WoW Lessons Pt. 2

"What we are is the sum of a thousand lies, what we know is hardly nothing at all..."-Rise Against, The Strength to Go On

I was thinking more about the storytelling that's being done in the World of Warcraft expansion, and I realized that there's another interesting facet to what they're doing. Basically--everyone's character is doing the same quests. On the surface, it should be very difficult for players to buy that their character is special at all, because they know that every other character is getting the exact same storyline played out for them. This may be why quests until this expansion pack were fairly bland--it's easy for you to believe that everyone has to kill x amount of wolves so Farmer Brown's cows can survive. It's more difficult to believe that the greatest villain the world has ever seen is taking a personal interest in every single adventurer that comes close to his lair.

And yet it works.

I think that's a testament to the oft-maligned imaginations of videogame players, many of whom, by the way, are adults. Somehow, we've all managed to either suspend our disbelief or construct a narrative in which our character is one of maybe a few thousand very special people, which is still pretty cool. It's a surprising phenomenon, and one I'd like to get some more information on. Maybe I'll e-mail the people over at the Daedalus Project and see if I can get them to do a survey on it.

More WoW Lessons

"She said I don't hate you boy, I just want to save you while there's still something left to save..."-Rise Against, Savior

Alright, so as you may or may not know, the expansion pack to World of Warcraft launched last Thursday. If you were wondering where I've been all week--now you know.

One of the more interesting (and enjoyable) things I've found about the new expansion is that it's much, much more story based than the last. One of the things that makes Blizzard as a company so strong is that they have some of the greatest IP (intellectual property) around. Their universes are very well-developed and full of great characters and wonderful narratives.

These have been largely absent from World of Warcraft until now. Perhaps the developers were focused on gameplay, or perhaps they just didn't know how to implement storytelling in a MMORPG, but they seem to have gotten a much better handle on it with this latest expansion (and, to be fair, with some of the final free content updates in the last expansion as well).

To be blunt, I've found that they're following some of my recently discovered keys to drawing someone into a story--they're making your character seem as if he or she is special, "chosen" somehow. Most of this is done with flavor text--the things the NPCs (non-player characters---the characters played by the game) say to you. They tell you they've heard of your exploits in Outland (the landmass you spent most of your time in during the last expansion) and have been awaiting a hero like you to help them out of a jam, or, in one case, the arch-villain of the expansion pack shows up out of nowhere and pins your character down, inspecting you to see if you're fit to serve him, then letting you go and telling his cronies that you're not ripe yet...you'll be plucked later.

It's very refreshing in an MMO, and I'm thrilled to see it for a couple of reasons: one, it means more great stories experienced by more people, which is what I'm all about, and two, maybe, just maybe, it will mean videogame companies employing more writers---and steady, paying jobs for writers are always a good thing.