Proposal: A shift towards dynamic content

One of the problems with any game following the standard model of MMO game development is that content tends to be introduced and then never removed. The story becomes part of the lore of the world and so it becomes a permanent fixture. Three years or more later, Salamanca is still under siege. Nothing we do will ever change that.

The Reichsman is returning. Once he returns, we'll spend the next ten years defeating him and putting him to rest again. A decade from now, some goons from the Rogue Isles will still be just waking him up. Again.

And so it goes.

It hasn't always been like this. Early in the game's history, a new issue meant that something changed in the backstory of the world. We got capes and a mission to earn them. Calvin Scott WON the battle to eject Sister Psyche from his wife's brain. Aurora Borealis replaced Malaise as trainer and Sister Psyche assumed her old station in her proper body. The Council went to war, usurping the place of the Fifth Column and purging them from their ranks, driving them underground.

At one time, there was a sense that the world was not completely static. Stories could come to a conclusion and that conclusion could alter the face of the game world.

Dynamic story telling was a short-lived phenomenon, sadly. It's true that we had "zone revamps" and those did change the world. It would be a stretch to consider that as "dynamic". The zones in question were hazard zones with no story of their own, created simply to fulfill a perceived need at the time for a "camping" zone. The stories added could easily have been added to a new zone instead. None of those new stories have been dynamic at all. In fact, they tend to raise a unanswered questions and add their own loose plot ends to those dangling about the rest of the city. In ten years, we'll all still be fighting to destroy the psychochronometron and Penelope Yin will still be age 14 and unaware of her true potential.

It's been said by Joe Morrisey, aka Hero 1, that the Mission Architect was originally conceived as a developer tool intended to make the creation or 'mocking up' of new missions easier and faster. It's been intimated that the developer tools that correspond to our player version of the Mission Architect are somewhat more powerful, or at least less limited.

The point being that the Architect is not just a player tool, it's also a developer tool.

The biggest arguments against dynamic storytelling have always been the big two:

1) Players hate change.

2) Resources are too expensive to justify discarding content after an arbitrary period of time.

Number one is certainly true. The number of people who still complain about never getting to play the Calvin Scott task force is a testament to how much players want to have all content at their disposal. I don't have any good answer to that except the old adage that "If you want to make an omelet, you have to break some eggs."

If we agree that dynamic story-telling is a good thing, that stories should have a beginning, a middle, and an END, then we are perforce accepting the premise that the content is eventually going to go away when the story is finished. It can't be helped, though it can be worked around if a mechanism exists for returning to old content via a flashback mechanism such as Ouroboros.

Number two appears to no longer be true. The whole point of the Architect is that basic content (meaning content that doesn't require special programming) is now INEXPENSIVE to produce in comparison the methods of the past. If a story is hooked up to an existing NPC in the game world, then the only cost is the time to write the story and bug-test it. This time is not free or neccesarily cheap, as anyone who has created an Architect mission can attest. It IS much cheaper than it used to be, and I don't think I'm going out on a limb by imagining that the process of adding it to the world is a simple one as long as no new contact NPC's are required.

It's easy for me to make my armchair designer pronouncements. However, it seems to me that it is also easy to test the truth of the matter.

My proposal is that the devs allocate someone to write and implement a new story arc using only the Mission Architect (dev version, of course) and hook that into the game world. Every two weeks a new chapter of the story would replace the current chapter, until it reached its conclusion and the story went away, to be replaced by another story.

Before anyone objects too strenuously, I'll point out that there are currently two task forces in the game and two more coming in I-15 that all have their roots in one of the few game-changing stories ever implemented in City of Heroes. Likewise, there are two signature heroes who would not be married today if not for a different game-changing story. In fact, any number of missions and task forces would at least look very different simply from having the Aurora Borealis model in place of the Shalice Tilman model. Not to mention, that the stories of the Top Cow comics would be impacted in ways both minor and major, depending on which story you look at.

I think it would be worthwhile to try an experiment on a small scale and then judge how the players react to something that lets them participate in the lore of the game and perhaps even influence it, even if the price is that the participation is on a limited-time basis until the story concludes. Once "Going Rogue" is pushed live, some of those designers may have a bit of unallocated time, and the curiosity, to devote to such an experiment.

Well, while I can't really argue that it'd be an interesting thing for the game, the greatest part about my experience here is that each character goes through the history of the city, with themselves as the main character.

To have that taken away, or even chunks of history removed and permanently altered by other players, would be ... well, sad, I guess.

I would like to have a zone where such things were the norm, but I just don't know about having the *whole* of the world's stories up for grabs in any way.

I'd love for some of the better written MA arcs to be incorporated into game lore, however, that would be awesome.

The biggest issue with dynamic content is that almost by default, it requires content to go away. As someone who joined mid-2005, I never had the opportunity to do Calvin Scott's TF. Imagine if that happened with other TFs and contacts on a routine basis... You'd eventually end up with a huge pile of content that developers worked on that was no longer in the game. Imagine the following conversation:

New player: So what is fun to do in game?
Old player: Well, TF X was fun, but it was removed last month.
New player: ...
Old player: You can read the story on paragonwiki and then play the sequel, though.

@SpaceNut - My 50s, AE arcs and current projects at ParagonWiki

Normally, I'd disagree *intensely* with this, but if Ouroboros were reworked to be available just a little lower and allowed us to do old task forces, it'd work out and everyone (that isn't impossible to please to begin with) would be happy.

I've got to agree as far as seeing dynamic content - and agree with JadKni. We have ouroboros. By *design* they're meant for "time travel." Old content can go there.

I'd say two weeks would be too short - this coming from someone who loved how the Green Mile was released. I wouldn't mind some things going away, or at least being modified, even with understanding that we "play through time" (for instance, not knowing the truth about the Rikti - though that's revealed a few times, now.) But having stories cycle through every issue or two, sure.

See my Guides and Tutorials

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Number one is certainly true. The number of people who still complain about never getting to play the Calvin Scott task force is a testament to how much players want to have all content at their disposal. I don't have any good answer to that except the old adage that "If you want to make an omelet, you have to break some eggs."

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See, the problem I have with this adage is that people always use it when they're making an omelette for themselves, yet they are looking to break MY eggs. As a guy, I'm not too fond of that, specifically since I don't really like omelette to begin with.

Point being, people like their game world as it is, like the old stories and running through them, like having, as you put it, all the content available to them. I've seen plenty of suggestions like this, and always there are a good number of people who simply don't want their content going away. Simply painting it as a necessary evil is NOT good enough, especially since there are other ways. Specifically...

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If we agree that dynamic story-telling is a good thing, that stories should have a beginning, a middle, and an END, then we are perforce accepting the premise that the content is eventually going to go away when the story is finished. It can't be helped, though it can be worked around if a mechanism exists for returning to old content via a flashback mechanism such as Ouroboros.

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You can have dynamic content without it being time-dynamic. The story in a movie or a book may change through in-story time, but the previous scenes and the previous pages don't cease to exist after you have read them in real time. Fictional stories in any medium are governed not by real time, but by whatever time the medium runs on.

In City of Heroes, that "time" is levels. By level 20, you've defeated Dr. Vahzilok and you no longer meet any of his minions. Yes, you can go back and see them still in the streets, but there are never any stories about them. By level 35, you've learned that the Nemesis Army really is led by the Prussian Prince of Automatons, something you didn't know before. By level 40, you've discovered the existence of the Malta Group. Yes, you can technically go to Peregrine Island at level 1 and see them hanging around, but you can just leaf forward a couple of hundred pages and read what's there just the same. By level 50, you now know the full story of Praetorian Earth, who it is ruled by, what it is like and so on and so forth.

In fact, somewhere between level 40 and level 45, you discover Clockwork Earth, and your first reaction upon going there is to be amazed at the sight of Clockwork, something you haven't seen in 20 levels. In-game this is described as some derivative of "a really long time," but the fact remains that levels are used as time, not the actual time spent gaining them, itself.

Yes, you can break continuity and go forward or backward in the story, but on your own, by design, you are locked into a step in the story progression that is appropriate to the point in "time" you are currently in, ignoring what you can see of what has happened before and what you know will happen afterwards. Each character is his own story, locked in a specific moment in his own personal instance of the world. Even in this big world where heroes outnumber normal people, that still ensures our stories are our own, about us, following us. I would really not be interested in being a grunt in someone else's story. That's the primary reason I do so few Architect arcs.

You can have continuity without removing content, just as long as you honour the chronology of the levelling curve, provided you can accept the world revolving around you.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

To get past the "Players hate change" problem (or more correctly "Players hate to lose content"), Ouroboros would need to be re-worked a bit in the long term so that "finished" stories could be revisited via flashback.

I should clarify something - I'm not proposing that all of the content of the game become dynamic. I don't think that's either feasible or desirable. SOME of the game should ultimately become dynamic, though. How much, would really depend on just how "expensive" it would be to create and publish the episodic stories on a regular basis.

The suggestion on the table is simply try the concept with a single "Architect slot", if you will, and see how the concept is received. While I've kept the idea simply to keep it attractive, there are enhancements that could be added if it flies. (For instance, using the branching dialog to let players "vote" on the direction of the next chapter.)

Part of what makes the core game good is something that was brought up near the top of the thread, but it's something that proves my point, I think: The core story of City of Heroes is the story of your character becoming a hero. That is, there aren't 150,000 people defeating Doctor Vahzilok. There's just one - your character. S/he is the hero in his/her own storyline. Azuria doesn't lose thousands of items from the MAGI vault. She only loses one or two and your hero is the one that recovers them.

In short, the core story is your story, but it is also an episodic story. At entry levels you are introduced to the villains. You read the diary of the Clockwork King and discover that he finds you interesting and threatening. You learn the shadowy threat of the Vahzilok. As you level up, you encounter the organization and learn the goals of the followers of Doctor Vahzilok and you save the city from his activities and from Patient Zero, while discovering that in his mind, at least, he is more grey morally than black. You also investigate the Clockwork King, and you learn the truth about his "robots". Finally, you encounter Doctor Vahzilok himself, and put him behind bars. You also run the Synapse task force, fight through the entire Clockwork Court and finally neutralize the King.

At that point, you no longer encounter either of those factions in any of the core missions of the game.

Those stories, static as they are, have a beginning, a middle, and an end as you level up through the game.

Outside of those core missions, the game becomes frozen in time. What I would like to see (and I believe that others would as well) is a certain amount of content that is NOT frozen in time but that exists briefly and then resolves. The city is aging but the world it resides in is not aging along with it except haphazardly.

The beautiful thing about the Calvin Scott task force is that it is resolved and gone. It told a story, concluded the story, and changed the world as a result. An episodic story that resolves and ends doesn't have to be earth-shattering. It just has to add to the lore of the city and expand on it so that the lore can grow and develop. Instead of the story expanding in dribs and drabs of tightly focused content that then becomes a permanent part of the landscape, the story of Paragon City would become organic and would be in a constant state of expansion.

That's where I see this heading over the long term. For now, though, the suggestion is just to try it on a very small scale to determine how feasible it really is and how players would really feel about it. The rest of the game's content would stay exactly as it is unless some devs decided there was a benefit to advancing one of those static stories in this manner.

A good amount of story arcs may not be appropriate to be "thrown away." For example on the hero side, there are story arcs to introduce players to Circle of Thorns. At low levels, you can know what they are doing. Then at high levels, you will know where they come from. So, the intention of these story arcs is just to tell you what Circle of Thorns are. If you make them dynamic, that means you're not going to tell people what are Circle of Thorns anymore.

But I understand why you want dynamic content. Let's say I did the story arcs about Circle of Thorns. If I make a new toon, I probably want new things about Circle of Thorns instead of going through the same story arcs telling me the same thing all over again. So, I want dynamic content for replayability. But I'm pretty sure that there are people who want to go through the stories that I played.

Under the current system, you can shove "outdated" story arcs into Ouroboros. In the long term, it is gonna be messy. Let's say CoH story arcs were dynamic from the beginning, Ouroboros would have 5 years of story arcs. I would love dynamic content, but probably need some new thinking and new technology for a better execution of the idea.

Actually, for me personally, it's not about replayability at all. It's about developing the lore and participating in building the history of the game world. People who are interested in replayability are the sorts of people who would be against episodic content, really.

Also, just to reiterate, I'm not suggesting that the entire game become dynamic. Just that, going forward, there should be some dynamic content alongside the static content.

Case in point: This new Reichsman task force. Sure, it's going to be interesting for a little while, and after that it'll go on farm status. We've got five missions or so on each side dealing with it.

Suppose, instead, that for the six or eight weeks leading up to it, there was a series of episodes that built up the story of the Fifth Column discovering the whereabouts of the Reichsman, explained why some faction of them would decide to release him, explained what Requiem is doing besides running and hiding, and that generally built up to a climax, with the new task force BEING that climax.

With the Architect in place, that kind of content is feasible. The biggest problem with the Reichsman task force is that, from a lore standpoint, it's full of question marks and outright contradictions. A series of episodes leading up to the launch of the task force would offer an opportunity to explain all of those question marks and build up the backstory at the same time.

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People who are interested in replayability are the sorts of people who would be against episodic content, really.


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hm...replayability just means that I won't get bored when I make a new character. Every time I make a new villain, I say to myself, it's Kalinda again. Dynamic content is actually a good solution, and I would love to have that, not against it, so the question is how.

The episodes that you talked about suffer the same problem as what I said in my previous post. What if a person misses an episode? If the player cannot play previous episodes, then it would be a broken story for him/her. Do you put all the previous episodes into Ouroboros?

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Do you put all the previous episodes into Ouroboros?

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That's what I would do, but I wouldn't put it past the devs to come up with a more interesting solution.