TYLER Projects | the blog

There are currently three main schools of thought to designing an immersive story for a game.

The first follows the Half Life approach, last seen in Modern Warfare 2 and Uncharted 2. Place the player into a specific individual within the game, give him a clear cut goal, and rail him through a rollercoaster plot. Surround him with sound and fury, leaving him little time to ponder anything else. Immersion arises from the cinematic presentation of action and gameplay, but the story unfolds in a linear progression. Done well, the player seeks to finish the story, to see how the plot unfolds, to experience the game as they might normally experience a movie, just with more interactivity. Great stories can be told through this method, but they’re rarely suitable for a more multi-player experience.

Battle Stations is thus incapable of this, just yet.*

The second is the Choice and Consequence approach, as evidenced by Dragon Age, Mass Effect, and The Witcher. The player becomes an active agent in the story’s progression, rather than the guy who’s ordered to shoot things. The player is presented with a choice that will affect the outcome of the story. Players become invested in their choices, and the characters they play. Play the power-hungry mage and sacrifice all who come into your path, or play the paragon of virtue, spreading compassionate ass-kicking to all corners of the galaxy. It’s the player’s choice to make. The outcome of the story is thus determined by the player’s actions, not a linear progression of plot, sandwiched between stretches of gameplay.

Several players have remarked that they would like to see this in Battle Stations Quest system, yet these are incredibly complex to design, and often overwhelming to more casual players.

The third is the emergent narrative, Civilization, Warhammer, Fallout 3 etc. Design the world, litter it with details of a living, breathing ecosystem, like audiotapes, lost logs, pedestrians you can mug, cars to steal. It’s the backbone of a well-designed sandbox game such as Grand Theft Auto, (before they railroad you down the linear plot). The writers and designers create a world and all its ancillary information so players can make up their own stories, and go on their own adventures, discover the worlds little secrets.

This is what we’re trying to do, more or less.

Some of the real story that derives from Battle Stations comes from the players themselves, who their captains are, what sort of feud is going on between the clans, which famous captain is flying high in the skies of Sios this week. We want to build on that. Obviously, a static quest system will not be the best way to involve players in the game world. That’s why we have a Renaissance.

We’ll be launching Battle Stations: Renaissance sometime alongside Chapter 1 of the quest updates. Renaissance is essentially a wiki format for all things Battle Stations, including Siosian history, Prominent player characters, personal character stories, etc. One of the main features is for fan contribution, whether in terms of fan fiction, or creating a short story we can fold into our flexible quest system. The idea is that if there’s a particular bit of story there, something we can spin several quests out of, we’ll look at being to produce it with what resources we have in-house, and you’ll see it in the quests sooner or later.

We’re trying to build a world for you guys to play in here, but where others can visit.

The underlying approach to BSv2.0 storytelling technique is that every player is his or her own captain in the world of Sios.

The concept works like this. Quests are designed such to be that they are jobs, missions and tasks that any mercenary captain in the world of Sios would normally be hired to do. You have a ship, you run cargo, escort merchants, maybe do a bit of patrol, aid the Knights in raiding bandits, explore new lands, etc. None of the players are given control of a specific character like the way we did in Mafia Empire, or the way other RPGs do it. You’re not a Grey Warden, nor are you a Spectre, Cloud Strife or Luke Skywalker. You’re not that special. If everyone was special, then no one really is. You are whoever you want to be, as long as whoever you want to be captains an airship and wants to fly around Sios. Why are you playing Battle Stations if otherwise?

But there’s a story going on in the world of Sios, and it’s going to happen whether the player participates in it or not.

The trick is that we’re building a world, not simply telling a story. There are going to be a multitude of plots going on, a few conspiracies being conspired, politicians realpoliticking, bandits banditing, nations on the brink of war. When a player first enters Sios, after the initial Tutorial area, he’ll be presented with a number of options for quests. They’re what could be expected of an Airship captain just getting started in life. As he progresses, he might get in touch with certain contacts, certain individuals who have need of mercenary aid. If the player helps that guy, he gets drawn in further into the ongoing stories. If he simply pursues the routine of merchant running, patrolling and bandit raiding, well…. more power to him. That’s the basics of your choice for now. You can certainly level to 100 delivering pies to the border guards, but you’re not really gaining a lot of experience are you?

So the quest system works like this. Each port is divided in several districts. You can freely travel between the districts without AP. The idea is that within a nation, all the trade routes are so easily mapped out that it’s mostly inconsequential flying around. (Also, gameplay wise, it’s less annoying to keep sucking your APs). Those district icons at the top of the Quest page, yeah, you don’t need to unlock them. Fly there, see what quests there are, do them if you like. Fly elsewhere if you get bored, or find a better paying job. That’s the life of a captain.

Quests all still have random outcomes. This means that just because you’re escorting a merchant through a peace trade province, it isn’t going to be plain sailing. Bandits might attack, the merchant might stiff you on payment, you’ll run into a thunderstorm. If you go squid hunting, you’ll occasionally get lucky and capture the squid without the need for battle, or you might run into something much worse than a simply flying squid. Who knows? Only you do when you go on the quests. Things happen, that’s life in the world of Sios.

Other quests get unlocked as you master others. You might, as a captain attract enough attention that some people think you’ll be useful for certain jobs. You certainly won’t be the only one. These jobs might appear once a day, they might always be available or they might appear only once. If you don’t do them, they’re gone. Maybe they’ll return, maybe they won’t. Who knows. Well, we do, but that entirely depends on our ability to design and code those quests in as much as we can during the course of the week. If opportunity knocks on your ship, you should take it. That’s the life of a mercenary.

The world is there for you to explore. Go on, explore, and eventually you discover things about Sios that will end up being a story in itself.

The comic ties directly into that. There’s an actual character driven story there. It takes place in Sios, and where the protagonists of the comic end up, players will have a chance of visiting themselves. Or even the other way around. Players do a quest that will have its repercussions in the comic down the line. Players who make a name for themselves in the clan wars, in the island bases, in the bounty hunts might appear in the comic (as their captain counterpart). Players might even have a chance to run into the protagonist in the game, based on some random encounters, or in their explorations. We don’t actually know. The possibility is coded in, but the random outcome generator doesn’t mean you will actually see them. But the comic, that’s where the story takes place. The game is where the players can poke around the world and discover the hidden stories that motivate, intersect and create the world around them.

Of course, this is all theory. It remains to be seen if we can pull it off.

Next Up: Instance Runs, Boss Hunts, and the Renaissance.

*Note. I started this as a response to Luis Blondet Raul’s theory on MMO storytelling and DnD Dungeon mastering and it exploded into an informal essay on personal storytelling and the MMO.”

I was a dungeon master once.

The stories I enjoyed most when playing RPGs of the yesteryears and even RPGs now are the ones that start the player off with a clear personal purpose, only to have that quest spiral into something hugely epic, hugely complex as your progress. Planescape: Torment, Baldur’s Gate II, Fallout series all that that single goal that starts you off in the game, but slowly build up the world around it through a series of events.

The goals there rarely fell into the easy mediocre tropes fantasy story usually comes with, stuff like, “Save the world, mercenary crew looking for money, adventurer come to vanquish ancient evil.” They were more personal; they start out more intimate; why you got resurrected in a morgue, get the water chip for your dying town, or rescue an old friend. Saving the world came secondary to the personal story that game revolved around.

So similar to when I was a dungeon master, I found it easier to herd my players when I motivated them with personal quest amidst a war torn world. No one really bought into the fiction about some Big Bad evil, but everyone bothered to play characters when some warlord they worked for swindled them out of treasure and left them stranded on a desert island, or that they were lured as convenient scapegoats into some political plot, or that they were blamed on a murder they didn’t commit.

People come into RPGs with varying different motivations. A lot just want to game the system, build an Uber powerful character to crush his enemies, see them fall at their feet and hear the lamentation of their women. Others want loot, big shiny loot they can wave around to their friends and brag, engendering e-peen envy. Some come for the story. On facebook, that some is nearly negligible.

I think most people on facebook come for the spreadsheet, the genial time wasters that are easy to understand, easy to get into, and easy to play. It’s casual entertainment, quick enjoyment in between your real games, or your real life stuff. Given the limitations of the medium, it’s much harder to tell a good story, much less a great one, that players can buy into. But telling that good story, that’s what I’m trying to figure out.

What I’ve figured out for facebook and MMOs in general, is that it’s hard to tell a specific story about a specific character for a multitude of players. If everyone is that character, than the story, and the world building loses that social gaming feel. The story feels claustrophobic, and the content generation becomes dangerously unscalable to the tech we have at hand.

On the other hand, telling a story with repetitive meaningless tasks means players simply don’t buy into the fictional world. There are only so many pimps I can kill, or pizzas I can make before I realize there isn’t much of a world, or a concept to play around with. These activities may tickle the compulsive clicker is most gamers, but it could hardly be called a decent attempt to create a world, or even a game that has more interactivity than filling a spreadsheet and hoarding virtual goods.

So, given the limitations of facebook, in terms of tech, time, accessibility and gaming conventions, how do we, as developers, write and design a game that could ideally build a steampunk fantasy world full of airships and adventure, while allowing gamers of all creed to come, click around, casually enjoy the art and gameplay while providing a deeper experience for those who seek it.

Given that this post has run its length in terms of loquacity, I’ll write that up in another post.