Research (WOW) - Part 2
STORY LINES
For this week’s blog, I want to share some observations of story lines within World of Warcraft (WOW) and the lessons I’ve learned that may be applicable to similar tabletop games. I should mention that I’m good at ideas by bad at writing, or at least I don’t have the knack for it likes others do. Most of the writing of Game X will be contracted work from others far better than myself. But given that I will be involved in forming the constructs of many story lines and the overall connectivity of events across the world, I feel it’s necessary to study these nuances.
In general, I do much better absorbing information through websites and movies over books. Many people are the other way around. When it comes to tabletop game story lines, I believe an ideal solution for both types of people lies in creating two layers of content. First, the content you have to know to move forward and second, the additional background/flavor text that adds to the game, but at the same time can be played without reading. For Game X, I plan on having a separate story book that will have art and text and can be referenced throughout the game for quick reading. With that in mind, let’s get into my WOW observations related to story lines.
OBSERVATIONS
I think WOW does a good job of creating interesting and interconnected story lines and since the game has been around for such a long time, it’s no surprise there are a lot of stories. Since there are so many stories, I’ve leveled up past most of them and, as a result, skipped ahead. Orgrimmar (for those familiar with the game) is one of those that I probably should have gone deeper into and I may go back to at some point, but I was leveling up way too slowly there and opted to skip much of that land.
More than once, I’ve gotten myself a little mixed up in which story line I’m following. This most often occurs when a story line has me leave a given region I’ve been in for some time to go back to another where a different story line exists. I can keep story lines separate in my mind much easier when the worlds are also kept separate. When stories cross and overlap geographic regions and combine with the long list of quests and thus stories, I think the probability for getting confused is high. One technique used in WOW later in the game that helped keep a story whole, was something I noticed when I hit level 110: the story line quests present “Steps”. When taking on a particular new quest and/or story line, at the top of the quest line a special indicator appears and will say ‘Step 1 - do this’. Once step 1 is done, it will show ‘Step 2 - do that’. In general, you were also kept/stuck in a particular area until you completed all the steps. If you left without completing the steps, you had to start over again. I can see good and bad to this approach from a game play perspective, but it did a good job of holding the story together.
The use of Chapters also helped, these were displayed as ‘##’ in the world map of a given area. If you were in Highmountain region, it might show you’re in chapter 3/11. This didn’t tell you too much more than that, but it gave you an idea of how far along you had progressed with that region’s story line. While the story lines are interesting and absolutely necessary for many players, I think it’s also important to recognize some people simply won’t care, or at least, may not care about all the stories. Some of the stories I encountered in WOW were dumb (we’re all entitled to our opinions, right?). Other stories were pretty cool, even for someone who struggles to get into that sort of thing.
LEARNINGS
The biggest lesson learned is that the more stories/sub-stories you have, the more risk you have in losing a player’s interest. Nothing kills a story faster than confusing your reader as to what story they are reading. Given this, it’s incredibly important to be clear about:
details on the different story lines
ensure players know how their current quests align to those story lines
In Game X, this could be provided by giving a reference sheet of stories listed out and allow players to check off the ones they have encountered. Perhaps each quest card will include a notation to the story line as well. Some level of categorization is helpful to separate out small side stories, regional stories and global stories. Also, I think it’s best to limit how many overall, parallel story lines exist in the game at any given time. This could be difficult in a tabletop game, but it’s possible to have unlocked content just as WOW holds back material until other tasks have been completed. Each expansion could possibly introduce a few new stories so the use of expansions or separate games could help a lot to limit the confusion. Caution should be made to make sure stories are neither too overlapped, nor too disjointed and thus feel entirely unrelated.
I am a firm believer that the most important selling point to a tabletop game is the artwork, but it’s not what is most important when it comes to what excites players to get the game out again and again to play another round. The story, the excitement of discovery, the unknown of how it all ends, these are the things that keep people playing and make for a truly memorable game.