Massively Multiplayer Online Storytelling
I think I may end up with a whole ‘nother tag for my Uru Live post-mortem thoughts at this rate…
Before I get going, I want to stress that I’m not doing this to be critical of Cyan’s work just because it was ultimately unsuccessful. There are a myriad of ways to make fun of MOUL, and I hope to never fall victim to doing so. Rather, I want to learn from this failure. Rand said that the biggest regret he had about Live’s closure in 2004 was that they didn’t get the chance to learn from it. Six years of work went into something that ran for 3 months in a somewhat limited beta testing environment. The title never launched, and the content and story they were planning to roll out in the coming months never got released online. It just didn’t run long enough to learn anything terribly insightful beyond “lag is a serious problem” (and incidentally, they did make great strides in that regard during the past year). With over a year’s worth of updates, content, and story roll-out under its belt this time around, I feel that there are definitely some lessons that can be learned from Uru Live’s closure this time around that go beyond the technical limitations so often addressed by players. With what I hope is an emphasis on my respect for Cyan and a desire to learn from their mistakes firmly established, let’s press on.
One of the things that has always fascinated me about the concept behind Uru is the notion of an MMO driven by a compelling developer-run story on a daily basis. Sort of a perpetual D&D session, if you will. Emphasis on player actions is obviously still important, and makes up a fair amount of the content of any good role-playing session, but players are “living” in a story that is being told around them as well as through them. I think that Prologue did a much better job of this than MOUL in numerous respects, and I’d like to briefly go over a few of them.
- In Prologue, events happened “on stage”. Sharper and a group of like-minded explorers tore down a barricade blocking off the entrance to the Kahlo Pub. He later broke into one of the neighborhoods’ Private Rooms, made that neighborhood private, and later had it deleted from the Nexus system by the DRC. Phil was kidnapped by the DRC on the rope bridge in Ae’Gura. Tink was later allowed to speak with him in Kirel (which at the time was just another private Bevin-style ‘hood, hooray for ret-conning ;)) when the protests from explorers started getting out of hand. Phil later “died” in the Guild Hall, and while that specific action wasn’t on-stage, everyone in the City was watching and heard the collpase, followed by the plume of smoke rising from the Guild Hall. In MOUL, virtually everything seemed to happen off-stage: Sharper’s trips to Negilahn and later to Noloben were completely inaccessible to players, and only existed through later re-tellings by Sharper, which were not done in any sort of continually-accessible way like journal writing, but rather through one-off live events. Sharper’s killing of a Bahro was perhaps one of the most “on stage” pieces of the entire story arc, when the Bahro linked into the Watcher’s Pub with their fallen comrade. Wheely’s death was also relatively on stage, but there were no outward signs of activity during the rescue; no sounds of drilling, no smoke rising from the Tokotah building from the DRC’s efforts… nothing to really make it that much more real. (I could also find fault with re-introducing Wheely to the Cavern just a day or two before she was killed off, but that may be going a little far.)
- The DRC and other supporting cast members were in the Cavern more regularly, and for longer periods of time on average, than they were in MOUL. If news needed to be spread, it was usually done in multiple neighborhoods as well as in Ae’Gura, rather than through a single visit to a neighborhood before disappearing again. In Prologue, the DRC seemed like more realistic and believable characters; in MOUL, they seemed to be more like caricatures of themselves.
- Prologue had the full contents of Ages Beyond Myst to provide depth and relevance to the ongoing live events in the Cavern. Yeesha’s single-player Journey gave players something to do and learn without having to attend live events on a regular basis. MOUL had plenty of additional Ages, but they did little to nothing to further deepen the relevance of the live story events going on in the Cavern. This turned the entire story into a collection of live events, rather than building the live events on top of a more stable, longer-lasting, at-your-own-pace single-player experience (incidentally, I think this is the only benefit that Uru Live got from the creation of ABM).
- You can’t rely on players to fill in the game’s gaps, especially without tools capable of enabling them to do so. Players like J. D. Barnes, Echo McKenzie, the team at Subterranean Restorations, and others ran with this notion as far as they conceivably could, and groups like the Relayers stepped up admirably to fill a hole left by Cyan in the delivery of the story to the masses, but it seemed as though there was too much reliance on players to do it themselves, and not enough work done to make that truly possible. Further, entreating the players to make their own fun in a game they’re paying between $10 and $15 a month for (depending on your nationality) isn’t something that sits well with a lot of people, and I can’t really blame them for not wanting to invest more time into a game they’re already investing in financially just to enjoy the time they spend in it. Some players are more than willing to do so, and I say more power to ‘em, but not everyone should be expected (or required) to do that.
I think it’s important that an MMOS effort be able to effectively combine live events (like Wheely’s death) and fixed-in-time storytelling segments (like Yeesha’s Journey). The live events should be used primarily for providing day-to-day activity within the game on a small scale - stuff to keep players interested and generate “flavor” in the story; nothing directly related to advancing the plot - and for major, it-can-only-happen-once sort of events, like Phil’s kidnapping, his “death” in the Guild Hall, the rescue efforts to save Wheely and her subsequent death, etc. Fixed-in-time stories should be things that players can continue to complete at their own pace even after the plot events leading to the unveiling of that story have advanced beyond it (case in point: you can still release a Bahro into the Cavern by completing Yeesha’s Journey four years later in MOUL, even after the Bahro were freed from their enslavement to the Tablet).
It’s equally important, though, that these two practices not get switched around if you want to create a world with a truly impactful, cohesive story and a way to keep players interested between major in-game live events. For instance, requiring players to complete a time-sensitive challenge within a certain date range to be able to participate in the releasing of a Bahro (essentially replacing Yeesha’s when-you-have-time Journey with a sequence of live events) is a bad way of doing things, as would be enabling everyone to witness Wheely’s death first-hand regardless of when they happened to get around to completing that leg of the story (essentially tacking her death onto the end of a Journey-like series of player-triggered events as a climax). The first example distances players from the story by ensuring that only a small handful of players are actually able to complete a task that should be open for everyone to participate in, while the second example lessens the power of a watershed moment in the Cavern, solidifying the fact that the Bahro weren’t all sunshine, unicorns and lollipops into the collective consciousness of the Cavern. You just can’t kill Wheely every day of the week from now until the story ends and expect it to have any meaning. Were it an event in a single-player game, that would be an obviously acceptable action to take, but in a shared universe like Uru, once a character is dead, they can only die once, or it undermines the suspension of disbelief required by the game to make it appear to be a real place.
Interestingly, I think this means that an episodic content release schedule for online games like Uru could be a viable means of releasing material, but not by following the model used for MOUL. Episodic releases that cram considerable amounts of activity into a small span of time are fine for bringing in players and even driving up interest and participation in what are likely to be major plot points. However, outside of those periods, the game can’t simply stop, which is what Uru did. There can be a flurry of activity in those week-long episodes, but outside of them, the characters still need to make appearances, and small things still need to happen often enough to keep players there for the entire time. Further, by moving some of the story into play-at-your-own-pace arcs of single-player or small-group content, you deemphasize the need to be present at every live event during the episodes to know what the heck is going on in the game. Combining these two factors, the crush to see a character during an appearance should be lessened, resulting in better game performance, better interaction between players and characters, and create better interactive characters since they don’t just turn into walking scripts who say their piece and then leave before the crowd gets too unmanageable.
Finally, I don’t really have any specific answers or suggestions for how the events of MOUL could have been played out differently that haven’t already been mentioned by dozens of other people, so I will avoid doing so in the interests of not being repetitive (and because I don’t like back-seat game-developing… learning lessons is one thing, saying “you should have done X instead of Y here” is entirely another). However, I think that any future efforts to make a story-driven MMO need to learn from the pitfalls and promises of Uru’s development and execution, because I feel that there are real lessons there to learn from that can make future products better, more engaging, and ideally more likely to be profitable.