Can we get choices that really matter and have a effect?

[Kidria]

As fun as that'd be, this isn't your single player JRPG. Some tropes will be followed, sure, but in the end it's an MMO and the developers cannot take an MMO and split it to include every possible outcome a player could want.

[LolitaBansheeMeru]

As fun as that'd be, this isn't your single player JRPG. Some tropes will be followed, sure, but in the end it's an MMO and the developers cannot take an MMO and split it to include every possible outcome a player could want.

Again that is incorrect one of the first mmos aka Dark age of camelot pulled it off and pulled it off easily and I was in elementry when that game came out and it was able to pull it off just fine lol you don't need every possible just need the possible thats within the story in this games case you got 2 possiblitys. In a game like wow you got 4 choices

Also using Mmo as a special term to say not able to do this or that when there are over 50 cases of mmos that have pulled it just fine isn't a defense its a counter defense or is it special if its a Se mmo?

Has anyone even played dark age of camelot or even everquest both mmos both with a party system both with storys both pulled off everything Ive seen people say its not possible in a mmo to lol.. yet two of the oldest mmos did it and did it good.

[Packetdancer]

Again that is incorrect one of the first mmos aka Dark age of camelot pulled it off and pulled it off easily and I was in elementry when that game came out and it was able to pull it off just fine

I'd love to know what your definition of 'branching story' in DAoC is, honestly. Because mine is not something I associate strongly with my memories of DAoC, and so it makes me think that different people in this conversation might be using the term in different ways.

There's a difference between minor things like "which choice I make here determines which NPC faction I can ally with and do quests for", which is actually easily done (though not always popular) and "which choice I make here has massive implications for the direction of the main story quest in a story-driven MMORPG". SWTOR is an example of one where people bring up player choice... but SWTOR's also one where they eventually threw in the towel and basically dropped an expansion rebooting the storyline so they didn't have to keep carrying those choices forward.

Other games have also tried variations on it, but it tends to be 'a choice that happens once across the entire playerbase and then affects the rest of the game going forward from there'. An example might be the first year's Halloween event in the original Secret World; the Templars were the ones who ended up doing the most to aid the cats, so suddenly there were eleven billion cats all over Temple Hall, and from then on in the rest of the story, there were little nods to the cats' gratitude to the Templars. (And how protective Sonnac became of the cats by the time Tokyo rolled around...) But it wasn't like players who showed up later could choose whether or not to aid the cats—that choice was made once, and once only, and for the entire playerbase. The Matrix Online had something vaguely similar in the 'live event' system, which also eventually fell apart.

From what I gather, even World of Warcraft did something recently where players got to pick who they were siding with in a particular power struggle... and I also gather the way that was implemented was not popular. (At least with my WoW-playing friends who are now asking about "hey, so I'm looking for a new MMO, how's that Final Fantasy one you play?")

If you don't have the illusion of choice, the decision tree quickly becomes unmanageable if the game's terribly long. If you can choose one of three things at the beginning, and in one of those an NPC dies, and then you can choose two more things off of the first choice, three off of the second, two off the third... after a certain point, you're writing dozens of differences for every possible story path, and the number increases fairly rapidly the longer the story goes on, unless you slap a thing down, say "okay, you got an ending, but nothing from before matters past here", and restart the story from a blank slate of everyone at the same state.

[Bright-Flower]

Snip.

For the Warcraft thing specifically, here's how it went down.

Early in BFA, there was a horde questline to free Saurfang from prison. Sylvanas, the current warchief, wanted to assassinate him. When the quests were put onto the public test realms for WoW (WoW has those so people who look for it see upcoming story stuff before it's officially released in game), there was a backlash. Some people didn't want to betray Sylvanas, warchief of the horde, and side with Saurfang, who they saw as a traitor.

So Blizzard added in an option to side with Sylvanas.

However, this was never truly a branching narrative. Every time this plot thread continued, 'loyalist' players siding with Sylvanas were given a wink and a nod to 'go along with it' and functionally did all the exact same things the 'rebel' players did. The only difference is that at the very end of the plot, you get an extra little scene with Sylvanas where she goes off to pursue her agenda after abandoning the Horde. And in all likelihood 'loyalist' players in the next expansion wont' get anything but a token line of dialog or two to acknowledge this 'choice.'