Dopass.com

I ran across an interesting article today, by way of Massively.com. Apparently, Chris Klug of Cheyenne Mountain (They're making Stargate Worlds, which I am avidly awaiting) has been posting Dev diaries up. In his latest one he discusses moral choices in his MMO...

I was, I have to admit, first struck dumb by a fit of juvenile rage. You see, Massively's write up of the article takes the time to say that Earth & Beyond (Klug discusses a quest he wrote for that game) is the rare stand out exception to MMOs by including morale choices and explorations of the morality of the player's actions. I took umbrage. I have to admit that. But the reason, is because of what we did with Auto Assault and the lack of any mention of the title, at all.

I am very proud of the writing in Auto Assault. We covered topics and characterized our cast of NPCs in ways that I had not seen in another MMO. Interestingly enough, we were constantly compared to Earth and Beyond (Another killed in its infancy MMO, I might add)... I am beginning to wonder if this wasn't part of the reason. Anyway, to get back to the point: We spent a great deal of time making our characters three dimensional. Their motivations, the choices they faced -- and the choices that players had to make in order to help them -- were the triumphs and tragedies we were sacrificing everything we had to put into that game. We wanted to make sure that, if we did nothing else, we brought players stories that they hadn't seen before - stories of a caliber they weren't expecting to find in an MMO, let alone an action game. I think we succeeded and I will admit, puffed up as I am right now with vanity and pride, that I think we succeeded to a degree I've yet to see in any other online project. So, it hurts to have that work totally disregarded, but I don't blame massively. After all - they likely never played it. And if they did, they probably didn't read the text. God knows we were forced to do everything we possibly could to marginalize the skill of literacy in that game.

*sigh* Anyway, the point here is the write up was interesting. I suspect that Mr. Klug shares my views about what makes characters and the context of quests interesting. He hints at it a bit. I think that characters are only as interesting as the choices they make and the way they deal with the consequences. Similarly I think quests are only as interesting as the choices they present players. In a traditional MMO you have very few "verbs" at your disposal - very few actions players can take within the quest systems to accomplish their goals. There are an order of magnitude more quests in any MMO than there are types of quests that can be completed. How then, do you keep them memorable?

There are a few ways, but one of the cheapest ways to do that is to make the context of the quest as thought provoking as possible. Present real dilemmas with consequences and the fact that the player only had the old standby "kill, collect, deliver, escort or use" objectives to choose from won't matter. If the characters, the situation and the choices those objectives represent are all interesting or thought provoking, you can muscle past the same old generic gameplay... at least for a little while.

I am constantly amazed that we don't take our writing more seriously in this industry. It's a powerful tool. Far more powerful than most of this industry ever gives it credit for. Ask the guys at Bioware and 2K Boston what I'm on about... they know.

- Snipehunter