Sure. Will they still have that in 5-10 years, though? Cannot one bad story addon wreck all of what came before, and poison what comes after? Putting so much into the story is a long-term risk. And WoW’s recent years are a great example of how it can backfire. While most of that failure is probably the WoW devs’ own fault, the risk itself was inherent in the strategy. It’s not any story that can stay engaging over a decade of constant progression. And an MMO has worse tools for it than most other media.
Not necessarily. Just look at your favourite MoP. The parts that were about “moving the world forward” were the faction war parts you deride. The parts you liked were about exploring a new world… and protecting its status quo. You can tell new stories in new places, instead of insisting on changing the old places. Conjuring up new islands and continents on the world map might be a meme, but it works well enough.
you can only pull the hidden land thing so many times before the community wonder where all this land masses came from as we’ve already seen the globe heck we’ve even seen the planet from Argus
Oh, they’ll meme about it, sure. But will they care, as long as the new land is fun enough, feels new enough to intrigue, and familiar enough to satisfy? I don’t think so. I actually think you could pretty much pull that one off an unlimited amount of times, and that the larger parts of the playerbase would embrace it. If they knew that that’s how the game worked. That it’s a little sillyness that can be joked about can be a positive, and doesn’t have to feel bad.
Indeed, and we can clearly see both big continets at once. On the same side of the planet, and we don’t even see that side clear and full. So that actually leaves quite a lot of room.
That, to me, doesn’t really sound like an MMORPG. Not that that has to be a bad thing – it’s just that it has received the wrong label. These are not really my thoughts alone, I’m echoing Nerdslayer’s video on the topic: https://youtu.be/QIsv6ESBFrU
I had no prior knowledge of Final Fantasy franchise before trying FFXIV and the game didn’t do a good enough job to hook me. But I may have approached the game with misguided expectations since it is branding itself as an MMORPG.
I may be repeating myself an awful lot on these forums, but I sincerely do not believe that the way modern MMORPGs handles story is the correct way to do it. I can’t speak for FFXIV but the games I have played it’s always been the same; the story may be strong initially but it’ll degrade over time as the developers run out of ideas and starts to create bigger and badder enemies in a desperate attempt to hold the players’ interest.
But it’s not just that. You can’t ever own the story a developer gives to you in an MMORPG. Not if you intend to share the world with your fellow players. The diegetic world, that is. If the Heart of Azeroth is worn by one person then it makes no sense in the diegetic world to have multiple heroes carrying it at the same time – it breaks the narrative. In that scenario you’re not sharing a world with the other players, you’re sharing a game. I realize that vanilla WoW wasn’t perfect and also required that players suspended their disbelief, and I’m not sure if an online experience can ever be free from that but it is something that should be mitigated to the extent that it is possible. Vanilla WoW was, in my view, a much superior MMORPG to retail WoW.
mmo’s can be many things as it simply means Massively multiplayer online but FF 14 is a MMORPG which is a different branding
the multiplayer aspect is there but it’s not the focus you could remove the multiplayer and it would do great as a stand alone FF game and that’s the whole point it was written for story first and foremost the rest is just a bonus and endwalker is the closing of the first chapter of FF 14’s story how it will go from here depends on the writers
but you know im not going to try to sell you on ff 14 everyone is different i like story and lore … wow has none of it at the moment some people just want to pew pew but that’s not me nor do i partially care for mythic + or raiding i mostly play for fun but what i find fun in wow is not for everyone thank god or else a lot of other people would be here to and this old expansions would be crowded
That sounds like a good thing – but just because the game has multiplayer aspects does it make it an MMORPG? I’m not sure what the “massively” stands for anymore but it feels like modern MMOs are kind of going the opposite direction of it. I very much like mythic dungeons in WoW, much more so than raids, but it’s not content that strikes me as MMORPG-content either.
Don’t worry. Like you say, everyone is different and I do not mean to belittle you or FFXIV. It wasn’t my cup of tea and it probably won’t ever be but it seems like its playerbase is plenty happy the way things are. I care a great deal about story and lore in my games as well, which is why I spend not an unsignificant amount of time here on these forums to read and rant! And while the story-focus may have worked out for FFXIV it certainly hasn’t worked out for World of Warcraft and I think their decision to go this route was a mistake. Whether it actually was a mistake or not depends on how you measure it, I suppose. The perspective I use is purely artistic.
i would argue that story brings your mmo to life if you have no story you end up with black desert stunning graphics but very shallow don’t get me wrong i’m not saying black desert has 0 story i’m just say its a bit of a mess
vanilia was basically that as well sure you had some lore but most of it was just scraps you had to piece together your self take bolvar for example a lot of people don’t know who he is i remember in wolk people complained that this random guy got to be the lich king
heck the story is why warcraft 3 did better then the previous 2 i would argue if you have to buy several books to know who the characters in your RTS is then you kinda failed at telling the story
I agree, but I don’t think a story has to be told through cutscenes, nor does it have to involve the player as the main protagonist. World of Warcraft did the environmental storytelling quite well. I often compare it with Guild Wars 2, which is a game that doesn’t really have the same depth in its backstory. Not that Guild Wars 2 is void of backstory but it feels much weaker than the lore behind World of Warcraft, and the new lore they make up isn’t particularly interesting.
I much agree! In general I have come to dislike transmedial storytelling. I don’t think you as a player should have to go and read books in order to understand the plot of a game’s story. At best, other media should complement the story of the game. Preferably with self-contained stories that might be referenced in the game but won’t impact the direction of the game’s story.
Considering it didn’t have the transmedial storytelling behind it… is that any wonder? We can complain about splitting stuff into books and guides and sidegames, but the fact of the matter is that you have an easier time filling out the world with details, if you do. And I assume we mostly mean “more details” with depth, considering how hard it would be to call anything Warcraft ever did “deep” in a a more artsy sense than that. So I feel that the goals of a deeper world, and an aversion to transmedia world-building would be misaligned. Now, I certainly agree that the transmedia stuff shouldn’t tell the same story that the game is telling, but if we want a richer world, we should want more stories within that world to bring out more details.
…or we should want that, if the authors were marginally commited to consistency, I guess, which in WoW we sadly cannot assume…
Precisely this. That’s what I meant when I said that other media can complement the main story of the game. I was a big fan of Dragon Age: Origins. I think that game did an excellent job with not just its world building, but also the delivery of it. I was so hooked to that franchise that it did encourage me to buy the books, and these books told their own stories within the universe. And although they did shed some light on some of the main characters involved in the game’s story the books weren’t necessary for a player to understand the story of the main game.
So I mainly oppose transmedial storytelling when it relates to the telling of one story. I think Overwatch was the game that made me adopt this stance as I originally liked the transmedial storytelling of Overwatch, but in hindsight I’ve grown to dislike it. Overwatch had an interesting beginning but it doesn’t feel like the story is going anywhere, and while their cinematics were amazing their comic strips were kind of lacklustre.
A diverse range of broadly produced stories can give the world scale, when you use it to tell things, which supplement and inform the events which transpire. The line has been towed a couple times with stuff like War Crimes, where you had no idea of understanding the hell was going on, if you have not previously read the book, in WoD.
But then there is the upcoming Sylvanas novel, which promisses to tell the same story, from a different perspective(among other things), whilst leaving that key perspective mostly outside the game resulting in the game’s story being a hard to invest in disjointed mess.
thank god or else a lot of other people would be here to and this old expansions would be crowded