The traditional (by now) questing model in MMOs doesn’t leave a lot of room for exploration and surprises. Things get even worse when players (like me) decide not to read quest text and blindly follow the pointers of some built-in quest helper system. The other day, LotRO surprised me when I encountered a line of […]

I have a hard time coming up with proper ways to include exploration in modern games, especially MMOs. It just seems incredibly difficult to allow so many players to explore a (necessarily) limited world – you simply can’t boldly go where no man has gone before because there usually is no such place. That said, […]

It’s no secret among people interested in game design that pretty much impossible to create a fully interactive, complete, and extensive narration tree. Ideally, every decision a player takes in a game would influence the rest of the game and the decisions following it. In reality though, such a tree quickly becomes completely impossible to […]

Here’s a little quote for those of you that don’t read Tish, Tosh, Tesh as religiously as they should: “I believe that MMOs should be about the player’s story in a vital virtual world that’s indifferent to them.” – Tesh Traditionally, computer games make the player into an all-powerful hero that saves the princess, the world, […]

Storytelling in games has always been a difficult beast to tackle. Oftentimes the story simply feels grafted onto the gameplay or vice versa instead of both being a homogeneous entity. In the wait for Bioware’s new MMO The Old Republic, discussions seem to flare up from time to time on the topic of making story an integral […]

Spinks posted an article yesterday dealing with player rewards vs character rewards. While interesting in itself, it caused me to think about something only remotely connected – the ability to tell stories about our game experience. Back when I was running the Magic – The Gathering tournament circuit, (Not very successfully, mind you. I only won cash once.) the […]