, it explicitly states you are A Warrior of Light at the beginning of 2.0, that is one of the unrecognizable people who were at Carteneau and disappeared for 5 years. The actions of your character, one of many returning Warriors of Light, will lead them to become THE Warrior of Light (same as the actions of a non-Legacy player's character). /OT

[Aya]

I think it's beyond silly. Leave it to single player games please!

[Valence]

Personally, I like to play it small and modest for my RP. Starting with an insignificant character that can evolve later, is way more engrossing to me. Funnier. Less deux ex machina. More subtle.

 

As for these MMO stories, I don't care much if we are pictured as a world hero or a mundane character as long as the story is good, and of quality (don't get me started on the awful stories in SWTOR, imperial spy excepted..). Of course i'm a bit annoyed currently at the fact that we have been the invincible warrior of light for a long time, we eat primals for breakfast as well as garleans and ancient threats, and it's getting a bit... deja vu, if you know what i mean. It lost its appeal long ago.

 

Don't get me wrong, i'm quite impressed with the story they managed to pull on a MMO format since 2.5 and 3.0. I just wish we get more setbacks and drama. Doubt. Harsh times.

 

The exile to Ishgard after the 2.5 setback was great, a good start. More please. Let the heros struggle a bit.

 

 

Then again I don't care much overall what the story tells us compared to the world we RP and evolve in. When I do my MSQ, I play in my little bubble and the people in the party are just mundane adventurers or whatever. I don't even try to explain it to myself that much...

 

The story is almost a separate game to me. Like I'm jumping in the shoes of the warrior of light and the scions, living the world story, and the jumping back in the little shoes of my insignificant character that have to live with all those events happening in the background when I RP.

 

But, then, I'm also a firm believer that game developers don't play their games. It's the only reasonable explanation, to me, for why the stories in the games often don't fit the type of game that the game is, why it's considered acceptable for QOL features to be missing, why there are sometimes gameplay issues that are baffling in their obviousness yet persist indefinitely, and why there are sometimes "new features" which get added to a game that kinnnnda nobody playing the game actually really likes or had been asking for...

 

If I may derail a bit on that part, yes, most developers don't play their games (but some do at their leisure). That's not a necessary condition, but it's always good that they know a bit what they are working on.

 

The ones playing extensively are part of the QA department, as well as beta testers. And they do it more than most of us. 

 

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...

[S'imba]

It's all a conspiracy set up by the powersame that be...save an egg and you're suddenly the biggest hero the world's ever seen? You're just a publicity stunt and all the wol's accomplishments are completely set up. 

 

Ok more seriously though I don't think it is one chosen one. It's been shown there are other gifted ones. The thing that sets you the player apart is your determination to get things done. There's probably a lot more people who have been called by Hydaelyn, but few get chosen because many lack the qualities to be willing to step into that position. Then once they start down that path they can be drawn away following their own motives and how they believe they can change the world. 

 

Basically how I look at it is these companions that fight with you have the same calling but whether or not they are devoting themselves entirely to Hydaelyn would be up for debate. As the WOL you don't have a life so everything you do is in the name of Hydaelyn. 

 

A final factor I believe to be in play is as the WoL you just happen to be in the right place at the right time. Which means you get a spot light shining right on you. Considering what you're fighting against even a one and chosen hero wouldn'tbe able to make a difference. I tend to believe there others that are making big differences and whether they just escape notice or said person made an effort to not get attention and be put on the news cause they don't want to buy ice cream for the entire fire station.

[111]

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. 

 

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.

[Caspar]

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.

[Kellach Woods]

The ones playing extensively are part of the QA department, as well as beta testers. And they do it more than most of us. 

 

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.

[LiadansWhisper]

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. 

 

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.

[Valence]

Personally, i'm not blaming the QA, quite the contrary.

[Kellach Woods]

I was just doing the explanation from the job side of things.

[C'kayah Polaali]

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 One™ 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.

[Alexandra Leyland]

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.

[Mia Moui]

I don't pay much attention to the story itself.  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.  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.

[Dravus]

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. 

 

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.

[Mavis]

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.