It's a bit outside the norm here at MMORPG.com, but we were recently invited to Bioware's Edmonton office to see Dragon Age. Not because anyone thinks its an MMO, but because it has so much that MMO fans enjoy. In this blog entry, we look at how the game infuses meaningful choice and what that could teach MMOs out there.

Unlike many games where all choices are black and white, good and evil, Dragon Age focuses on shades of gray.

David Silverman, Dragon Age's Senior Product Manager, stood up and ran us through how he would handle the situation and his logic for doing so. According to him, these ashes, which had been hidden for so long, were too powerful and while they might be hard to get, if they fell into the hands of the enemy, it would make their quest a lot tougher.

He chose to pour some dragon’s blood in the urn and destroy all save a tiny pouch.

Read it all here.

Actually, like any good RPG, it's way beyond what any MMO can offer.

Single-player RPGs are (or at least should be) all about individual player choices.

MMOs are all about social interaction--they are most definitely not about story or choices or even gameplay. It seems Bioware might be trying to change some of this--we'll have to wait and see how that turns out. But currently, if you want a good combat system, a good story or good gameplay or for your choices to matter or anything else other than social interaction, you go to a single-player RPG.

I like MMOs a lot, but honestly, they are currently little more than glorified chatrooms.

I agree, the reason Single Player RPGs can do the various things they do is because you're the only one that matters in that world.

In MMOs, your party members are other players, and thus you can't just piss them off and permakill them. Or if they're not players, they're npcs you don't really care about. In order to get from one level to the next, you have to kill hundreds of people/monsters anyways, so 3 murders isn't going to stop you in your tracks.

Also everyone has the same experience for a number of reasons in an MMO. Firstly being that story elements often depend on previous elements working out a specific way. Sure you could add all these alternate endings and storylines, but it already takes many years to develop the depth of an MMO normally. People need to have a virtually limitless number of hours of playtime, whereas a single player RPG only goes for around max 18-20 hours, and that's in extreme cases. Effectively doubling some parts of production time would slow development to a crawl in some games. Could you imagine each instance of WoW having 2 endings? Sure it would be nice but the game wouldn't have been released 5 years ago.

Now, replayability might be nice, but it would also be hard to have both optional endings give the player the same sense of accomplishment. Typically you have to have a boss at the end of an instance so people can kill him and get the loot drops, whether there's a quest story woven through there or not. These are instances where people will go through them multiple times, enough that any story, even if there's two or three options, will become ignored. Heck some people will just pick the same story every time because it's easier or because you get better loot.

Also, the rest of the game world has to, more or less, treat you the same way no matter what you do. When you go back to town, you can't have the vendors refusing to sell to you because you killed some people. There has to be central points where everyone can get everything done (a central city etc) without having to go traipsing all over cause this faction likes you but this other one doesn't.

I'm not saying this type of thing can't be done, but it's not like BioWare is the first to consider it. I'm sure every MMO developer has said to themselves "I want to get more unique, engaging storylines in there for the players." but it becomes a balance between getting what you want and getting what you need, in addition to what the technology will give you. It'll be great if and when someone finally manages to pull it off, but we don't have it now because people simply haven't found a proper way to implement it.

And if they get it wrong, the fickle mmo community will jump on them like hyenas.

SW:TOR, which is made by the same company, will have this kind of story progression based on the choices you make. I am looking forward to it. It will be a refreshing change from feeling like just another faceless drone grinding out wolf pelts or whatever. Of course your choices won't effect other people's experience, but at least you'll get the feeling of having done something substantial.

Also I have pre-ordered DAO and am looking forward to it greatly.

I just worry that it'll end up being too short, like Force Unleashed, or many other console RPGs of late.

Originally posted by xaldraxius

SW:TOR, which is made by the same company, will have this kind of story progression based on the choices you make. I am looking forward to it. It will be a refreshing change from feeling like just another faceless drone grinding out wolf pelts or whatever. Of course your choices won't effect other people's experience, but at least you'll get the feeling of having done something substantial.

 

Also I have pre-ordered DAO and am looking forward to it greatly.

I just worry that it'll end up being too short, like Force Unleashed, or many other console RPGs of late.

I'll have a more full preview early next month (embargos!). It'll answer your question though ;)

This is exactly why I'm not very interested n Bioware's take on MMOs. For my money, MMOs are simply not a narrative form.

MMOs are primarily a hobby in the tradition of making models from matchsticks, woodcarving or embrodery. You start with a very basic set of materials and by dint of long, painstaking work you slowly build up a complex, detailed object, namely your character. A small part of that object may be elements of the stories he or she has been involved in, but a very minor part.

Single-player RPGs clearly are  a narrative form, and I am sure it's possible to hybridize the two, but not, I feel, to anyone's benefit.

Originally posted by Bhagpuss

This is exactly why I'm not very interested n Bioware's take on MMOs. For my money, MMOs are simply not a narrative form.

MMOs are primarily a hobby in the tradition of making models from matchsticks, woodcarving or embrodery. You start with a very basic set of materials and by dint of long, painstaking work you slowly build up a complex, detailed object, namely your character. A small part of that object may be elements of the stories he or she has been involved in, but a very minor part.

Single-player RPGs clearly are  a narrative form, and I am sure it's possible to hybridize the two, but not, I feel, to anyone's benefit.

 

The problem is, we wont know if it will be to anyones benefit  until they actually try.  I tend to be on the side that believes it will work, and I really hope it does.

Originally posted by pandrax

Originally posted by Bhagpuss

This is exactly why I'm not very interested n Bioware's take on MMOs. For my money, MMOs are simply not a narrative form.

MMOs are primarily a hobby in the tradition of making models from matchsticks, woodcarving or embrodery. You start with a very basic set of materials and by dint of long, painstaking work you slowly build up a complex, detailed object, namely your character. A small part of that object may be elements of the stories he or she has been involved in, but a very minor part.

Single-player RPGs clearly are  a narrative form, and I am sure it's possible to hybridize the two, but not, I feel, to anyone's benefit.

The problem is, we wont know if it will be to anyones benefit  until they actually try.  I tend to be on the side that believes it will work, and I really hope it does.

I have to agree completely. Who says MMOs can't be narrative and can't have their stories vary due to player choices? Why, because no one has ever really tried it before?

I for one am looking forward to SWTOR and I hope that it's good enough to encourage others to think outside the box. Everyone complains about how all MMOs are the same, yet when something new comes out, they complain about it breaking the "rules" of MMOs. Hopefully the days of MMOs and single player RPGs like Dragon Age being so different will slowly fade away.

In my opinion pushing mmorpgs more and more in the direction of single player rpgs is exactly the wrong thing to do. 

The more you try to put players in a pre-fabricated story the more linear and less open the game is.  If you want them to experience this story you put so much work into then you have to corral them and lock them onto a fixed pathway.  Go down this path, encounter <this> , make <this> choice or <that> choice, which will send you down <that> path to encounter <this>.  So the more you do that the game you've created becomes less and less like a world and more and more like walking through a closed in hallway in an amusement park funhouse.

Also, the more you do it the more you have to use instancing.  Now some people argue that instancing is a good thing because it eliminates all the messy problems that arise when everyone is sharing the same world.  But think about it for a minute...sharing the same world with other people is the whole point of a mmorpg.  How far can you go with instancing and still call a game a mmorpg?  If the players spend 90% of their time in private instances are they really playing a mmorpg anymore or is it just a single player game with multiplayer options and a sort of glorified public lobby in the non-instanced areas?

One of these days some company is going to come out with a game that they don't even host on their own servers because with the massive use of instancing they don't have to.  The players will host their own instances that other people can join.  And why not?  That's the direction the genre is going in with everything of importance in private instances.  And then when the genre has regressed to Diablo type games what do we have?  Will we still call them mmorpgs?  The game companies will probably still host the public area lobbies on their own servers so that they can charge a subscription fee or use cash shops to milk money from people but is that the direction we want the genre to go in?

MMOs already herd us in game with zones and invisible walls.  They already force us to follow progression lines.  You have to finish quests in one area before quests will open up in the next or you have to be a certain level to even survive in the next area.  Some games alleviate this a bit by having several starting area, but they all funnel you down to common adventure areas at some point.  At least Bioware is willing to attach a story to it that can be affected by the player, giving us a modicum of choice and the ability to change the story that also changes our characters.

I like instancing when it is done tastefully and I'm quite intrigued with it's more modern counterpart, phasing.  I prefer to solo, but I also prefer to solo when other people are running around me doing their own thing and I think phasing will be a fantastic way to do this without letting others affect important segments of a quest, such as killing the boss I need or pretending to hump my leg as I quest dialog with a key figure.

There is such huge potential for this genre, but it's stuck in a rut and old school thinking gamers and developers are a big part of that rut.

Originally posted by Vrazule

MMOs already herd us in game with zones and invisible walls.  They already force us to follow progression lines.  You have to finish quests in one area before quests will open up in the next or you have to be a certain level to even survive in the next area. 

Absolutely true.  But then the question is: do we want even more of this sort of thing?  Do we want mmorpgs to be even less open and more linear or do we want them to be more open?  Should we throw up our hands and say, "Ok, forget about giving us a world to play in and just put us on a ride, like a roller coaster, and try to make it a nice experience."

And again I have to wonder; when we're all just riding a ride in private instances is it really a mmorpg anymore?

You mentioned phasing.  To me that seems like another way of destroying persistance and consistancy.  Two people standing in the same area each see the world differently.  For me the village is destroyed.  For you the village is healthy and thriving.  We are no longer having a common experience in the same game world.  We might be in the same world but it's different for each of us.  Consistancy has been thrown out the window with this gimmick.  Really it's just a sort of soft instancing.  It lets us see each other walking around even though we are both experiencing a different world.  It's just another gimmick to try to avoid the problems of a shared world by not making us share the same world.  Which, once again, is the antithesis of a mmorpg.  We should be sharing the same world.  The same world, not different versions of it.

Developers should try to find other ways of dealing with the problems of a shared world.  They should embrace the idea of a shared world and stop trying to work around the problems by splitting us off into alternate dimensions.  And this is the whole reason why mmorpgs are drifting more into the realm of single player games.  Instead of trying to improve the shared world design they are trying to eliminate it. 

I prefer theme park over sandbox.  I want to play a game, not a simulation.  I want fun and relaxation from a game, not stress and a second job.   I want fantasy, not reality.  I want an escape, not a rehash of the miserable parts of my life.  I want to be able to do things I could never do in real life.  I want to be a hero.  I want to be powerful.  I want to have a choice in how my story unfolds.  TOR seems to be right up my alley and I'll take whatever mechanism or technology that is used to bring that kind of gaming experience to an MMO.

Theme parks are still explorable and they are still social games.  They are still persistant virtual worlds that allow us to explore alternate realities and personalities.  Most importantly, they seem to be much more popular than sandbox games.  While I certainly hope other companies will offer the sandbox experience some of you are looking for, I'm quite happy that Bioware is giving me what I'm looking for in an MMO.

It seems to me that there are ideas and mechanisms from single player games that could easily be integrated into MMOs that would still allow the kind of gaming experience you would expect from both theme park and sandbox games.