I just wanted to point out a few excellent articles and make a pithy comment or three about this SWTOR game that is much-ballyhooed of late.
First, Raph Koster’s excellent article on Narrative:
Narrative is Not a Game Mechanic
EDITED TO ADD Koster’s followup post, Narrative Isn’t Usually Content Either
Then there’s Richard Bartle’s take on SWTOR:
aaaand then there’s this little snippet from the WoW guys, who apparently concede that linear, heavily scripted and directed gaming might not be the best approach.
Blizzard Seems to Think That Cataclysm Was Too Linear
I’ve written about these things before.
and then there’s this oldie about the business model:
and my old huge article on MMOs with endings:
Y’see, I consider the narrative-heavy “fourth pillar” to be a Bad Idea for MMO play. To quote myself from Klepsacovic’s place:
Yeah, I should clarify. There’s no problem with devs telling a story, but the structure of MMOs is about playing off of other people in a persistent world (whether through direct or indirect interaction). The most interesting parts of that (the parts that drive interest and retention) are going to be the stories that players are enabled to tell because it’s a unique part of the genre. Those ephemeral moments of Awesome or Weirdness are what sell these MMO gamespaces as somewhere worth visiting.
Sure, you can get your watercooler/blog discussions about how your Smuggler handled that one moral choice in SWTOR, or how your guild downed the Lich King, but you could get much the same thing talking about an offline game. MMOs simply have the potential to *function* differently from other games, so it’s baffling to me that devs seem to want to put the experience on rails. It bothered me in WoW, it bothers me in the core design ethos of SWTOR.
It doesn’t bother me because the dev stories are bad, either (though they may be), it bothers me because they aren’t letting players *play* in these great potential playgrounds. They are just pushing them through the motions.
So when I say that MMOs *should* be about player stories, it’s because I think that’s the unique selling point and strength of the genre. That doesn’t mean devs should be forbidden to tell stories, just that they might be missing the point if they can’t let go of the reins.
Then again, this is a problem I have with game design on a larger scale; way too many devs seem to be frustrated filmmakers, not really *game* makers. It’s a different sort of entertainment, this “game” animal, and it can’t really be expected to function the same way. It’s a spectrum, though, not a binary “sandbox/theme park” dichotomy. *shrug*
There’s a place for barely interactive movies. There’s a place for story in MMOs. I just think that MMOs work best with greater freedom and a more malleable world, largely because it’s those crazy moments out in the game’s world that really make them unique. That’s the legacy of tabletop RPGs that I think MMOs could be poised to inherit. You can get great scripted narratives in something like Uncharted 3, and that works fine… but it’s not really the point of MMOs. As Koster notes, there’s a difference between an experience and a game.
There’s a place for great narrative, grand epics and stories with endings. I just don’t think that place is in MMOs, especially not subscription MMOs that almost of necessity need to be built around grinding and the sense of neverending play. There’s a strong case to be made that such isn’t really what is best for games in general, but that’s how sub MMOs work, for better or worse.
I don’t want SWTOR to fail (though Scarybooster is right, some have that mean attitude), but dagnabbit, the stresses inherent in shoehorning strong narrative into the MMO mold shouldn’t have been hard to see. It should be no surprise that players are “finishing” the game and moving on, or that the focus on the storytelling might mean a weaker effort on the “retention” schemes that makes the subscription system work (good comments over at Yeebo’s place). This is what BioWare does, it makes single player games. Even if SWTOR as it is might make for a stupidly grindy single player game (hattip to Chris at GameByNight)… I enjoyed Disgaea and several Final Fantasy games, so a long game doesn’t scare me.
…and yes, if they sold SWTOR as an offline game or even series of games, I’d still probably buy in, as I noted in that SWTOR Cost article from months ago. The game might be grand as a single player game, it’s just… trying to be something it isn’t.
Oh, and incidentally, MMO Melting Pot has a good roundup of some of the commentary, too, found thisaway:
It will probably take the slow minded Jedis 2-3 months to realize how right you are. The word fundamentally flawed comes to my mind, but hey, people seem to love it that way. That’s a pity. I tell you WoW was a magnitudes better MMO and game in every regard so many years ago. And you know how much I dislike the WoW style DIKU MUD.
Bioware goes more and more in the direction of an interactive movie instead of a game. I thought that idea died quickly after some experiments when the first CD-ROMs came around but take a look at SWTOR, Dragon Age II and Mass Effect 2.
Funnily many competitors also seem to fall for the “we need voice acting, or bust!” trap instead of playing to their strengths. Good times to be a voice actor for sure.
I can tell you why I personally like the game. I mainly play MMOs solo, and the solo leveling game is pretty much the best I’ve experienced (the rails are very shiny). Yeah, there are some offline games that have an even better directed experience. The problem with them is that there are no other people. I may only spend about 10% of my playtime interacting directly with them, but the presence of other players makes MMOs “sticky” for me in a way that offline RPGs aren’t.
The solo games in most MMOs are substandard grindy CRPGs that I tolerate in order to play an MMO (see EQ for an egregious example). LoTRO, WoW, and other MMOs of their generation elevated the solo game play to mediocre (more fun than my job…miraculous!). In SWTOR, I’d rate the solo game as “pretty good.”
In any MMO I play, once I run out of fun solo content I’m gone. A MMO that gets four months of sub time out of me is a rare exception. It seems self evident that I’m not as profitable an individual to attract as a hardcore raider that’s happy to grind away in some end game for a solid year. However, there’s about ten of me for every hardcore raider, and probably three of me for every casual raider. I’ll be really interested to see where things stand in SWTOR six months from now.
PS: thanks for the bump!
Longasc, at least I still have Minecraft and Final Fantasy, eh?
Yeebo, with SWTOR specifically, it’s a game I really want to like, and it may well be a great solo game… and I’m a confirmed soloist.
Maybe I’m just bitter about being asked to pay a box price and a sub for a game that I’d only play on my own time solo. It may as well be offline at that point. Yes, there are occasions when I’d play with others like I do in WoW, but why not make LFD equivalent the *only* online component so you can play offline until you want to go actively do something that requires online play?
Yeah, yeah, antipiracy, anticheat and revenue stream… that doesn’t mean I have to like it or spend money on it.
It will definitely be interesting to track the XFire numbers for it.
Longasc, you are exactly the sort of self-righteous more-gamer-than-thou player whos think that his way is the way things should be, that I’ve raged against. Your opinion is no worthier than any of those playing–and yes enjoying–SWTOR or WoW or any DIKU-style game. In fact, you invalidate your own statements, never offering up any alternative. If you’re so awesome, go out and publish that game you are sure will garner millions of players. Oh wait, if you had one, you’d already have put it out there.
I for one am enjoying SWTOR for what it is. The wife and can play it together, with online friends, or solo if one or the other doesn’t have time or interest right now. Go have your experience. I’ll enjoy mine.
Rowan, I know what an awesome gamer you are. Please keep your personal attacks to yourself, scrub.
Yea, rowan, scrubs don’t get to make personal attacks, only good players.
Tesh, I think this is one of those scenarios where I hit post on my comment and then said “oh…, yea, he has a point. I should write that up!” Then you went and wrote it. Jerk. How dare you elaborate on your own opinions. if *our* story doe not exist, why are *we* here, when I could read the dev’s story just as easily by myself? What we need is a dev story, but our own way of going through it.
“frustrated filmmakers”
Tangentially, this reminded me of another article I linked to a while back, on videogame design as art – http://www.contempaesthetics.org/newvolume/pages/article.php?articleID=299
I think there’s quite some truth in that videogame development has more and more started to imitate the (even) more popular medium of movies over the past decade – and not just in obvious terms of technical/graphical progress. stories are being told a lot different in today’s games, than back in the 90ies.
it starts becoming bizarre though when designers are freely giving up the big advantage games actually have over films here; the interactivity (or as the linked article calls it, “breaking the fourth wall”). this is something you wanna leverage on in order to create very lasting and immersive experiences, not lose? creating/experiencing a story yourself has much bigger impact than hearing it somewhere, reading it or being presented with it (while on rails). just like exploring and discovering places creates a bigger impression of them, than merely looking at a map.
….but then, all of this leads back to the same old song we’ve sung in plenty of (sad) blogposts now, doesn’t it. =/
but dagnabbit, the stresses inherent in shoehorning strong narrative into the MMO mold shouldn’t have been hard to see.
Strongly disagree! It has nothing to do with putting story in there. I’ll contend if there were no MMORPGs out there and SWTOR was the first one right now, it’d have all the ‘many people crammed into one space’ emergent story you talk about.
No, story is not a problem at all. Your just not getting the emergent story because you want to rely on nothing but cramming a bunch of people into a small space, ala big brother reality TV, and getting emergent story from that. When what’s happening is that the mmorpg playing demographic is becoming more diffuse across many different mmorpgs.
If anything an attempt to tell a story actually prompts a player to think in some moral conundrum terms and play something out which isn’t pure spread sheet manipulation. Your actually gutting an attempt to provoke emergent story, when the other way of doing it is part of the good old days now.
Not that they were all that good old days. All the stories I’ve heard sound like they’ve come from long, long periods of of spread sheet manipulation and it the awesome comes from personal memory editing, here’s an example in relation to table top roleplay.
My call is, you get what you play for. Can you address Premise this way? Sure, on the monkeys-might-fly-out-my-butt principle. But the key to un-premeditated artistry of this sort (cutup fiction, splatter painting, cinema verite) is to know what to throw out, and role-playing does not include that option, at least not very easily. Participants in Ouija-board play do so through selective remembering. I have observed many such role-players to refer to hours of unequivocally bored and contentious play as “awesome!” given a week or two for mental editing.
How much were those persistant worlds of yore actually thrilling, or how much is it clipping out long hours of node clicking? I’d prefer to be making some prewritten moral choice over that waiting for that one crazy player thing to happen that once.
Not to mention that how on earth does a predecided story in a game somehow stop the players own actions being THE story? Only in table top where some GM will go red in the face if you do not rahspact his authori-story, does the prewritten story come ahead of zany player choices.
While I’m waiting for crazy player crap to happen, I’ll take that fourth pilar any day.
It’s interesting that SWTOR has provoked some very strong, heart-felt pieces from some of the wisest heads in MMO game theory. Raph’s piece on Narrative effectively calls out this “Fourth pillar” idea as bullshit. Ted Castronova’s piece on Terra Nova is one of the most strongly worded I’ve ever seen from any academic on any subject.
Richard Bartle’s summary links to a pdf of an analysis he wrote in which he theorises that the job of a game designer is to match the development of the player with the development of the character, clearly something SWTOR doesn’t attempt to do in the slightest.
It’s a little ironic that after years of mmo bloggers complaining about lack of innovation someone takes an off-the-wall idea about what if you make a mmo that’s basically a single player game which is incredibly innovative and gets so roundly berated.
Then again, this wasn’t the innovation we were looking for.
Yeah, well plenty of people smoke, binge drink and throw away their earnings at the casino.
The innovations people look for aren’t necessarily indicative of anything good.
My post wasn’t about SWTOR, though.
No, really.
Raph, thanks for stopping by! I know, you weren’t writing directly about SWTOR. Your article on Narrative really is great, though, and it dovetailed very well with what I’ve been thinking about SWTOR.
Stabs, thanks for reminding me about Terra Nova. I need to go catch up there again.
I think the problem is more in the MMO than the RPG. I think those final 3 letters are left off most of the time and that is where things have perished. We’ve ended up with the themepark MMO being the de facto king of the genre with the largest numbers of subscribers. The pen and paper game hasn’t quite been faithfully translated in my opinion. Whereas it seems that people are now all about the killing Internet Dragons rather than what many of us have experienced through D&D and the like in terms of living in a world and the stories that come out of it. That is why for me SWG was a paragon of the genre. If you wanted to go out and kill stuff you could but you were also given to tools to exist within the world. I, personally, am a fan of SWTOR, I can understand why some don’t like it though. I get to enj0y the story of my character, yes just like a single player game. But I get to shre some of that with my guild mates and also have to chance to engage in the RP side of things. The RP is the main reason why I play MMIOs, I want to interact people and take part in stories that form our perception of the worlds provided to us by the developers. Sure we could use some more tools for that in SWTOR but I am already finding RP enjoyable in this game whereas I couldn’t get into it in WoW. Some of the best pen and paper sessions I’ve had has been when there is no combat, you’re working things out, you are being your character and when you can be into a story and your character is just flowing, well, that’s amazing and TOR has given me some of that.
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