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Story in MMORPGs: The Coming Revolution

An NPC is seen in a village with an exclamation mark over his head. You run to him and get a lengthy dialogue about a certain plight the character has that only you and the other millions of players in your world can help him with. You simply need to kill "X" amount of a certain creature or get "X" amount of a special item dropped from the certain creature and bring it back to the NPC in order to receive your gold, experience, and item rewards.

You are one of the millions in your world worthy of defeating the largest threat to come about. In order to defeat this great evil, you need to stand around asking for a group to join you, travel a distance to find him, and then wait in line with the tens of other hero groups waiting for him to respawn so you can get the gold, experience, and special item rewards for ridding the world of this evil. An evil that happens to return every two minutes for the next John or Jane Doe and their powerful team in line to destroy it. Welcome to the world of story in MMORPGs, at least for now.

This tried and true, yet eventually dull and boring, method of telling a story and immersing players in their game world in MMOs is about to get shaken up in the coming years. Two new MMORPGs have arrived on the scene, both without a release date but well into development, that look to revolutionize the way players will look at storytelling in MMOs. They are Star Wars: The Old Republic and Guild Wars 2.

NCSoft and ArenaNet's first attempt to change storytelling in MMOs, the original Guild Wars, met with both success and failure. It's instanced missions and eventual voiceover work for mission cutscenes added a feeling of immersion and importance to what your characters did in the world. However, the entire instance of the world and the use of the same quest system found in practically every MMO out today kept it from being entirely revolutionary.

Now working with a new slate for gameplay and lore to base the game around thanks to the original, Guild Wars 2 is looking to change the way players quest and play a story. Guild Wars 2 will be set in a persistent world minus missions and dungeons, and ArenaNet is introducing what they call an "event system" that is an entirely new way of looking at questing.

"I think I can safely say that you won't see a single exclamation mark floating above a character's head in Guild Wars 2," said lead designer Eric Flannum. "This is one of the many things that will encourage the player to explore the world -- you can wander through and never quite know what you're going to see. You might come across a fortress that's being attacked by centaurs, or it might be that the centaurs attacked half an hour before you got there and they hold it now. You might start walking along a road you've walked a hundred times and suddenly there's a caravan traveling along that road that you may not have seen, and you can go help that caravan out."

This new vision for obtaining and partaking in quests gives a much more realistic, organic feeling, approximating what it really would be like to walk around as a hero in a fantasy land. Players would spot trouble or characters in need and aid them by choice instead of looking for NPCs in the town square with symbols over their heads. The key element of the event system in Guild Wars 2 is choice. Players do not have to help those in need, and if they don't it will affect the game world.

"Events respond to what the players are doing in the world," said ArenaNet co-founder Mike O'Brien. "If the players raid [a] centaur camp and clear out the centaurs, then there won't be a centaur attack on the garrison. But if the players let the centaur population get out of control, then the centaurs will become emboldened and start doing raids."

If ArenaNet can pull off this system, which they seem to have a handle on, it can change the way quests are done in MMORPGs. It will help immerse players in the world much more than any quest system in any MMO has done to date. And immersion is everything when it comes to keeping players interested in an MMORPG. Combine it with the instanced story missions that made Guild Wars' story so immersive, and we could very well see a new way to look at story in MMOs.

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