On Storytelling

One of the big points that people are giving to The Old Republic over World of Warcraft is the fact that the former has a much more involved storyline. Each class has their own epic quest, and apparently the fact that you have to actually convo all the quest-givers, even for the trivial quests, is supposed to help with the storytelling aspect as well. (My disagreement on the latter point is a matter of public record.)

But, in the end, is this really a fair comparison?




It's going to be interesting to see the way TOR's "storytelling" plays out in the long-term. The reason I say that, and the reason I ask if the comparison between the two games is fair, is that WoW used to have good storytelling. WoW used to have immersive epic quest lines. WoW even used to have class-specific quests. Granted, none of these things cleared the bar that TOR is now setting, but they were there. And they were removed.

Once upon a time, way back in vanilla, there was an Alliance quest line that culminated in your character marching through Stormwind accompanied by a retinue of soldiers to confront a powerful enemy in the castle's throne room. It was the Onyxia raid attunement chain, and it was the product of days or weeks of work to go through all the steps. That march through Stormwind remains one of my favorite in-game memories. It was a cutscene before there were cutscenes. It was glorious.

Blizzard kept the attunements in the Burning Crusade, but they were toned down. They weren't epic quests in their own right. Except for the first attunement for the key to Karazhan, which saw your character recovering the fragments from three elite dungeons and then traveling back in time to talk to Medivh himself in order to actually assemble the key. That was another moment that I loved.

You can still do the Karazhan attunement, but there's no point. And the march through Stormwind was sacrificed in the name of plot development. In its place, Blizzard introduced...nothing.

You see, Blizzard came to the conclusion that attunements and class quests were counterproductive to getting people to see the content. In fact, they've been consistently lowering the barriers to entry to seeing said content. There was the move to 10-man raids. The streamlining of the gear acquisition process. The massive nerfing of heroic dungeons. The introduction of the Raid Finder. Blizzard puts a lot of money into their endgame and they want people to see it. And who can blame them?

Bioware has put a lot of money -- a staggering amount of money, if you sit and reason it out -- into their leveling process. Eight separate class quests, each with dozens if not hundreds of instances and cutscenes. In some ways, you've bought eight games for the price of one. The "Legacy" system is a nice way to encourage people to roll alts and slog their way back through the interminable low-level content, but what does that say about the game's "end-game?" (I don't know, I haven't gotten there yet.)

Blizzard's philosophy seems to be: roll a main, get to the level cap, and then if you want to play other classes, here's a pile of ways to make the process easier. High-level funding. Heirloom items. Recruit-a-Friend. Blizzard is focused on the endgame, because that's how you make money with an MMO.

How is TOR going to handle all this? Are we ever going to see TOR heirlooms? Is it ever going to be possible for TOR to feature a Recruit-a-Friend-style incentive program? Bioware doesn't seem to want us to rush through the content. I don't really blame them, but I think they're overlooking one critical fact, which I will relate obliquely, to wit:

My WoW main has over 80 days /played. If I remember right, he had a little under five when he reached the level cap the first time. (That was at 80.)

At the end of the day, it's going to be the same way with TOR. This is the reason they say "the game begins at 50/60/70/80/85." It's because no matter how you slice it, the leveling process is a finite thing while the endgame just keeps going on. So where does it make the most sense to focus your development efforts?

I wish that Blizzard would bring back attunements. At least for current content, I mean I don't want to see a return to the days when you had to attune to Molten Core in order to attune to Ony in order to attune to whatever the hell. Sure, drop the attunement requirement once a raid is a tier behind. But I really think attunement quests add something to the game. If nothing else, they help solidify just why your character is (lorewise) in a particular raid.

I know I've been rambling. The tl;dr of the post is: Blizzard had some pretty solid storytelling. Who among us (who saw it) doesn't remember the Wrathgate, or the restoration of the Sunwell? They had the storytelling and they removed it. This suggests that the vast majority of the players aren't really all that interested in it.

TOR will persist indefinitely because it's Star Wars, and that fact alone is an indulgence for many sins. But I wonder how the "long tail" is going to fare, and whether or not all of the time and money Bioware poured into the leveling process will prove, in the end, wasted.