I was going to simply respond in the comments of this post. but it got so long winded and involved that I thought I’d better post it here rather than hijack someone elses blog. Read on for my take on one of the stickiest problems in MMO creation.
In his quest for the perfect MMO, the writer is talking in this post about two completely different issues, and whilst they are closely related to each other I think the direction he is coming at them from is mistaken.
Persistence and Storytelling are two things which seem to be the holy grail of MMO developers. Things which they seem to think they can build in and make work without considering the fundamental construction of the world they are building. Take the addition of persistent elements into WoW, the quests which only change the world for you and no-one else (until they too complete them). It feels tacked on, and whil its nice that they made the effort, persistence is something that is just not going to work in WoW, for the simple reason that the players must be kept grinding away to get the epic loot they want and this requires an infinite supply of things to kill and quests to complete (even if the quests are simply the same ones over and over again).
When an MMO developer talks about storytelling, they seem to mean a way for them to tell the player a story, rather than a way for the player to themselves and other players a story. The devs make the player pick sides, give them a role and a chain of quests to complete, and seem to be stuck in the single player RPG mold of linear, predetermined, storytelling, when an MMO can offer so much more scope.
As mentioned in the poster’s previous article, various MMO developers are relieving themselves of the burden of content creation by allowing the players to have a go. Whilst this is admirable and allows developers more time to concentrate on things like bug-fixes, gameplay mechanics and art assets. it is still only allowing players to create static, unchanging content. Once you’ve done a player created mission in CoH, and eventually EVE Online, thats it, you do it again and it is the same as before.
Even taking branching storylines into account, these all have to be pre-created and are all fixed. So you can do the same mission arc, chose a different branch, and have a different outcome. Once you’ve done every branch if you do it again you’ll simply be repeating yourself.
A persistent and dynamic world, to truly be effective, cannot have a predetermined story (whether created by the developers or the players) and a predetermined story cannot by its very nature be persistent. Once a story is told, thats it, it’s done, no more new content unless the devs or other players decide to create it. This is hardly persistent, in a truly persistent world the story must be emergent, constantly being created by the players and their interactions, without the need for any specific act of creation.
Persistence is a tricky problem in an MMO. The simple fact is that there has to be some form of respawning of MOBs and resources for the game to work, otherwise all the MOBs would go the way of the dodo and there would be nothing to fight. and all the resources would be exhusted and the economy within the game would grind to a halt.
I think that we are getting close to the point where online worlds, such as those of MMOs, will become more like simulations. Not in the Microsoft flight simulator way, where everything is ultra-realisitic, but more in the way of A-life software. An ecosystem that would evolve and exist independently of the players actions. Predators would hunt prey, trees would grow, herd animals would migrate eating the trees as they went, and they would all interact with each other without any player intervention.
Persistence of environment is a different matter from persistence of story though and the two can be considered separately, though they may compliment each other indirectly. In the above idea of an a-life based ecosystem which could exist and operate independently of the players and their actions, but could also be influenced by them, stories would emerge from these interactions. Either between the environment and itself, (A herd of herbivores, hunted by a pack of carnivores, a story older than humanity), the environment with the players (a guild is nomadic, following the herbivore herds on their migrations and fighting off the predators, a story just as old as humanity), or the players with each other (the nomadic tribe, whilst following the herd, must cross the territory of another, non-nomadic tribe, and can achieve this either through diplomacy, trade, or warfare.) These interactions in themselves lead to further, different, interactions and more emergent stories.
A prime example of a game which is almost completely dependent on the interactions between players rather than pre-packaged content for the stories it tells is EVE Online.
Granted, there is a whole backstory and fiction behind the NPC factions and races which the players have little influence over, but can play as part of if they want. However, the best stories coming out of EVE are the ones which have emerged from player bahaviour.
The politics and intrigues of the player alliance campaigns, most notably the Goonswam/BoB/Kenzoku drama, are completely player generated, without the need to build specific content creation tools. The difference between the player interactions in EVE and other MMOs is that most of the mainstream MMOs force the player to chose a side and stick to it when they create their character. WoW, Warhammer, and even the upcoming Star Wars MMO all do this, and it restricts the stories that the players can tell themselves.
In EVE the players can change sides at will, and often do, the freedom this gives players in the telling of their stories is unmatched in any of the current crop of MMOs and is, in my belief the way forward if your vision of dynamic storytelling in MMOs is to come to fruition. Instead of forcing players to go through a pre-determined chain of quests and a pre-written story allow them to write their own through their interactions with the world and each other.
EVE however does not have a completely persistent environment, NPC pirates still respawn and asteroids magically reappear to be mined once more. However, the economy of EVE is a finely balanced simulation as CCP’s economist explained at fanfest last year, with mechanisms in place to keep it behaving as much like a real economy as possible and allowing savvy players to influence it, thereby creating more emergent stories. So in this case persistence of environment would work against emergent storytelling.
In conclusion, it seems to be an unwritten convention in MMO development that the creator of the world has to populate it with stories, writing a fixed path through the game for players to follow. The few games which break with this convention seem to have the best, and most persistent, emergent stories.
The best dynamic content is emergent, unforeseen and surprising, and while there is always a place for static content in MMO’s it should not be seen as the only way to tell stories in the genre.
It is my opinion that the creators of a virtual world should do simply that. Their focus should be on building a working, living, breathing world that is interesting in itself, even if there are no players, and simply leave it open for the players to make it more interesting, but without the need to learn how to use a specific set of tools to create more static content. By all means allow them to do that if they want, but don’t make it so that it is the only way they can influence the world they are playing in.
