[MUD-Dev] MMO Quest: Why they're still lousy

[Bart Simon]

Paul Schwanz wrote:

> Quests by their very nature /are/ stories.  Perhaps Sporky isn't
> suggesting that the story be removed, only the text/narrative.  I
> thouroghly enjoyed Peter Jackson's story based on JRT's LoTR
> trilogy.  I appreciated the fact that the story was played out
> using the strength of the medium.  If Jackson had decided to throw
> a lot more textual narration onto the screen, I think it would
> have been distracting.  The strength of games are their
> interaction.  Though text and narration has it's place, I
> personally would enjoy a lot more questing and stories devoid of
> text and narration, but rife with interaction.  You won't be able
> to imagine how this is possible unless you think outside the
> current MMORPG box.  In my estimation, Sporky was doing precisely
> that.

Part of what folks might be after here of course is the combination
of interaction and narrative but I don't mean that we necessarily
need a more interactive narrative in the sense of allowing players
to alter the world through quests.  It may be enough to produce
narratives that are compelling enough that they become the objects
of player's interaction with each other.

That is - instead of players trading tips on the most efficient ways
to complete quests and get the loot (a sort of denuded quest
narrative in its own right). Might the story be compelling enough
that players might actually discuss the motivations of NPCs and each
other in the story/quest, the symbolism/significance of the quest in
the context of the world and player careers and so on.  I think i'm
imagining a little version of a MMORPG "book" of the month
club. That is, the story becomes a resource for other kinds of
player interaction.

One example from EQ2 comes to mind -- in the Qeynos citizenship
quest (or one of them) you are meant to go around an instanced room
judging NPC's on their loyalty to Qeynos... there is a pretty slim
dialog tree that pretty much leaves no doubt about what to do but
imagine if two players did the quest together with a bit more
complicated dialog tree.  The fun would be in the player-player
interaction - "do we kill him, do we not" not the player-NPC
interaction. The change in pace and the possibility of a different
kind of interaction might even be enough to stop the average player
from their mad dash to just level up already...  Crucially these
could also be identity forming moments (and therefore moments of
investature - and good for the subscription base) for the
player-character which does not depend on any explicit definition or
practice of role play.

Does anybody have any working examples of this kind of thing in a
MUD or MMORPG?

cheers, Bart
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