Mar

18

1001 Crazy Game Design Ideas: #1 In the end, I’d like a story

March 18, 2007 | 2 Comments

What fun is it to be an adventurer if there isn’t a handy bard around to record tales of your daring exploits and brushes with death for all of posterity to hear. While in many cases it is hard to find a good bard who will stick with you through the thick and thin of dungeon delving, blood filled battles, and extra-planar exploration, it seems like your trusty computer could keep some notes.

More than just a log of whom you have slain, although that would be nice too, the computer could keep track where you went, who you went with and what you did in somewhat of a story-type form, with maybe even an automatically added screenshot or two, which the player could peruse, edit, and post for others to read. Not just a posting of the damage numbers and the /ooc banter, but a real story-like approach with the player as the central character for the entirety of his/her career.

It’s a leap to expect the computer to be a very good story-teller, or that this kind of thing would be something other people would clamor to read on the first try, but I’ve yet to even see an attempt at it. At the very least, it would be a cool starting point for characters to build their own biographies out of and at best it might be incorporated into the lore of the game itself.


 

 

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2 Comments so far

  1. Ryan Shwayder on March 24, 2007 12:21 pm

    Yes. Many methods to do something along these lines have been discussed. I’d personally rather only record significant events, such as killing named mobs, completing quest lines, etc.

  2. noob on March 24, 2007 1:39 pm

    The approach you describe is probably the only practical one at this point considering the nature of most MMORPG play. Would a story about a group of players, with some infrequent member turnover, sitting in a corner of a dungeon, killing static spawns for a level or two be a compelling read? Probably not.

    Or how about a riveting tale of outdoor zone hunting of roaming monsters… Not destined for a bestseller rack either.

    What I am imagining is at some point, the game design might keep the idea of a coherent story approach to the everyday journeys of a player in mind when laying out the groundwork to the mechanics of play.

    Not a linear story where every player climbs the same series of steps, but just a playscape where everything a player would be likely to do in a play session would be an interesting addition to their legacy.

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