Treesong said:
I feel this hurdle is rather huge for me. Looking back on 16 years of gaming I have come to the unsettling conclusion that I have hardly ever followed the storyline in *any* videogame I have played. Not just MMOs but also single player RPG"s like Baldurs Gate. I do remember the overall storyline of some of them but I have never been truly engrossed in the storyline itself: immersion in the world, yes, but being enthralled by the story as I can be with for instance a R.R Martin novel? No.
FF7 was close for me, I actually got into the storyline, the flashbacks of Cloud"s former life, the past of Shinra, the death of Aeris, I gotta say alot of that game"s storyline got my interest. That said it was no small feat, it required all those flashbacks to the past, it required the constant cutscenes, it required the forced direction that game too in dropping a quarter of the disc onto the city and removing a vast portion of the game playing world.
If a MMORPG wanted to create a true meaningful storyline they would somehow have to use every trick in the book and even then their job is about 1X10^5 times tougher then it is in a single player game.
That said, storylines in EQ often got my interest. The trick to those? They were not the creation of Sony or Verant or any Dev, they were the creation of the players. I don"t play EVE, never have, but I actually enjoyed reading about the war in that game and the eventual fall of the biggest guild in the game, that story got alot of people"s interest to the tune of a thread that even warps this one.
I think a MMORPG somehow has to strike a balance between their storyline they develop and somehow design their game such that it allows for the creation of player driven events like that. They somehow need to create the conflict, create the group efforts of huge numbers of people to overcome huge goals that change the world of the game somehow. Basically they need to create the dynamic content from the start, create a town from the start that people will know and love and hang out in with the trigger already set into motion to have a giant raiding party of NPC"s and PC"s of the opposing faction suddenly rise up, march to the town, and litterly raze it and kill everyone. It would be like a sudden old school GM quest but one that is programmed in from the start to change the world forever after it takes effect, and it then sets into motion some war that spans the next however long they want it to run.
Basically imagine the day that the Dark Elves followed Bertoxolous and Cazic Thule to war when the two gods released Nagafon and sent him to attack Freeport and then followed in from behind and detroyed the whole city. The city thus becomes a ruined wasteland of undead, the NPC"s you once knew now undead raised by Bert as he went by the carnage.
Granted the idea above is lame in a practical sense because Freeport would suck as a dungeon, it would destroy a key port, Nagafon and the gods have no relation, ect... But the idea of how they could create dynamic content from the start like this from a theoretical sense is very promising. It is like creating Gnomereagan as a litteral starting town for the Gnomes in the start of WOW and 2 years later running an event where we see the actual fall of the place, and the eventual change to a raid dungeon.
That whole long post above summarizes mostly into "you cannot tell a meaningful story in a MMORPG if the world is static, things need to be in place that allow for real meaningful changes".
