Ludonarrative Dissonance and the Dismantlement of the Iconic Class Identities

[Sarova]

It's a great phrase happy to have shared it. It's a concept I think all experienced gamers understand, even if we've not had the terminology for it.

Indeed, thanks for sharing

[Majspuffen]

Maybe I can try bring this back into the topic, which sort of ties in with what I was saying: In this game, the player needs to do most of the heavy-lifting in terms of narrative and suspension of disbelief. As has been said, most plot elements of supposed great urgency, aren't; you can take as long as you like getting out of the exploding space station. I can't speak for anyone else, but I pretend - If I have an urgent mission, I don't stop to do some shopping on the way. Of course I'd love for there to be actual mechanics and consequences outside of my imagination, but there isn't, and I'm resigned to the fact that there never will be.

Yes, that's true. And if you're immersed enough into the narrative you will feel the need to hurry when it tells you to hurry. The problem with KOTFE/KOTET is that it feels like the majority of chapters ends with an explosion of some kind of other. How many times can you narrowly escape before it gets tedious?

 

Yes, the hyperspace travel within SWTO is far too short. Even the hyperspace treavel in the original X-Wing games seemed to take longer ... not to mention The Clone Wars.

 

And teleporting ... Well, it's Gree Technology, so I can stomach that.

I don't necessarily think that the hyperspace travel is too fast in SWTOR. Or rather, it kind of has to be because of how the game works. These days we barely even use our ships because we can travel via abilities that teleports us where we need to go. It's too late to change that now.

 

However, I always thought how they handled our starships to be a bit of a missed opportunity. It was the perfect environment to allow for some player housing. If there were more things to do aboard your ship, it might have been fine to have a travel timer between planets. Then they could also have it so that distance matters; flying from Dromund Kaas to Tatooine would take longer than flying from Coruscant to Corellia. This would invoke a sense of actual space and it would make the world feel larger. However, such a system would probably not fly with the new generation of gamers who only wants action, action and more action. Which is a shame, I kinda liked waiting for shuttles back in Star Wars Galaxies.

[Majspuffen]

Figure I'll give myself a modest little bump. I've been happy with the responses my extremely long wall of text has received and I'd be happy to put the thread to rest, but I figure I'll give it another shot at page 1 for more views and possibly more responses.

 

*** Warning! Contains spoilers for the Fractured Alliance chapter! ***

 

I'd like to tackle ludonarrative dissonance from another perspective. My original post focused mainly on the class identities, but I'd like to explore the dissonance within the game's genre. SWTOR was, somewhat humorously but accurately, touted as a single player MMORPG. The dissonance between the player's own experienced story and group content has been an issue since day one; I think we've all experienced a flashpoint where you've got two Wraths or two Barsen'thors, Cipher 9's, Darth Nox's etc. When an NPC comments on something you've done it gives you a sense of acknowledgment. But if the NPC instead says that exact thing you've done but to another player, it kind of breaks the immersion, doesn't it?

 

However, I do believe that we could all look past this issue. At the end of the day, we were all small cogs in a much greater machine, and that greater machine was the overarching narrative that we all participated in: The Empire versus the Republic. When Malgus turned traitor we could choose to disobey him or sympathize with his cause, but at the end of the day he fell down the reactor pit regardless of our individual choices. The narrative told us that because of this internal conflict, the Empire was weakened and that the Republic now had the upper hand, which set the stage for Rise of the Hutt Cartel. Compare that to how things work today. We went from being a small cog to becoming the greater machine; we, the players, have an immense control over the overarching narrative. For example: with my Operative, Acina remains the Empress of the Sith but for my Jedi Shadow she's dead and it's Darth Vowrawn who has become Emperor. The Emperor of the Sith is an incredibly relevant title to the overarching narrative, and we players have been given individual choice over the status quo of the galaxy. But we still share the same world, except our narratives can be vastly different, and therein lies the dissonance. Again, this was a problem in classic SWTOR as well, but it's different when you turn things up to eleven. Our decisions and their consequences were largely contained within our own narrative paths and didn't really affect the overarching story.

 

I believe KOTFE and KOTET damaged the game because of its single player focus. It shattered the conventions of an MMO. I wasn't a big fan of Shadow of Revan, mainly because it was the first expansion that pushed the whole cross-faction cooperation. It began with an attack on Korriban and Tython only to end up with Lana, Theron and a cross-faction plot that somehow managed to threaten both sides. However, in hindsight I realize that I do appreciate the way they told the story. It was carried out by rather minimalistic cutscenes that established the characters and the plot inbetween more meticulously crafted Flashpoints. These Flashpoints could be played solo or with a group. At the time I thought it was lazy, but now I realize that the design was actually very clever. It got two birds with one stone; it provides story content that everyone can play as well as group content. Ideally, the story mode should provide a lot of narrative context and it should be playable by a group up to four (so that people can play through the story together) while the veteran/master version of the flashpoint provides less narrative (since random groups prefer to skip anyway). They did sort of return to this type of storytelling during the Fractured Alliance-chapter, which is perhaps the only thing I can appreciate about KOTET, even if I did think the storytelling was poor.

 

The ludonarrative dissonance I want to highlight within this post stems from the fact that the game is an MMORPG but tries to be something else, and we players are left in limbo as the game tries to decide what it wants to be. Personally, I preferred the way they told their story in the events leading up to Shadow of Revan. Currently I'm in a permanent state of suspended disbelief because I know my narrative path differs from everyone elses and that we actually experience vastly different unvierses. The world is not cohesive, which wouldn't really be a problem if not for the fact that this is an MMO. Ludonarrative dissonance.

Edited January 19, 2019 by Majspuffen

[AlrikFassbauer]

I skipped most of the part because of spoilers.

 

But I just want to comment on this one :

 

The ludonarrative dissonance I want to highlight within this post stems from the fact that the game is an MMORPG but tries to be something else, and we players are left in limbo as the game tries to decide what it wants to be.

 

One thing I see is that it is established now that MMO = DRM: It's as simple as that.

 

It wasn't that clear when development began, but it is the current fashion these days ( just look at the "always on" - DRM games, like The Settlers 7 - and that's from 2010 ! ).

 

So, while SWTOR is in part MMO - thus meant to provide Star Wars fans to have a good time - the other part of it - and it tries to combine both, which imho works relatively good within the Class Stories - well, that other part is the first single-player RPG sonce KOTORT II. And this single-player RPG aka Class Stories is bound via the MMO part as DRM to be an online game.

 

These days, since single-player offline games are more and more dying out, SWTOR just shows what the furture for single-player games might look like.

 

Well, that's my personal opinion.

[Majspuffen]

So, while SWTOR is in part MMO - thus meant to provide Star Wars fans to have a good time - the other part of it - and it tries to combine both, which imho works relatively good within the Class Stories - well, that other part is the first single-player RPG sonce KOTORT II. And this single-player RPG aka Class Stories is bound via the MMO part as DRM to be an online game.

 

The individual storyline plays much like a single player game, like you say, though in the past you could always bring people with you. You could do this if you needed help with certain encounters or if you just wanted to watch and share the story. I did this back in 2011 when I started playing. I levelled my Operative alongside a friend's Powertech, and we would be spectators in one another's stories. So when I levelled, 1 through 50, I not only experienced the agent storyline but the bounty hunter one as well. Outside of our main missions we'd do the planetary storylines together. In these quests we could both participate; NPCs would always recognize if you were alone or in a group. We'd use the dice roll system, which was always fun when it came to decision making as we'd always bicker when our choices differed. In the Eternal Alliance storyarch we can't do this. All we can do is talk about the decisions we made but we cannot share the experience.

 

So here we have two types of storytelling: we have the single player one (that can be shared) and a multiplayer one. But there is a third type of storytelling, and that is the one of the overarching narrative. The narrative that ties all the players together in the physical world. The narrative that tells us about the state of the galaxy. And this narrative won't budge, regardless of your choices. Think of it, some class stories did have a pretty major impact, but the overarching narrative always took these things into account. Saresh always become chancellor, regardless of whether the former one is killed or not. The Emperor always dies (speaking vanilla). It doesn't tell how, it just says these things happen. Nowadays, we have some power over deciding these things, which means that the overarching narrative is different for each player. And this is bad, in my opinion. The physical world we share should be the same for everyone.

 

These days, since single-player offline games are more and more dying out, SWTOR just shows what the furture for single-player games might look like.

Aye... it's up to indie games to save the industry.

[AlrikFassbauer]

But there is a third type of storytelling, and that is the one of the overarching narrative. The narrative that ties all the players together in the physical world. The narrative that tells us about the state of the galaxy.

 

My guess is that this third story / narrative is the Dread Masters story arc. It spans thoughout Planet Stories into OPs in the end. Sadly, it ends with Oricon, but on the other hand, it gives the player who is actively following this story arc the feeling of satisfaction of "having put an end to it".

 

And, there's another one : The Revan story arc. Similar.

 

The class stories have ended, and been replaced by the KOTFE / KOTET story arcs - with the Revan story arc acting like some kind of interlude between both.