I’m not here to flash my MMO credentials at you because (a) you don’t care and (b) you probably top me. That’s fine. All I want to put out front here is that I’ve been playing MMORPGs for a long time and seen a lot of trends and development in this area. And if you had asked me 10 or 15 years ago what was one of my favorite parts of these games — the feature that I’d laud loudly — it would be the overarching epic storyline (or personal story, or main story quest, or whatever you call it).
I’ve come to the slow personal realization that I have not only lost my taste for these big storylines but stopped seeing them as that important for the health of MMOs. Include them if you must, but I feel that resources are best spent elsewhere.
I don’t know when I first encountered this sort of sweeping narrative. Maybe it was the original Guild Wars in 2005, followed by Lord of the Rings Online in 2007, and most memorably in Star Wars: The Old Republic a few years later. World of Warcraft didn’t really have these at start but later — like most MMOs — began to incorporate them.
And they were pretty glorious, playing out an ongoing story like a delicious novel, one chapter at a time. These epics were positioned to be the peak questing experiences, loaded with voice acting, continued characters, memorable setpieces, and major twists and revelations.
I liked them — and a whole lot of other people did too. Sometimes they were the major selling point of the game, what you’d evangelize to your friends when explaining why this was something they really needed to check out for themselves.
My shift in this position came about as I noticed my growing reluctance of doing, say, World of Warcraft’s campaign arcs or Lord of the Rings Online’s latest volume. They simply didn’t have the appeal they once did, and in fact, they sometimes felt like a chore.
So why I have I changed my tune? Am I becoming an unhappy geezer who can’t be satisfied by anything? Do I even hate these questlines?
No, I don’t hate them or even mind them. But I am ready to be done with doing them all the time. I’m also starting to wonder if they’re really worth the effort for devs to make them.
The more I’ve thought on my shifting position, the more I’ve concluded that the reason for this isn’t that complicated. Epic storylines are simply too long and bloated. They’re often focused on creating this buzzworthy spectacle that just goes on and on and on until we’re kind of dulled by it.
And haven’t we all heard players express how many of us are tired of being shoved to the forefront of every world-saving effort? That’s all these epics seem to be able to tell. A new Death Star, same old bunch of plucky Rebels to blow it up.
I absolutely love questing and quests in MMOs, but they don’t need to be so long that I honestly forget how they started because that was like 17 months ago. It’s just too much, too long, too noisy.
The better questing experience is the short story, not novel-length, format. Bite-sized experiences that can be consumed in a single setting or weekend. The quests and moments that I tend to remember come from one-off missions or shorter chains. Great storytellers can do a whole lot within these constraints, and sometimes they’re actually more free to give us a better tale because they’re not trying to service some unwieldy beast of a plot.
But hey, that’s just the opinion of one guy who’s been there, quested that, and got all of the t-shirts that they rewarded.
Everyone has opinions, and The Soapbox is how we indulge ours. Join the Massively OP writers as we take turns atop our very own soapbox to deliver unfettered editorials a bit outside our normal purviews (and not necessarily shared across the staff). Think we’re spot on — or out of our minds? Let us know in the comments!
