Okay, so the title of this blog post sounds like some sort of gaming & simulations paper title, completely with catchy abbreviation (PAQE! - pronounced "page!")
The only one thing that interests me with the announced DC Online is that one of the designers mentioned in an interview that NPCs would be proactive and actually approach players regarding quests. It'll be interesting to see whether the promise makes it into existence and what player reactions ("ooh, interactive, like a story" "meh, take it or leave it, no difference either way" or "aaargh, get that stupid popup box outta my face") would be.
It's something a lot of MMOs fail to do. Perhaps it's an engine limitation. Or by deliberate 'lazy-man's-way-out' design. Imagine a griefer player toying with an NPC's pathfinding by running around in circles or past obstacles while the poor NPC was just trying to ask the PC for help regarding his looted-and-pillaged farm and his denuded chickens. What if there were 15 PCs in the area like in a crowded town, how would the NPC decide which PC to ask? Maybe it's immersion-breaking or engine-chugging to have a million NPCs move towards a million PCs across various server shards (minus the few that have already done the quest.)
Maybe the mindset of the average MMO player has already been trained NOT to deal with long conversation tree choices, because they just want the shiny at the end of it all, so that all approaches towards something more story-based interaction are doomed to fail. Or maybe not.
Enough people played AoC and were okay with Tortage (though some hated it bitterly.) Some really loved the single-player RPG experience inherent in that area. Even though the conversation trees were quite limited and some idiotic designer told the writers that all roads (rude, polite, class-based or otherwise) had to lead to the same shiny at the end, taking away all forms of strategic choice and roleplaying consequences.
I suppose we'll have to see what happens with Star Wars: The Old Republic and see what Bioware (the masters of stories through conversation) can do to change MMO paradigms.
Yeah, maybe we'll end up with walkthroughs, or UI helpers to show us exactly what in-game effect a particular conversation tree does. Nothing stops the game designers from making it a toggled option either.
But I got to thinking about this because I have been playing through the first 3 minutes of Planescape: Torment and the first two chapters of a modified Baldur's Gate 1.
In Torment, Morte the levitating skull drags you up from your cozy bed in the morgue and basically forces a tutorial onto you via conversation, while starting off the story. Paraphrasing, it goes "gee boss, you gotta wake up, I know you're feeling woozy, can you walk?" UI Help Text: Left-click anywhere to walk.
"Whoa, there's a whole bunch of tattoos on your back" => conversation tree to ask him to tell you about the essay tattooed on yourself, that gives you the main goal to focus on...get out and find some berk named ____.
"Guess that's where you got to go. Find that guy. First, we gotta get out of here. One of those corpses has a key. You gotta beat its decayed brains out to get it." Begin combat tutorial via help text. And if you demand the skull help you out in a conversation tree, you get UI advice on how to click on the skull and order him to attack too.
So it's basic, but besides Guild Wars, I don't think any other MMO incorporates story/tutorial and NPC interaction/movement that well. Even in Guild Wars, the NPCs are static until clicked on. Then they run a script that moves them about for that period. City of Heroes/Villains has the whole overarcing ministory, which is great. But we still have the equivalent of static NPCs with an exclamation mark over their heads.
Not saying that every NPC has to intercept the player. That would be just as boring and repetitious (not to mention ANNOYING) as the alternative. But NPCs approaching dynamically (and not just wandering into aggro range) truly help the illusion of a living world / existing story.
Take Baldur's Gate 1. Since I installed the Tutu version, I took liberal advantage to add in some more mods. Most were just gameplay fixes and tweaks to make things more to one's preference, but the major one I added was known as NPC1Banter.
As the website stated, the reason why most people were so enthralled with Baldur's Gate 2 was the way your party NPCs had their own stories, likes & dislikes, and they weren't shy about expressing their opinions to you, the player, or to their fellow NPCs. Sporadically, the NPCs would banter with you, tease their party mates, and so on. (Plus, the whole romance options, stilted as they were.)
So a bunch of fans came together and put together similar banter scripts for Baldur's Gate 1. These are pretty rabid fans, and they've had a good eight years to work on the mods, so I honestly can't tell where vanilla BG1 ended and the banter mods begin.
All I know is that I have been having a blast with NPC chatter even though I've barely started the game. Imoen has been at it. I've had one or two private convos with Khalid and Jaheira. I picked up a fairly boring bard because Imoen expressed a romantic interest in him until I bumped into Minsc and decided to throw the guy out for the miniature giant space hamster (smelly bald owner comes attached, alas.)
For story immersion, this just can't be simulated by a PUG in an MMO. You get completely taken out into the metagame because you're worried about your game performance and role in front of other -real- people. People's conversations are mostly metagame-related.
And even if you happened to luckily fall into a convention of superhero roleplayers on Virtue, all you'll get is some in-character banter of no story significance because the focus is on "eat energy blast, evil crime-boss!" Not every adlibbing roleplayer knows how to dribble out bits of character development and personal story revelation like prewritten NPC dialogue can.
But let's say you hate conversation trees. You hate reading text. So proactive bantering NPCs in one's party gets you nowhere. (By the way, small kudos to Guild Wars for including at least a few sentences of generic exclamations now and then from the henchies and heroes.)
Dynamic events that happen in front of the PC force the player to react. We are totally missing this from MMO games.
Granted, City of Heroes tries. The first few times you see a thug snatching away a little grandma's purse, you gallantly gallop up and save the crocodileskin for her. Eventually you realize that they are going to be standing there, locked in the tug-of-war forever if you did absolutely nothing, and that there's forty two instances of this pair (clothing and hair slightly altered) on every street corner and that they are all grey 2 u.
Bye bye interaction.
The zone events are something else that almost get it right, but not quite. On paper, it sounds good. Gasp, giant monster attacks such-and-such zone, heroes must race to stop it! Fire engulps buildings in Steel Canyon, firefighters wanted!
In practice there's problems with rarity, frequency, locations, player awareness and motivation.
Stuff that is too rare makes all but the most hardcore give up looking. Cue Nessie and the Arachnos flyer. Stuff is all too common becomes nothing special to the jaded vet (Yeah, yeah, we know there's three Luscas in IP.)
Player awareness has been thankfully addressed with the zone announcements in chat. It doesn't quite have the same immediate and interactive impact as say, the sky darkening and changing color and omg, you are THERE as it is happening. It's an effort to have to switch zones, and you might miss it by the time you get there, so you won't even try unless you really want the shiny rewards from the event right nao.
That's player motivation for you. Two years ago, Lusca battles were a common occurrence and it was pretty fun. Now everyone and their 88 alts have the badge, and if a newbie wants to fight Lusca, he better be a well-socially networked person and perhaps do some begging on a global chat too.
Rikti and zombie invasions almost get it right. Everyone can participate. It's right there in your face. Dynamic things are happening that you've got to react to (choose to leave, or just what the hell, I'm here, let's fight). They're just slightly immersion breaking in that the spawns happily clump up where players are most clumped, so you end up with this laggerific clusterfuck in one teensy (but fortunately well known) place on a map, and practically nothing everywhere else.
And there's no lasting consequences, which slowly but surely takes away some of the impact every time the events cycle.
(Of course, if it happened too repetitively WITH lasting consequences, you're going to end up with complaints of forced behavior and/or botting-macro attempts to get out of the boredom cycle.)
In Baldur's Gate 1, the biggest example of dynamic NPC behavior so far are me walking into a building, having an NPC approach, and them turning out to be a bounty hunter that promptly attacks me. Life or death, I have to react or else. Granted, I have a pause key and save game reloads that I wouldn't have in an MMO.
I'm not sure the save game reloads are that important. I'm not really trying one way, and reloading to see the other path. It's mostly used only if the bounty hunter gets a lucky critical in and I die horrifically (so I'm level 1, D&D hitpoints SUCK at level 1! Unlucky coincidence of the ruleset!)
The pause key lets me have some time to direct my entire party. Mostly to attack, again because of limitations of the Baldur's Gate engine. I can't exactly make peace with the assassin. I might be able to run. It might chase or get stuck in the zone. Easier to kill it and justify it as self-defence.
Then there's the NPCs that will actually walk up to you and go, "oh, I recognize so-and-so in your party, you must be the ones we have been expecting, this is our town's problem, can you help us.." And initiate a conversation tree.
This is what many (if not all) MMOs lack. So far. Not every quest should be triggered by having the player click on a clearly metagame exclaimation mark a la Warcraft 3.
I wonder how EQII does it. Apparently it is still the king of elaborate quests. I wonder if every quest in WoW begins with a "!"
FFXI doesn't mark its NPCs at all, which has the good point of immersion and discovery, and the bad points of having to run up and click through a dozen menus to initiate endless one-way conversations with all of them (more-clicking) just to get a notation in your quest journal.
Mohammed doesn't have to go to the mountain all the time! Sometimes the mountain should fall on Mohammed! Or form a convenient staircase or avalanche or beanstalk in front of Mohammed so he has to choose to walk around it to continue on his way (with some visible played-out consequences of his choosing-not-to-act) or decide to climb it and see where the rabbit hole goes.
The Mythic RPG knows this. For the soloist player, there must be a certain element of chance. Not completely random chance. Not an absolutely arbitary event. There can be story progression. But the player cannot begin the interaction all the time, sometimes things have to happen to the PC for them to react to.
Without chance, there is just predictability.
Without the opportunity to react in meaningful ways, there is just chores to be done.
(Corollaries: Without conflict, there is no story.
Without choice, there is no need for a player.
Without a ruleset and goals to achieve, there is no game.)
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