[MUD-Dev] "The Artisan's Hands" - Storytelling tools

[Koster]

Excellent article at Waterthread.org.

http://www.waterthread.org/news/102790232827285.html

start quote--->

The Artisan's Hands
by Bucky Carooe

It would be easy to take the optimist's route and claim that as
technology gets better, the quality of storytelling in MMOGs will
increase with it; after all, for all the stigmata of
button-hammering adrenaline indulgence attached to video gaming, the
medium offers the very real possibility of mashing a good novel into
the grinder with a classic film and spreading the results out over
50 or 60 hours. But while single-player games have started to tap
into the narrative possibilities offered by interactive
entertainment, in online venues the results frequently feel listless
and uninspired - in many respects, MMOGs represent the nadir of a
genre not exactly renowned for its storytelling prowess in the first
place. Not for lack of tales to tell, obviously, otherwise the likes
of Jon "Calandryll" Hanna or Ragnar Tornquist would be out of a job
by now. No, where the whole enterprise falters is in the options
those budding auteurs have at their disposal. It's tempting to roll
one's eyes and sigh as news of the latest orc or mutant
slaughterfest rolls in - for as much time as said fonts of
creativity spend writing long-winded backstories, it's depressing to
realise just how much of it boils down to rampages from the Monster
of the Week, with some scripted GM encounters thrown in for good
measure. But even that's pushing the limits of what their games'
technology is capable of; without the tools to turn their visions
into reality, online storytellers are stuck in the current rut of
beasts and blather.

What's needed, in short, is a better mousetrap.

The root of the problem lies in the sources of the genre; when
looking at how stories are told in a MMOG environment, it helps to
consider the contrast between traditional and massively multiplayer
RPGs. In pen-and-paper gaming, finding adventure is relatively
straightforward process; each group has a dedicated storyteller in
its Gamemaster, who interacts with them on a one-on-one basis and
keeps unspooling fresh quests and challenges to keep the group on
its toes, while at the same time laying down the law and ensuring
everybody keeps in line. Make the leap to MMOG, however, and the GM
often mutates into something almost unrecognisable; a faceless
non-entity whose sole concession to "player entertainment" is their
ability to transform into any number of murderous,
nigh-on-invincible monsters

  http://forums.anarchy-online.com/showthread.php?s=ece6cdbc47fcdd7331a5b12a45ff804c&threadid=28048

It's all a matter of numbers, though. Around the table, the magic
ratio between players and GM is somewhere around 5 or 6 to 1;
smaller groups mean less interaction and larger groups are damn-near
unmanageable. Given those numbers, we can take a wild shot into the
dark and estimate that a server with a capacity of 2000 would need
roughly 300 dedicated GMs to create quests, mime NPCs and hand out
rewards. That this is patently impractical goes without saying;
moreso if you figure in multiple servers - EverQuest, one of the
most popular MMOGs out there, would have a support staff of no less
than 14,000 GMs under this model. Even if you were dealing with
volunteers, rather than paid members of staff, the logistics needed
to coordinate operations effectively on this sort of scale would be
beyond the capabilities of most gaming companies currently in
existence.  Given the current state of things, there's hardly much
danger of that to begin with; the miserly handful of GMs most
major-league titles employ to do their dirty work couldn't be
counted on to flesh out an entire server farm's worth of content if
their lives depended on it. Hardly helping matters is the increased
burden of responsibility said GMs bear; trying to keep the players
entertained with a skeleton crew is one thing, but having to juggle
it with the unenviable task of answering the hundreds of complaints
and petitions a typical MMOG workday generates is - for lack of a
better word - flat-out impossible.

Things were different once. It was Ultima Online which first drew
clear distinctions between service and story, splitting support into
GMs - who handled the more mundane player services and meted out the
jail sentences and bannings - and Seers, who coordinated
events. Between them, UO's official storyline was nothing if not
diverse, beginning with the machinations of the self-styled
Followers of Armageddon, the Zog Cabal

  http://town.uo.com/cgi-bin/archive.pl?s=141

and gradually mutating into high-concept interdimensional battles
mingled with the steampunk stylings of Ultima Online 2, which had
been hastily shoe-horned into the existing proceedings after said
title's cancellation. The end results were a toss-up in terms of
quality - in some cases, little better than an improvisational
series of threat-of-the-week sketches which grew considerably more
unhinged with Richard Garriott's departure; in other instances, epic
fantasy referencing the high points of Lord British's nine-game
career, liberally sprinkled with enough player-run events to keep
everybody occupied. Whatever your stance on the quality and
consistency of UO's events, though, it's hard to deny the
contributions of the various Seers and Elders who pitched their time
and talents into the pot during UO's pivotal years. The fact that
OSI's divide-and-conquer model never quite became more an industry
standard can be attributed to a number of factors, but in the end,
only one really matters: cost. From a balance-sheet perspective, the
division between serviceman and storyteller is a needlessly
extravagant one; moreso these days, given the highly volatile nature
of volunteer labour in the aftermath of the infamous AOL suit

  http://news.com.com/2100-1023-226360.html?legacy=cnet

Asheron's Call's Advocates were the first to go as many companies
began to see this hitherto-free source of labour as an unneeded
liability or ticking timebomb; as of 9th March 2001, OSI too joined
their ranks, discontinuing its Volunteer program in its entirety in
light of a high-profile lawsuit

  http://dir.salon.com/tech/log/2000/09/21/ultima_volunteers/index.html

launched by former UO volunteers in search of compensation. That the
greed of a few individuals rang the death-knell

  http://www.uo.com/cgi-bin/newstools.pl?Article=4607

on four years' worth of community-building efforts is deplorable
enough, but the resulting fallout has succeeded in all but
regressing event coordination and player relations back into the
stone age of the massively multiplayer genre; save for holdouts like
the Advisors of Rubi-Ka

  http://ark.anarchy-online.com/php/team_events.php

support now tends to follow the Verant example, enshrined in the
hands of an invisible minority of underpaid, overworked
individuals. Should players who dedicate their time to improving
their fellow gamers' virtual lives be compensated for their efforts? 
Absolutely. But let's be realistic; today's development studios are
barely willing to spend the money needed to hire enough GMs to keep
up the petition queues moving, let alone cut into their precious
profit margins by employing a pack of amateur roleplayers to slip
into the shoes of a convenient god-cliented deus ex machina. In
spite of this, MMOGs are still able to provide adventure and
excitement to the masses; not by virtue of a dedicated support
staff, but through simple automation. Let's go back to the tabletop
for perspective's sake. In traditional RPGs, the GM is the narrative
equivalent of a one-man band, flitting from innocent victim to
sneering villain at a second's notice and breathing life into the
world's inhabitants. But why pay somebody to stand around in a cave
to issue death threats and be r0x0red on an hourly basis if AI
scripting can do the same job for less? The same applies to the NPCs
who provide the local "color", or send the player on various inane
fetch quests for 30 XP and a Rusty Dagger +2; for a simple
kill-the-monster-and-return-the-item-to-me-style affair, a few lines
of dialogue and a convenient receptacle from which to issue them is
about all it takes to get things going. Impersonal, sure; it's a bit
like showing up to a gaming session in anticipation of a night's
worth of roleplaying, only to have your GM hand you a Fighting
Fantasy gamebook <http://www.fightingfantasy.com/index2.htm> and a
pair of dice. "Here, go wild. I'll be in my room surfing the
internet for porn if you need me." But the scale of a MMOG is
self-defeating; the only way to keep up with a population that
stretches into the tens, if not hundreds of thousands, is to turn
the Hero's Journey into a self-perpetuating little engine through
which the players bounce on their journey to greatness. In light of
this, it's curious to consider just how much of a throwback to the
pen-and-paper ideals the average "GM event" is. Take the traditional
- or rather, typical - setup: monsters or characters pop into the
game world, either shred through the players en masse, or deliver a
few tepidly-scripted pieces of dialogue to set some half-assed quest
in motion. Traditionally, these "named characters" are nothing more
than sheep in wolves' clothing; in-game support staff control their
actions and movements, and pop them out of existence again when
their purpose is done. It's a labour-intensive process, though -
perhaps needlessly so, given the relatively low quality of the
events produced in this fashion; at the risk of slighting current
efforts, invasions of baby-eating minotaurs

  http://www.mnstarfire.com/everquest/defenseofakanon.html

and invincible terrorists


  http://www.ir-news.org/news/article.php?id=68

are not exactly the stuff legends are made of. Given the right
tools, however, the hypothetical Event Team can free up its limited
resources to be used in a more productive manner - a point in case
can be found in Final Fantasy XI's very first event. The setup was
that of a glorified scavenger hunt; players were tasked with finding
21 moogles - the Final Fantasy series' furry white mascots -
scattered across the entirety of Vana'Diel. Sighting a moogle earned
a player "Moogle points" which could be redeemed for items at the
end of the four-hour event, with additional modifiers for the size
of the player's current party and their Level. Simple premise? 
Probably, but that would be overlooking the two most critical
factors. For one, unlike the tiny blink-and-you'll-miss-it events
Western players are used to, this one was truly global in scale,
involving each server's entire population and covering the entirety
of the gaming world. To boot, the event was almost entirely
automated; special one-off NPCs were spawned into the area to
dispense information and direct the players, taking the weight off
the Events team while at the same time allowing all 20 servers to
experience the event. No small feat by anyone's reckoning, and given
the fact that no Western MMOG since UO has been able to match it, a
stirring testament to the power - and potential - of automation in
MMOGs. What do tools have to do with all this, though? 
Plenty. Taking the same basic "monsters invade city out of
nowhere"-style event showcased by the two above examples as a
starting point, the Team lead begins by sketching out a quick
encounter, then pulls up the GM client. Through a series of
drop-down menus, they select the number of monsters, the model used,
the location they'll spawn in, their names, loot and special
properties. From another series of menus, they hammer out a quick AI
script, a few taunts, and set a general behavioural path. The
resulting encounter is duplicated several times - once for each
server - and then saved; to give the encounter some added
verisimilitude, the designer takes ten minutes to whip up an NPC or
two to broadcast some warning messages, copies them a few times, and
then "hot-patches" the whole mess in across the server farm. Voila;
half an hours' worth of mindless entertainment replicated across a
dozen servers. If this example sounds strangely familiar, chances
are you're one of the cadre of world-builders currently struggling
to squeeze some functionality out of the long-delayed, yet hideously
premature 

  http://www.waterthread.org/news/102470392161646.html

Neverwinter Nights and its hit-and-miss Aurora toolset. While what
landed on store shelves a few weeks back came significantly short of
delivering "actuality and potentiality in a single package" in the
user-friendly manner Bioware's own ad copy suggested, it's at the
very least a step in that direction - perhaps the subtlest form of
irony is that the would-be destroyer of massively multiplayer gaming
may just offer the template needed for its salvation.  Consider the
NWN module as a proto-MMOG with a development team of one; an
environment is developed and then opened to the public, continually
refined over time for balance and entertainment value. As the DM,
the module's owner can possess random NPCs, create encounters, warp
anywhere on the map, establish traps and do on-the-fly interior
decoration, all without ever having to disrupt play.

The key word to carry away here is "dynamic": in order to create the
impression of a constantly-changing world, a world-builder has to
have the capability to readily alter and add to the game's
environment on a regular basis with a relative minimum of hassle. In
MMOGs, the ability to spawn in a particular monster or NPC is a
given in most cases, but doesn't leave the budding narrator with a
hell of a lot of other options on his or her hands; the most
critical difference between the NWN DM Client and a GM in almost any
given massively multiplayer game is the fact that MMOG GM is usually
tied to their specific character, thus limiting their ability to act
upon the gaming world they co-inhabit with the players. Neverwinter
Nights detaches its DMs from the proceedings; though the DM has a
specific avatar to focus on, they can just as easily play
fly-on-the-wall. In keeping with the idea that virtual worlds are
less novels and more terrariums, this eye-in-the-sky functionality
which allows the prospective designer to monitor large areas with
relative ease is nothing short of essential; after all, if we're
going to be introducing stimuli into the environment, we'll need to
see exactly what effects they have on its inhabitants. It's an idea
that Cornered Rat Software recently parlayed into World War 2 Online
with the introduction of specialised "vehicles" - a buzzard and a
flaming skull, respectively - to observe and screencap large battles
with a minimum of hassle, but without the ability to manipulate the
proceedings, it's really only an interesting diversion. However,
once coupled with the usual suspects - NPC and monster creation,
item-summoning - and a good scripting tool or two, a GM can simply
set up events and let them run, observing the results from on high
and intervening if anything particularly problematic crops up.  By
temporarily possessing one of their creations, they can even create
the illusion of a GM character where none actually exists; the best
of both worlds at a fraction of the effort. But why leave it at
that? If we really want to push the envelope of our hypothetical
toolkit, why not give our fictitious Events team the ability to slap
together throwaway dungeons and other areas from prefab elements and
then connect the resulting creations to the main gameworld via a
one-off gateway or teleport? In an Anarchy Online-style system where
each "mission" is a separate, self-contained zone, adding to the
world in this manner is far easier than having to expand existing
zones to incorporate a particular event - a "mini-packet" of data
downloaded to access the new area would be significantly more
convenient on the player side than having to wait for an entire
existing zone to recompile. Furthermore, these "event" dungeons
could then be reused for other parties and purposes as its designers
see fit.

But in spite the advantages conferred by building a game with such
tools pre-planned and fully supported, there are a few problems with
this particular angle. Given the fact that most MMOGs rely on
scratch-coded engines which take several years to reach even a
reasonable level of stability and functionality - "reasonable", of
course, being a relative term in light of such atrocities as the
crash-prone, memory-hungry Anarchy Online client upon release - the
time to code these tools, let alone bring them up to the kind of
user-friendly functionality and convenience outlined in our example
above, is almost non-existent. There's a reason designer tools for a
given game tend to be a little rough around the edges; in most
cases, it's hard to justify the extra time investment if the basic
functionality's already there. The additional complication of having
to deal with true-3D worlds compounds the problem; UO's flat,
isometric worlds allowed for considerably more elaborate events than
the carefully-modelled environments of its competitors simply
because they already depend heavily on prefabricated objects in
their creation. For all their comparative simplicity, tilesets and
sprites can be juggled more readily than polygons.  Then there's the
monetary factor. In a time where production budgets have escalated
to the point where companies can't even afford to send out beta CDs
without jeopardising their game's feature set

  http://boards.station.sony.com/ubb/starwars/Forum3/HTML/065568.html

the additional time and manpower needed to produce a functional,
easy-to-use set of tools can cost more money than said tools are
worth - first priority is getting a game on the shelves and stopping
the painful, cash-bleeding development process. As a result, you'll
find these little conveniences are supplied after the fact, pieced
together on whatever minutes can be spared from fixing bugs and
coding up new high-level loot. Anarchy Online's new NPC toolkit

  http://www.ragnartornquist.com/2002_07_01_thoughtsarchive.html

for instance, wasn't completed until almost a year after the game's
launch, but is a nonetheless perfect example of the kind of
materials a game's story-builders should have at their
disposal. That isn't to say that constructing a game engine around
dynamic environments is entirely out of the question - witness
eGenesis' proprietary eClient, currently powering A Tale In The
Desert; designed from ground up to support both hot-patching -
facilitating the introduction of new content without the need for
server downtime - and a high degree of customisability. Other games,
such as the module-based 3rd World, also are edging towards this
kind of functionality, but have the added advantage of being under
significantly lower financial and chronological pressure than their
big-budget counterparts; as EverQuest and its successors have
proven, PvE content is cheaper than story-based content and just as
effective, if not moreso, taking a great deal of the impetus out of
putting the extra effort into designing a game with a story-friendly
toolset. Characterisation and plotting are all fine and well, but
when mindless dungeon crawlers like Lineage and Legend of Mir can
draw in subscribers by the millions, the suits can be forgiven for
not wanting to screw around with a winning formula.

Fortunately enough for today's penny-conscious MMOG developers,
there are far simpler alternatives. If the primary challenge in
telling a story in MMOGs lies in actually being able to relay said
storyline to the playerbase at large, in-game news sources are one
of the easiest "fixes" to this situation. In spite of this, they
remain criminally underutilised; while almost every major game from
Ultima Online to World War 2 Online sports its own riff on the
"community news" theme, none of them make a concerted effort to
bring these stories out of the websites and into the game
itself. Less of a tragedy in some cases; given SOE's willingness to
abuse EverQuest's Message of the Day to advertise the exciting
possibilities offered by Jeopardy College Bowl and the rather
limited journalistic potential inherent in stories like "Area man
wastes 70 hours of life on Ragebringer spawn" or "Lag kills 60 at
Bard tournament", it's just as well that EQ players aren't being
kept abreast of current events. It's a similiar situation in WW2O's
case - bearing in mind the fact that the war "resets" on a regular
basis, somewhat lessening the need for up-to-the-date dispatches
from the front - and with Dark Age of Camelot's hollow Realm
vs. Realm conflict. But what about Anarchy Online? Say what you will
about the shambolic, stop-start nature of its metaplot, but the
variety of "in-character" news organs presented on the game's
official website, ranging from the rabble-rousing Voice of Freedom

  http://www.anarchy-online.com/content/community/people/rubikanews/clannews/

to the sober, propagandistic Rubi-Ka Times

  http://www.anarchy-online.com/content/community/people/rubikanews/omninews/

do an admirable job in painting a picture of an active, complex
virtual society. But does anybody really take notice? Stuck in the
ass-end of the site's frontpage and divorced from any kind of
context, they are little better than deadweight, doomed to be
ignored by the hundreds of players who are just checking in to get
the 411 on the newest patch or have a hard time remembering
"forums.anarchy-online.com". Why not mirror the content to an
in-game venue, allowing the players to peruse the stories in an
environment where they actually make sense? In AO's case, the
addition would be entirely consistent with the game's futuristic
theme; a planetwide news network with multiple channels is easily
feasible in a world where teleportation and anti-gravity are facts
of life. More to the point, it takes some of the sting out of the
static setting; even though events are between far and few and
Rubi-Ka itself only changes whenever a patch comes down the
turnpike, a regular flow of news gives the impression that
something's always brewing, no matter what day of the week it
is. It's a more sensible cure for downtime than Gems

  http://tweety.bowlofmice.com/tweety/gems.html

if you're going to be parked on your ass for while, you might as
well have the ability to scan the daily headlines. Hell, why stop
there? Syndicate a couple of webcomics, throw in some virtual sports
scores, a crossword puzzle and weekly advice from Mennix

  http://eqlive.station.sony.com/community/dear_mennix.jsp

and the time will just fly. But there's more to these tools than
just simple time-wasting and world-building, especially in a setting
like AO's, where the four-year storyline is an indelible part of the
proceedings. Given the paucity of dedicated staffers, it's
inevitable that those rare occasions when a GM finally decides to
descend from the Ivory Tower to coordinate an event are random,
improvised and chaotic; all the more for their sporadic nature. GM
events happen wherever and whenever; for most players, the only way
to get involved with things is to be in the right place at the right
time - easier said than done when you're talking about a world
covering hundreds of simulated square miles. Enter the humble news
source, the perfect way to keep a game's populace up to date with
the has-beens and will-bes. Of course, just flat-out telling
everybody where and when events are held can be a two-edged sword
for obvious reasons; once everybody knows where the action is,
chances are that you'll end up with rubberbanding and lag en masse
as guilds and groups rush in to get a piece of the proceedings, but
given the predominance of instant messenger programs, in-game /say
and /guildsay functions and voice communications, it's practically
inevitable one way or another. Informing the players doesn't
necessarily mean giving the whole game away, though; a little bit of
subtlety can go a long way. If a GM-controlled feature character is
going to start a battle somewhere, the GM in question can put in a
small in-character notice a few days beforehand, giving the NPC a
chance to announce his or her plans in broad terms and spout off a
bit of RP-friendly ideological claptrap. If specialised monsters
have been designed for a one-off "invasion", letting a few
"sightings" slip ahead of time gives the players at least a general
idea of where to expect the event when it happens - a few select
individuals might even get it in their heads to patrol the general
area, in which case the designers can add more encounters on the fly
and create a satisfying buildup to the "main event". More important
- at least from a storyteller's perspective - is the fact this
approach introduces a certain sense of continuity into things; for
most players, the first they'll hear of an event is when it's
already over and done with, at which point they frankly couldn't
give less of a damn about it. The news stories leading into an event
create a kind of anticipation; the news stories concluding them a
fitting resolution.  Consider an example in which a GM character
announces and then carries out a protest or political rally; the
first news item primes the player, but can easily be set aside. When
the second item hits, however, there's a little flash of recognition
- and the story suddenly becomes relevant, even if it is off the
back of a "So that's what happened!" feeling. This does, however,
necessitate additional planning and a greater degree of coordination
than what's found in most of today's market leaders, unless major
events are involved; given the largely intangible benefits, some
would probably see it as more trouble than it's worth. To date, only
one big-name developer seems to have twigged onto the power inherent
in in-game news sources; Final Fantasy XI's mouthpiece, the
Vana'diel Tribune

  http://www.playonline.com/ff11/vt/03/index.html

is a slicky-designed little faux-paper with topics ranging from
current events to naming conventions

  http://www.playonline.com/ff11/vt/03/04-2.html

which can be read in the comfort of your in-game home, the Mog
House. Though somewhat less regular in appearing than, say, Voice of
Freedom, the combination of "crunchy" event- and gameplay-related
articles and roleplay material sets a sterling example to Western
developers to follow.

For the more ambitious souls out there, the environment itself can
be just as effective a storytelling tool as any event or NPC, a fact
that Asheron's Call's episodic metaplot has demonstrated time and
again. In the real world, things change from day to day; people are
born, people die, seasons shift, places are built and destroyed. But
expecting to see the passage of time take its toll on a gaming world
is generally about as rewarding as looking for horsefeathers; while
players come and go, save for the odd expansion pack or patch, the
picture still remains the same - a static little collection of
locales and quest machines upon whom the sun never sets.  Asheron's
Call, however, bucked the trend in a fashion no game since has
managed to emulate; snowy one day, covered in sinister dark spires
the next, ever-changing and evolving. It helps that Turbine's
willing to break their toys every so often. Part of Asheron's Call's
gonzo appeal stems from its casual disregard for major landmarks;
entire towns have been levelled from one month to the next,
sometimes leaving nothing more than a gaping crater to mark their
passing. Compare this to Anarchy Online, where one recent news story
describes a Clanner raid on the massive Notum Cannons

  http://www.anarchy-online.com/content/community/people/rubikanews/clannews/articles/3540L

which send valuable minerals off-planet. Despite the fact that five
groups participated in the raid and the attack resulted in at least
one cannon being "destroyed repeatedly", a quick visit to Clondyke
will confirm that none of the three structures evidence even the
slightest bit of damage, let alone suggest the aftermath of a
massive commando raid.  Wasted potential, if anything; a one-off
event fades almost as soon as it's done, living on only in a few
message board posts and the odd ICQ log. A true "global event", on
the other hand, remains engrained in the world after it has passed,
allowing the players who participated to leave a permanent mark to
commemorate accomplishments - and perhaps facilitate a few bragging
rights. However, that particular example is at odds with the
ponderous way in which Asheron's Call's world changes; major
alterations to Dereth's terrain only appear after patch day is over
and done with and the servers are back up again. Without the ability
to dynamically change the environment, there's only so much a
storyteller can do with the material at hand, though it's to
Turbine's credit that their arc plot is still considered one of the
best in the mainstream in spite of the limitations imposed by this
"cold-patching" approach. So, what's the alternative?

While deformable terrain, a feature promised in several forthcoming
games - most notably the dark sci-fantasy MMOG Charr: The Grimm Fate
- offers an at least partial panacea, a simpler solution can be
built in at a modular level, much like Shadowbane's RPG/RTS hybrid
promises to do in regards to player-created towns. Instead of making
buildings and other notable features part of the immediate terrain,
they can be treated as a kind of stationary mobile object, complete
with its own invisible HP score and "death animation" - read: fiery
explosion followed by timbers or futuristic building materials
collapsing in on themselves. Then, when the plot dictates a bombing
or otherwise spectacular act of destruction, the GMs in charge can
just reduce the structure's HP to 0 and watch the fireworks go off.
Similarly, by keeping structures as objects rather than as "hard
terrain", introducing them into the game world via hot-patching
becomes a significantly easier task. The remaining slack can be
taken up by palette and texture swaps; decaying grounds and rivers
of blood wouldn't be any more difficult to pull off than the work
required to replace one set of textures with another and saving the
end result. The drawbacks are obvious - after all the "disgruntled
GM goes on rampage, kills hundreds of players" horror stories that
have surfaced over the years, the idea of some loose cannon playing
"Virtual Unabomber" and decimating an entire city through their GM
Clients should be enough to give any developer pause for
thought. It's not a terminal problem, though; with enough checks and
balances and careful monitoring, there's no reason why it couldn't
be made to work. Whether there's actually any professional desire to
see it work is another matter entirely; those forthcoming MMOGs that
do incorporate destructible features do so because of they're a
necessity imposed on them by their basic feature set - in other
words, a side-effect of having player-built structures entering the
game's world in large numbers. Expecting such features to be born
out of simple profit motive is an exercise in futility. However,
that's only wishful thinking at work, and even then, only half of
the puzzle. The possibilities inherent in all of these areas are
certainly intriguing, but no matter how good the tools are,
designers and developers can only take a game's story so far. Where
things go from there rests entirely in the hands of the players
themselves. 
<---end quote

-Raph

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