Your Next: The Shoulders of Giants
How broadening horizons could be the secret to a great MMO.
SOE is getting less and less shy about calling EverQuest Next a new kind of game, and personally, I’m glad. Challenging the tropes of MMOs has been the overarching goal of EQN since the team were sent back to the drawing board in 2011. They were smart enough to see the pattern of huge releases with disappointing retention. I don’t think any of us want that for the next product in the lineage of EverQuest.
With a blank slate to work on, and an edict to innovate, SOE did what all great inventors and innovators do: they looked at what everyone else was doing.
Some are fond of Oscar Wilde’s insistence that "talent borrows, genius steals." While I wouldn’t dare disagree, I would humbly submit that when Sir Isaac Newton wrote "If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants" he was closer to the mark if we’re talking progress. Though to be fair, he did steal that metaphor.
While looking for inspiration, and the means to bring crazy new ideas to life, SOE found Storybricks (a company you may have heard of), and with them a way to bring to life to an MMORPG in a way we’ve never seen.
This week, in a new official video – the promised re-recording of the SOE Live panel – Lead Content Designer Steve Danuser and Storybricks Lead Designer Stéphane Bura talk about how EQN uses its AI to create story and content for players to participate in.
Increasing player agency while retaining strong narrative is a minefield; adding a persistent multiplayer element is a minefield surrounded by trolls with grenades. If this partnership can pull it off and create a satisfying experience for players, it might just change the way we think about virtual worlds.
'How do they hope to accomplish this?,' I hear you ask, politely, while surreptitiously stifling a yawn. I’m glad you asked, because I already wrote the answer and am inserting this clumsy segway with the power of editing.
Traditionally a trade-off must be made between agency and narrative. Many games go to great lengths to create the illusion of agency. If most MMOs were asked what they thought agency was, they’d probably say it was something to do with Mulder and Scully. That’s right, they’re so out of touch they would reference the X-Files and not Agents of Shield.
What we would expect to find is that an MMOs content has been created and portioned out for the consumption of players; players cannot have any kind of effect on the narrative, as it would disrupt the experience for all the other players – which would be catastrophic. Despite many MMOs catering to solo play, there is still the problem of the shared world. The fact that the very feature that makes MMOs what they are can be so readily described as a ‘problem’ hopefully demonstrates a dissonance in design.
Imagine if storylines were actually resolved by the first player to run through a zone on launch day. When the next player in the queue got to the quest hub, they would be greeted by happy citizens without a care in the world. This would simply not do, and despite it being an unfortunate necessity for many persistent multiplayer games, it has always been one that sits awkwardly with players. A certain nagging inevitability that will rip any but the most oblivious out of the pretense of immersion. Like queueing up for that one named mob in the starter zone of a new Korean MMO, or ‘discovering’ a body surrounded by players as part of a quest chain, so much MMO content is set up in defiance of its nature.
What storybricks does is give the agency to the player, allowing them to decide what is important to them, allowing them to succeed or fail, and making every success a ‘first’. This is the ingenious part, recontextualizing actions to create intrinsic triumph that is hard-wired to the narrative of the game at a cadence dictated by the successes and failures of players. No more waiting six months for the new raid content, no more ‘on farm’ encounters.
The elegance of the content delivery is what allows agency and narrative to be mutually supportive, as delivery is managed by player pressure. If the world exists in a state of equilibrium, with conflicting forces in a stalemate, added pressure from players can create a meaningful impact on the world. The best part is, as players disturb the equilibrium the world will begin to self correct to fill the vacuum.
If the world were always attempting to reassert the same paradigm, it wouldn’t be too long before the veil fell and the futility of player action was exposed. But if all the elements of the game are responding to the immediate situation as player pressure dictates it, we approach emergent narrative. How exciting.
Of course, no battleplan survives contact with the enemy, and I’m looking forward to seeing all the creative ways players try and break the system. If the world responds to players, and some players are mean, could they ruin the fun? Could a group of dedicated sociopaths break a server entirely? From my understanding of the system, I expect they would come up against some passive resistance – like trying to pop a half filled balloon, exerting pressure in one place just inflates another.
While no system is perfect, the nature of the emergent narrative proposed for EQN seems a much better fit for the possibilities presented by a massively-multiplayer persistent world. It’s design that feels like it’s maximizing opportunity, rather than fighting against it.
I wanted to spend some time this week talking about all the delicious teases in the video as well; all the cheeky throwaways, easy to miss in a 30 minute presentation, that nevertheless open the crack we have to peek through just a little wider. Unfortunately I’ve found myself lost in a Storybricks discussion again, so we’ll have to save them for another time.
As I moonwalk offstage, I would like to leave you with a hope for the future in EQN. Wouldn’t it be great if what we achieved was not solely a product of a prescribed narrative, but an achievement born out of our collective will? Rather than being sold the line we are all tall, I’d rather stand on the shoulders of giants.
I mean that. Giants as mounts would be bananas.
LockSixTime