Do you think story is really what MMO players want?

[SnoopyDoo]

To answer the thread title, most MMO players don't actually know what they want. People will say they want one thing when what they really want is something else and they just don't realize it.

 

To address your original post... Here's the thing... for years and years there have been consistent complaints about MMO's engaging players durring the leveling process. There have been complaints about just wall of text quests. There have been complaints about fetch quests ect ect ect.

 

So now we have voice acting, cut scenes, decision trees ect. We have story in a form other than just a page of text onscreen. And it is certainly more engaging. The thing is is that not everyone cared about the leveling experiance. There are those that just want to pvp. There are those who just want to do raids. And so on and so forth. So for some the story aspect gets in the way, it slows some things down. On the other hand, for others it makes the game more enjoyable. And the group that generally complained and have generally found it favorable is the people who don't level fast, more casual players, and roleplayers. And since most people who make up a MMO's subscription base fall in the first of those 3 groups...well it can be quite a good thing. Can be as other factors affect things.

 

Regardless you mentioned choices not having a effect on things and the polarity of the choices. I'll address the polarity first... Its a Bioware game. If you thought it was going to be different than every other moral choice system they have ever created I have a bridge to sell you. That said supposedly neutral rewards are coming at some point...so thats something at least.

 

In a game like this, with this being the first of its kind, choices aren't going to vastly change the story you're going down. You're all going to follow about the same path. Now there are choices that do have impacts here and there on missions, but you're not going to get 'i do this and change where my story arc goes'. But again this is the first time you actually have a story to go along with your character.

 

Now you also mention the issue of hitting 50 and your story stopping. Wellllll it does and doesn't. Think of TOR as a novel. You've finished the first book of the series and are now patiently waiting for the next book to be released...problem is it still needs to be written. Now theres this wonderful RP thing that some people like to do but its not for everyone....

 

This game being like a 'novel' shows that this isn't a good idea for an MMO. MMO players play several hours a week and they expect to come onto the game with something to do, even on their main character.

 

'Waiting for the next novel' is not something people will find particularly fun. I think that this game will work in the single player sense which might explain why so many people have purchased it, but as a long term MMO the story concept just doesn't seem viable.

[SnoopyDoo]

Just to mention. everybody thinks wow is soo awesome because it has 11 million plyers.

in the whole US and Europe Wow has had max 6 million players 50% of the wow players come from china and thats because wow is the only mmo which found a god publisher to bring out their game in asia.

No other MMO like Rift, Warhammer, AoC etc went on the asian market. so if Swtor has no about 2 million users it has already 1/3 of the amount from wow whih is pretty impressive ;-)

 

I wouldn't say this is something to be pleased with. It doesn't really matter where the members are, SWTOR could launch itself in China...

 

You can't say it has a third of the members just because only 6 million players are from the US and Europe, that's just wrong on so many levels...

[Grammarye]

Yeah, his definition is really bad. Here's what my definition would be: Grinding is any task you do repetetively even though it's boring because you get something out of it.

So that's work right? Grind is already well defined.

Grinding is a term used in video gaming to describe the process of engaging in repetitive and/or boring tasks not pertaining to the story line of the game

If you feel differently, feel free to take that up on the talk page of Wikipedia. After all, it's supposed to be influenced by the majority. I feel my definition was close enough to that which has been defined & discussed by the majority since the days of the first MMOs where there was grind aplenty. I do not feel that you can allege that the story is grind; this would be a contradictory statement.

Edited January 2, 2012 by Grammarye

[Avrose]

I think what is important is reading up on the product before you buy it and not setting unreasonable self set expectations.

[SnoopyDoo]

so do all of you play COD? just curious..i don't know but in the mmo RPG's genre i tend to want story and i feel that bioware as it often dose did a good job at giving me story.Perhaps sw:tor should have just been pvp/space combat with a minor story line in it if you randomly felt like boring yourself with that meaningless talking and reading.Ick!

 

Please don't refer to us as 'COD players'. CoD is a totally different game, designed for vegetables who can only point and shoot. This is about MMOs. Don't put WoW in the same bubble as CoD because they are very very different.

 

And are you saying that because BioWare kindly read out their story for you its somehow a better story than in WoW?

[Vyrsus]

I think the story aspect could carry an MMO, however not in the fashion it's been impemented in SWTOR. As I once saw someone else put it (can't remember where or who, sorry), The more the game insists on telling your story the less opportunity you, the player, get to do so. The problem with slapping the typical bioware brand story system on top of an MMO is that while it allows for choices, those are merely branches of a fully scripted story that is made to be experienced by the player alone, which clashes with one of the major draws of the MMO genre: the players impact on the world. MMO's are about expressing yourself to other players in some form be it through completing dungeons together, comparing progression through content or simply buying and selling from and to fellow players, all things that reminds the players of the persistant community of the game.

To get story to work as a 'pillar of MMO's', I think developers will have to leave the comfort of fully content driven, scripted games and dip their toes in the murky waters procedural storytelling (and content generation in general). Some of this is being experimented with elsewhere in the form dynamic events and territory control, but maybe Bioware could be the ones to experiment with the tools to facilitate narrative to such dynamics, how to create a dynamic dialogue system to allow players to easily ask any npc (or other player) any relevant question, perhaps even looking into some synthetic voice-acting.

 

That said, even looking at what Bioware has done with the tools available, I must say that I'm not too impressed. The dialogue wheel in general has a lot of missed potential. The brilliance if it is that allowing the player to choose intend rather than a specific line dialogue allows one to fit that intend into many different contexts such as for example whether a particular question is asked for the first time or a second or third time, having a repeat of a branch being asked ("What is X?" to "Remind about X again") and answered ("X is Y" to "Sigh, I already told you, it's Y") differently. It's however primarily used keep up the flow of conversations by speeding up the choice making(which is nice), completely missing out on the varying contexts a given branch of dialogue can occure in.

In the multi-player-participant conversations particular to SWTOR the missed opportunities become more evident. The game implements the most obvious and simplest way to handle player responses: Randomly pick a player who gets to respond on behalf of the group. If one player got lucky with all his or her rolls it might as well be a singlyplayer conversation.

Imagine now, if just the second highest roll got express his intend too, just not as the response to the npc(s) but as a comment to the highest roll's response. For example, imagine that a group of players has just helped a village by chasing off some raiders off. As the question rewards comes up the players gets the choice to decline (for light points perhaps) or to accept some form of reward. The highest roll go to a jedi declining, thus providing the usual response to the village leaders (something about duty I'm sure). However the second highest roll is smuggler happy to accept payment for his services, thus repsonding the jedi "whoah there, I didn't agree to do charity. If the nice villagers wants to show their gratitude, let them. That (points at some equipment relevant to smugglers) looks nice". This uses the strength of the converstion wheel by changing smuggler's response into a comment on the choice of his fellow player.

 

So, TL;DR.: Yes I believe story could carry an MMO, but it would have to work on the premise that the point of MMO's is to express yourself to other players. As long as the story aspect remains a private static deal it cannot carry an MMO. On top of that the specifcics (the dialogue tools) could have been better utilized even within the paradigm of the current game (and the general design paradigm in the industry in general).

[Pyrolight]

The two problems with the "story"

 

1. The VA can take too long. When factoring in side quest VO you can sometimes send about as much time listening to a conversation and actually doing the quests.

 

It is great for the main story no doubt but it gets a tiny bit old for the "kill quests".

 

2. Alien conversations. This is the flipside of the issue. At times the amount of VO the alien will have will not remotely match up to their text on the screen. While this makes sense since the VO still progresses on a timer you sometimes will have 3 lines of text to read through and 4 seconds to read it.

 

I wish for alien and non voiced conversations it was "spacebar to continue".

[SnoopyDoo]

So that's work right? Grind is already well defined.

 

If you feel differently, feel free to take that up on the talk page of Wikipedia. After all, it's supposed to be influenced by the majority. I feel my definition was close enough to that which has been defined & discussed by the majority since the days of the first MMOs where there was grind aplenty. I do not feel that you can allege that the story is grind; this would be a contradictory statement.

 

Just to point out, the actual definition of grinding is NOT what you originally said it was...

[Snowfire]

Yes, yes it is.

 

This

 

This and more of

 

This

[vizzaltalik]

This game being like a 'novel' shows that this isn't a good idea for an MMO. MMO players play several hours a week and they expect to come onto the game with something to do, even on their main character.

 

'Waiting for the next novel' is not something people will find particularly fun. I think that this game will work in the single player sense which might explain why so many people have purchased it, but as a long term MMO the story concept just doesn't seem viable.

 

I was referring to your characters story, and less to the game. You can only write so much, and people will always consume it faster than you could write it. They could have spent another 10 years writing content, and it would only be a matter of months before it was all consumed and players going "this is it?". And in that matter of months they would have only been able to write so much and get so much released and that would get consumed even faster and again you'd get "this is it?".

 

Gameplay wise, the MMO just launched. Theres going to be some things to do but not a lot. If you expected different then you're silly. When something first comes out, if you expect anything less than 'not a lot to do at the moment at the max' then you're silly. This is not a fault of Bioware or EA this is how every MMO in history has been...and the way it will be for quite some time. It is far easier and quicker for a player to consume content than it is for someone to create it.

 

By the end of the first day of the last WoW expansion you had people who had consumed all of the new top end content outside of the raids. Being at the top quickly has its benefits and drawbacks. Its something you have to accept. If you can't accept that, then well...MMO's aren't the game for you.

[Harryjames]

god help us

[juicyjew]

These games are called mmo''RPG'' for a reason. whether you like it or not, story should matter. that does not mean you have to get into it, it can be simple skipped and just not have it as your primary focus of play. up until now no mmorpg has delivered on the ''RPG;; element of an MMO and that is why it has become unimportant for so many. wow has created a standard where the RPG element and story does not matter simply because they could not tell there lore very well at all, take a look at cataclysm for example..and so wow's design is built around, grind grind grind to max level, gear gear gear, raid raid raid. and then it all repeats in the next expansion. with this formula of play and the fact the gamers of wow are pretty much use to the kinds of ideas blizzard put out i am curious as to what is the point of relying on raiding as a challenge, simply because you will never be satisfied. you will beat the content, farm it for your alts and guild, then move on and do the exact same thing over and over again. with a deep story there and an adventure, it leaves it to your imagine to feel a real reason why you are raiding or even pvping if you wishj. now this may sound silly to some people, but personally if one cannot appreciate the fantasy, story, of a vast world of imagination that a company put so much hard work into, then they shouldnt be playing an MMO at all.

[SnoopyDoo]

I think what is important is reading up on the product before you buy it and not setting unreasonable self set expectations.

 

I had expectations, yes. I'm not going to cry about this game. If I don't like it then I will just quit. This thread is basically asking the question

 

'Do we think the core concept of the game is a good one?'

 

I don't think anyone set any expectations but I certainly believed the MMO features in this game would be stronger. Please don't imply we have no right to complain because we should have seen what the game would be like before we bought it. Trust me when I say, we have every right to try and make this game better.

[SnoggyMack]

'Do we think the core concept of the game is a good one?'

 

I certainly do. It's fun. It's engaging. It gives me something to look forward to when I log in.

[SimonVDH]

I didn't read all posts, so I don't know if anybody wrote this already, but

 

story =/= cutscenes and voice over

 

cutscenes with voice over = story for people who don't care about story enough to read

 

This is the paradox of SWTOR

 

WoW does have a story (or mabey "lore" would be a better word), LotRO does have a story, , Guild Wars does have a story, Warhammer had a story, AoC, Tabula Rasa, Rift, all of them have a story. It's just that most people don't bother to read.

 

Cut-scenes and voice overs don't make a story better, they make it more accesible.

[SnoopyDoo]

I was referring to your characters story, and less to the game. You can only write so much, and people will always consume it faster than you could write it. They could have spent another 10 years writing content, and it would only be a matter of months before it was all consumed and players going "this is it?". And in that matter of months they would have only been able to write so much and get so much released and that would get consumed even faster and again you'd get "this is it?".

 

Gameplay wise, the MMO just launched. Theres going to be some things to do but not a lot. If you expected different then you're silly. When something first comes out, if you expect anything less than 'not a lot to do at the moment at the max' then you're silly. This is not a fault of Bioware or EA this is how every MMO in history has been...and the way it will be for quite some time. It is far easier and quicker for a player to consume content than it is for someone to create it.

 

By the end of the first day of the last WoW expansion you had people who had consumed all of the new top end content outside of the raids. Being at the top quickly has its benefits and drawbacks. Its something you have to accept. If you can't accept that, then well...MMO's aren't the game for you.

 

Well firstly it is the fault of BioWare if there is nothing to do at max level...

 

Secondly I'm not saying that this game is bad because people can go through content so fast, I'm saying that the story element of this game means adding new content may not be as sustainable as adding in a new raid or war zone. This is a STORY DRIVEN MMO which means at all levels it needs to continue to offer more and more story for its members to consume. I don't think that is a very smart task to give yourself when making an MMO. This game is looking to become a single player game with elements of an MMO in it.

[SpirtikusTor]

To avoid the wall of unimportant text, YES the story is important.

[Mephismo]

I just had to lol when you said most MMO players are just like you!

[SnoopyDoo]

These games are called mmo''RPG'' for a reason. whether you like it or not, story should matter. that does not mean you have to get into it, it can be simple skipped and just not have it as your primary focus of play. up until now no mmorpg has delivered on the ''RPG;; element of an MMO and that is why it has become unimportant for so many. wow has created a standard where the RPG element and story does not matter simply because they could not tell there lore very well at all, take a look at cataclysm for example..and so wow's design is built around, grind grind grind to max level, gear gear gear, raid raid raid. and then it all repeats in the next expansion. with this formula of play and the fact the gamers of wow are pretty much use to the kinds of ideas blizzard put out i am curious as to what is the point of relying on raiding as a challenge, simply because you will never be satisfied. you will beat the content, farm it for your alts and guild, then move on and do the exact same thing over and over again. with a deep story there and an adventure, it leaves it to your imagine to feel a real reason why you are raiding or even pvping if you wishj. now this may sound silly to some people, but personally if one cannot appreciate the fantasy, story, of a vast world of imagination that a company put so much hard work into, then they shouldnt be playing an MMO at all.

 

Story matters to some and not others. Story doesn't HAVE to matter at all. Some people love filling themselves with a good story and other just want to have gameplay.

 

I also think that your personal view sounds slightly strange. This is after all, a game. Not some online Eutopia. It's one thing to enjoy a game and another to appreciate the work gone in. I am thankful that this game has been made, parts of it are amazing but I'm not getting as much as enjoyment as I feel I should be.

[SnoopyDoo]

I just had to lol when you said most MMO players are just like you!

 

Your point being?

[Gunryu]

I think the story aspect could carry an MMO, however not in the fashion it's been impemented in SWTOR. As I once saw someone else put it (can't remember where or who, sorry), The more the game insists on telling your story the less opportunity you, the player, get to do so. The problem with slapping the typical bioware brand story system on top of an MMO is that while it allows for choices, those are merely branches of a fully scripted story that is made to be experienced by the player alone, which clashes with one of the major draws of the MMO genre: the players impact on the world. MMO's are about expressing yourself to other players in some form be it through completing dungeons together, comparing progression through content or simply buying and selling from and to fellow players, all things that reminds the players of the persistant community of the game.[/Quote]

 

This guy gets it.

[SnoopyDoo]

I didn't read all posts, so I don't know if anybody wrote this already, but

 

story =/= cutscenes and voice over

 

cutscenes with voice over = story for people who don't care about story enough to read

 

This is the paradox of SWTOR

 

WoW does have a story (or mabey "lore" would be a better word), LotRO does have a story, , Guild Wars does have a story, Warhammer had a story, AoC, Tabula Rasa, Rift, all of them have a story. It's just that most people don't bother to read.

 

Cut-scenes and voice overs don't make a story better, they make it more accesible.

 

/agree.

 

Good point and I don't think anyone else said this

[ozirizo]

There are racing car games for those who like them. There are shooters, and mmos. Among mmos there are pvp focused ones, pve focused ones, and even rp ones.

 

This game is pve focused. That doesn't make it less an mmo, or less good.

 

You wouldn't go saying to players who like shooters that their game is wrong for not having party piñatas, and pink kittens, would you?

[SnoopyDoo]

There are racing car games for those who like them. There are shooters, and mmos. Among mmos there are pvp focused ones, pve focused ones, and even rp ones.

 

This game is pve focused. That doesn't make it less an mmo, or less good.

 

You wouldn't go saying to players who like shooters that their game is wrong for not having party piñatas, and pink kittens, would you?

 

This game is STORY focused. PvE is something VERY VERY different.

[Athilnaur]

Loving the storyline myself. Having played or betad most mmos, swtor is the only one where I felt a part of the plot.

 

That's a very powerful thing. Leaves lots of potential for expansions.

 

Game has held my attention in a way I haven't had since EQ released.

 

Do agree with those who wonder what you do at 50 after the story is done, but no doubt expacs will follow on quickly.