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

[VenKitsune]

For a large company its not that much work hell when I worked on maps or did before it got destoryed on warcraft 3 I wrote it just fine your excuse lazy work because thats what it is this is a company that has 100s of people working on the game its not just 20 people sitting there...

Beside you wouldnt have to show it it could be a hidden goal until the final expansion then it can split end and only effect THE ENDING one ending with the heros lovely doovy hippes and one were we kill them all and restore the worlds togeather it could literaly just have 1 extra line based on the choice that shows up in the characters Inn room with ascian and zodiark talking to them something hell I could do by myself in 4 hours if I was on pc and had mod tools lol so no it wouldn't be that much work for a company with over 100 PEOPLE WORKING


Also you wouldn't have to create two diffrent stages you would have your basic story which is already built in for the good toe hippie story and all you would have to do is create a 2nd scene with character deaths on one side and maybe 2 communcation scenes that would take under 42 hours with their tools lol

Yes when I did maps I didn't have all the fancy tools and advance animation but I still took the basic store my maps had and wrote out endings and show ups for every person who made a request for a choice and I was one person and 2 choices isn't that much work it doesn't even double the amount of work ... everytime I see that I think you haven't wrote out rp plans or even worked on a basic project. For the most part you don't have to change a single thing outside diffrent animation and object/ characters that show up and if you want only if you want you can make npcs say cruel lines if the person is going the darker path but thats just a basic choice. for the most part it would take 3 hours to write out and place the character to pop up for 5 mins to say one line like "good work we will soon cause the rejoining" then fade away like your a secret spy or something lol

LOL making maps for Warcraft 3 is a completely different ball game to writing a story.

It doesn't matter whether there is 20 people or 20,000,000 people on the dev team. At any one time, the story is being written by ONE person, ONE. ONE SINGLE PERSON. If that ONE person would need to spend 80 hours a week writing instead of 40 because 2 expansions prior you clicked a different button, or made an "important" choice, that's huge. It'd literally double the cost for SE and the time between patches because as others have said, you'd basically need to write an entirely new story for each real change or decision.
Yes there are multiple writers working on a patch at any given time, but each one does something different. I imagine for example, not long after 5.2 comes out YoshiP is going to give a writing asignment to one of his lead writers, giving them 6 months to write the story for 5.4, and then he'd give another writer 3 months to finish writing all of the side quests for 5.3, and another writer given 16 months to start and finish the next expansions story, leaving blanks to make room for amendments that may happen in the currently developing 5.x story.
SE can't just make a story complex by throwing more writers at it, nobody can, why do you think some of the best literature ever was written by a single person, not a team?

The only time we may see meaningful decisions to be made in a game like this, would be within the last year of the games life, during the last expansion and even then that may not be one depending on how popular the game is at the time.

[Big_Bap]

Look, another delusional lalafell.

[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.'

[Kleeya]

Seeing how tons of people dont read a single thing and skip all dialogs and cutscenes, "choices" as they are now seems like the best way to handle them. I am worrying enough that the npc with the most logical argument i did choose in the valentione event will not come on top on my datacenter because "i didn't read anything, i did choose the red color i wanted", it would be nice to keep that out of very important things like the MSQ. Choices having no any effects at all is adapted to the way most people are playing the game imo.

[KalinOrthos]

OP, you're lacking a fundamental misunderstanding of how a good story is told. You seem to think that these types of stories have exact, preplanned beats they need to hit. And most stories do. But the best ones follow those beats as a direct consequence of actions taken. Look at how Game of Thrones ended: D&D clearly looked at the things that needed to happen and then just forced it to happen. Characters developed over nearly a decade acted completely against what they had been in the past, travel time made no sense, and overall it just became an absolute mess.

One of the big reasons Shadowbringer's story is so lauded is because much of our actions are a result of organic storytelling; decisions don't happen because they need to happen, they happen because that's what our character would do.

[LolitaBansheeMeru]

OP, you're lacking a fundamental misunderstanding of how a good story is told. You seem to think that these types of stories have exact, preplanned beats they need to hit. And most stories do. But the best ones follow those beats as a direct consequence of actions taken. Look at how Game of Thrones ended: D&D clearly looked at the things that needed to happen and then just forced it to happen. Characters developed over nearly a decade acted completely against what they had been in the past, travel time made no sense, and overall it just became an absolute mess.

One of the big reasons Shadowbringer's story is so lauded is because much of our actions are a result of organic storytelling; decisions don't happen because they need to happen, they happen because that's what our character would do.

Have you played white knight chronicals because thats basicly the story you sit there like your not even there basicly like a walking robot .... Also to the other thing on its how "our characters would act" that right there is a proplem noone knows how OUR characters would act or react outside of us and to the note if people don't read thats their own fault lol and a choice option would force them to read the lines.

Yes a story can have a single path and be good but not when it is your CHARACTER that is walking through it. It's one thing when final fantasy 7 or breath of fire or legend of dragoon forces one path because you aren't playing your character through it your playing a named character with a background premade and predesigned by the company. We design our character we choice his /her reasons for whatever. Its not like we are playing as Darts or Ryu that is premade to be angry/happy etc over story parts.

And since you so kindly used DnD there is a reason why DnD was good always because it did have those choices at every turn and whatever choice you made effected your alignment be it help the old lady ,kill the old lady,mind your own business etc. And game of thrones isn't good at all

[Knahli]

This is simply unfeasible, even on a micro-level I imagine this would require an immense amount of extra resources diverted here, there and everywhere... so I don't think so, much as I love my RPGs.


That being said, I would be all for more dialogue options in general or, at the very least, for all of them to actually have an effect on the response you get. There are some options out there, and granted I am thinking back as far as Heavensward here as I can't think of any other more recent examples right now, that simply give you the exact same result no matter which option you choose and that is just 100% pointless, phoney content.