Hey guys, this post is not directly related to WoW. However, I wanted to post it because it does talk about an issue which is very much directly related to WoW. That is, the shifting focus away from story-telling as a key aspect of the game and more towards story-telling as a compartmentalized aspect of said game. I think we saw this with the end of WoLTK, wherein Arthas, a character who was built up substantially since WC3, had finally been killed.
Since then, Blizzard has arguably neglected much of WoW's lore in favor of short-term, gameplay benefits. I hope this piece, using Starcraft's development, is telling as to why.
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A while ago, Polygon did a feature piece on Starcraft's evolution as a game, but with a specific focus on development and story. The same piece (http://www.polygon.com/2015/11/6/967...y-dlc-blizzard) was briefly discussed on these forums some time after it came out. One passage in particular, stuck out to people:
I've been going over a lot of old interviews, presentations, etc by people involved in the development of SC2, and I honestly think that this idea, with little variance, is very pervasive. There's this idea that instead of designing a game holistically, you rigidly adhere to this belief that players care more about jumping into the action immediately than a good, interesting story. Though it's definitely true that gameplay must often trump lore (like in multiplayer for instance) the more you look into how Chris Metzen and Dustin Browder describe the design process, the more you begin to see that it's an issue of priority."Among those storylines that didn’t make the cut was a serious "down and out" drinking problem for Raynor. The missions Metzen wanted showed Raynor screwing up in some way, even after players successfully achieved their goal. People would end up hurt, but eventually, Raynor would overcome his personal demons and find redemption."
"At the time, the team was just like, ‘Why? It’s unnecessary,’" Metzen says. "‘I just wanna see things nuked! I want to feel badass right out of the gate.’ That’s perfectly valid. If I were writing a novel about it, it might have been great.
Take this interview of Chris Metzen by PC Gamer (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LBSb9suA2lM) starting at 8:05, the interviewer asks about designing story in video games, and Chris Metzen talks about how story was told in a game such as Warcraft 3 vs Starcraft 2.
As you can see, there seems to be this self-conciousness with expressing too much story through maps and cinematic content (WC3's story boards, where dialogue took place, also analogous to SC1 characters pausing in the map to have some dialogue, mission briefings, etc) Chris Metzen also briefly mentioned the mission briefings in the Polygon piece"Warcraft 3 we tried a much more cinematic take on things, we had these cinematic sequences that wove the whole story together, so we tried a much bigger story on Warcraft 3. And while I love Warcraft 3, there's times when it was a little too top-heavy. When you're stories so woven in and out of all the gameplay, and the gameplay has to change up until you ship the game you have to optimize levels and make it fun, it can be really really top heavy to tell that much story"
"So there was this suggestion, when we decided to build Starcraft 2, there was kind this suggestion of, what if we tried to pull the story a little bit out of the maps and let the level design be what it is, and just faciltate really fun maps, and really just let the story rest in it's own space."
"our games, people tend to want to get back into the action very, very quickly. And so a lot of cinematic content or a lot of story context can become very cumbersome very quickly"
("Our aspirations were much higher in coming back to StarCraft," Metzen says. "Instead of the screen with the portraits yelling at each other, I wanted it to be living. I wanted to be in the scene. Some would argue that we took it too far, photographs on the bulletin boards and the jukeboxes and all that stuff. But we were very different developers. ... It pushed us to think bigger and be more farsighted about the product we wanted to build")
Chris Metzen continues, a couple minutes past that point in the interview, he goes on about how instead of putting story into maps and cinematics, the team instead opted to let the player explore the universe, through the character interactions in Wings of Liberty.
"Kind of like that old Wing Commander idea, where you'd have sets and you move through this set to that, small talk with people, develop relationships... and just be able to explore a bit more of the ship and the universe ultimately. I love that experiment with Wings of Liberty"
Again, we see that the development team seems to push the story further and further into a compratmentalized space. Instead of being central and almost unavoidable (keyword: almost, people should be able to skip it.) The story mostly functions as stricly separate from the gameplay. Which gives the writers even less freedom because they can't put anything jarring in the character conversations, since you need to be able to understand the overall plot without them. Here's the part that I find the most telling though, partially because Chris Metzen uses similar language from the Polygon article, and partially because it's pretty direct in terms of the design philosophy.
You see it yet? It's the same language from the Polygon article, there's this idea that players want to feel like the hero of the story, before being entertained and immersed in the story itself. That's where I think this idea of gameplay before story starts to become problematic, it's a gradual progression. Slowly the devs seem to separate the story from the core game, even in the campaign. We see this with the excellent level design of the past three expansions, as well as the poor story-telling. In SC2 game design is driven far more by gameplay, while story follow suit whereas in Warcraft 3, the game design is more of an equilibrium. The maps exist to tell the story and narrative, but game-play and story are valued almost equally and they are forced to meld together."Sometimes you have to way the storytelling, even though we can run very deep with things, even though you can construct and tell very nuanced scenes. you have to remember that the whole reason someone picked the game off the shelf in the first place, is because htey wanted to drive it, they wanted to feel like the center of events. Sometimes that can run counter to your genius, but how does that feel though?"
"You need to stay off the players toes, and remember that the player wants to feel like the center of events."
Now, that's what I have for Metzen, and this post is already quite long, so let me just close off with Dustin Browder, who was game director throughout WoL and HOTS. Here, he's giving a presentation on how E-Sports has affected *cough* poisoned *cough* SC2's development. Especially on story (http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1014488...n-of-STARCRAFT) (Scroll down the side bar until you see "Story")
To close out, I just want to say. I don't think Blizzard has any lack of ability, besides some interns writing cringe-worthy dialogue, much of the same people who made a game as amazing and as immersive as the original Starcraft still work on the development team today. Chris Metzen certainly hasn't gone anywhere (thank god. I love the guy)."We do crazy, crazy things, we have this armory (referring to Swann's room in WoL) so you can see these vehicles, you can see the 50-ton siege tank, as big on the screen as you can get it, so when you see the little tiny siege tank in the game, you imagine the 50 ton siege tank in your mind"
"Our units are ants, marines are tiny little guys. They die like flies...I want you to care about Tychus, even if you hate him. I want you to have some emotional connection to him. But in the game he's gonna be this little tiny little ant. So we go nuts with this stuff, we make these insanely over the top comic book characters, he's this tough guy who drinks and smokes, he's ridiculous, he's insane, but when he's an ant, you'll remember him
Ultimately, the problem is that Blizzard tends to swing the pendulum to far when it comes to feedback. They often OVER-react, instead of making the small, necessary adjustments. In this case, they've heard that players just want to skip through much of the story, and so they reacted by pulling much of the story-telling out of the maps and reducing the amount and quality of dialogue. For those of you (most?) who played the original games, the delivery mechanisms to the story are hugely different, there's almost a 5 minute conversation before each map, and even some dialogue while playing as well.
I know it's crazy, but I do have hope, if we send the message, I think we can prove that players do care about a deep, interesting, and compelling story.