just had some thoughts on narrative design and mmo requirements, since i'm playing ff14 and mostly enjoying the story: a thread (1/x)

there are two main issues in MMO narrative design AFAIK (i'm not an expert).
1 - many people are playing the same story. how do you then make the player feel like they're doing meaningful things and also justify having a ton of other people that are just like the player? (2/x)

2 - you tend to not play with the same people when you play with others, meaning that any story threads have to be carried through NPC's who can feel useless. MMOs do usually encourage playing with Guilds/Free Companies/a name for a group of people but this isn't the same (3/x)

there are a few ways to tackle these problems, but the most common appears to be 'ignore the problems and have single/multi content'. that's what FF14 does, world of warcraft AFAIK, etc. there are a few examples of people acknowledging the first one, but it's very hard ... (4/x)

Guild Wars tried to acknowledge this. the player (and all players) grew stronger through something called the 'pre-searing', and then everyone grows together as an adventurer and then as someone who is 'Chosen'. this makes logical sense to do, but (5/x)

this game also has one of the objectively funniest pieces of dialogue I've ever seen in a game, where you and your seven other random people you're playing a dungeon with are 'all Chosen'. there are millions of chosen players. All people around you are Chosen. (6/x)

To be Chosen and 'special' then is almost to be human, basically. It cuts that feeling of 'specialness' off at the knees.
That piece of dialogue reminded me the most of the cutscenes from Dynasty Warriors, and that's really not where you want your RPG to be. (7/x)

So generally you agree to do (1), and both player and dev suspend disbelief for this story. But then you get into weird situations: in FF14 you play 8-person dungeons, and then the plot directly after talks about how you beat everyone by yourself. (8/x)

You obviously didn't in the game. ... so I guess just the question of this thread is, is there a way to resolve this better than knowing ignorance? or is the way to get around them ... simply just playing something like dnd? (9/x)

theoretically, if the players create the world or storylines that's one possibility for this sort of emergent gameplay synthesis. This has been tried in various MMOs but as far as I'm aware it has never really worked ... (10/x)

... and what would it even look like? how can you bridge that gap?
... I don't have any answer. was just thinking about it, while I play the only FF I'm probably ever going to get mostly through (it has a map!). any ideas? (11/fin)