Project Lore

Obvious Pun It's quite sad that we are able to make this a column, but the death of MMOGs is inevitable in the industry.  Some games just never meet the company's expectations.  Others flounder after launch, and a few are supplanted by follow-ups or sequels.  As shocking as it may sound now, there will even come a time when our beloved World of Warcraft is taken offline.  Although knowing Blizzard it'll be supported, at least in maintenance mode, for a very, very long time after it loses its massive popularity. As noted in the original dust biting post, losing an MMOG is never a good thing.  As human beings we like to see "our" products succeed in the market for the simple reason that we spent money on them (HD DVD).  We supported them (Dreamcast), therefore we want them (Virtual Boy) to last forever so our investment seems sound.  The ugly side of this trait is that it causes us to tear down competing products as evidenced by the WoW vs WAR debate.  A practice that is both pointless and harmful to the industry at large.  Rather than cheer that our MMO "won", let's mourn the loss of someone else's cherished hobby. The Matrix Online (MxO) had a mix of classic MMOG issues at launch.  The title by no means broke sales records or gained a huge following.  In many opinions this is thanks to the degradation of the intellectual property before its release.  Way to go Matrix Reloaded & Revolutions.  Despite this, it kept enough subscribers aboard to stay afloat and support its continued development.  After all, it is doubtful that Sega, Monolith, and later Sony, would have kept the game alive for four plus years if it was bleeding money AIG-style. Enough melancholy, let's get to the good stuff, the single feature that kept MxO alive and well for over four years, story progression.  While I didn't get hooked by MxO due to its odd gameplay, I was line and sinkered by the IP the title was based on.  The link between the two projects forced me to keep an eye on the game's big events.  You see, MxO was given official canon status of Warner Bros.'s The Matrix universe.  What this means is that everything that happened in the game officially happened in The Matrix storyline.  I've never heard of another video game taking over as a product's main form of progression, but the idea fits perfectly into an MMO. Monolith Productions took things even further with Live Events, which were carried to Sony Online Entertainment's development as well.  In these scenarios crazy stuff could and did happen (ie Machine/Human truce broken).  The events and people partaking in them became legends.  For example, let's say that by sheer luck and skill your character managed to hold off a passageway leading to the center of Zion during an event.  Your act of bravery, if discovered and appreciated by other players, could be added to the story of the event, thus cementing yourself a place in the official story of The Matrix.  Forget about having an impact on the game world, you'd have an impact on the official game/movie/comic lore.  Forever!  How cool would that be? Check out this post by the lead game designer, Rarebit, if you are interested in finding out what The Matrix Online brought to the overall story.  Hopefully a more comprehensive update is made in the near future.  Perhaps the silver lining in the closure is that MxO will be going out with one final bang before it shuts down at the end of July. From the goodbye post: "The team will also be whipping up an end-of-the-world event. It won’t be quite the same as having over 100 developers in the game as Agents like when we ended beta, but we have 4 years of tricks up our sleeve. It’ll be a chance to revisit all the things that make MxO the memorable experience it is. And how could we pull the plug without crushing everyone’s RSI just one more time?" Now what am I going to follow for my SyFy (sorry, I mean sci-fi) fix?

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Lilyterrain's final adventures in Azeroth went out with a whimper, or perhaps a fart.  Barely hours into her career as a hunter, sans pet taming abilities, and the character was left for dead, never to be seen again.  I chalked up the loss of a subscriber to Blizzard's inability to grab Lesley with a compelling story in the early going.  Sure there were quests for her to tackle, but few of them were more than a collection or kill quest, let alone interesting enough to grasp her brain stem and demand its undivided attention. Due to the very nature of the early levels, how fast you get out of them, it makes sense that Blizzard didn't spend an obscene amount of time creating memorable stories.  Why invest money into something that players will complete in a few hours?  To leave a good impression on new characters of course!  Leave it to a commentator to prove myself, and various other readers, wrong, at least partially.  {swc}Ebek.Frostblade (known in the future as Ebek) was the first to point out that there is a sense of cohesion in the opening territories of the game. Paraphrasing from the comment:

• Humans:  Initially the race is worried about a Kobold threat, only to realize that VanCleef and the Defias Brotherhood, a disenfranchised group of blue-collar workers that rebuilt Stormwind, are far more troublesome.  Arguably the earliest, least subtle and best starting chain in the game.  WoW.com & WoWWiki have fantastic wrap-ups of the whole ordeal, one that stretched into vanilla WoW's endgame.
• Dwarves:  Players will continue the civil war with the Dark Iron clan while battling pockets of Trolls in their lands.
• Gnomes:  No longer secretly battling the Troggs that managed to take over Gnomeregan.  Even though the race is playable there is not much known about Gnomish culture outside their affinity for invention.  Chalk it up to the destruction of their capital city, which caused the pint-sized race to be scattered across the lands.  Starting alongside the Dwarves, you'll likely encounter a mess of trolls and dark iron mobs.
• Night Elves:  Young Night Elves battle with demons attempting to taint nature, an aspect the Night Elves hold dear.  Sound familiar?
• Draenei:  The spacegoats attempt to make contact with the rest of the Alliance while they recover their own people from the crash and clean-up the ecosystem that their ship, Exodar, tainted with foreign energies.  The story actually makes the MMO staple kill and gather quests quite logical.
• Orcs:  Orcs continue to fight for survival in Azeroth, which to many of the clans means defeating the Shadow Council that have tainted and controlled the noble creatures.
• Trolls:  The most diverse, and least played, race remains close to the Orcs who rescued them.  Thus, you pretty much go through the same things as the green skins.
• Tauren:  The Horde's nature lovers will tackle the wild bristlebacks before moving on to two factions they believe are defiling the world, the Venture Company and Bael'Dun.  Tauren players enjoy the most impressive early experiences for the Horde thanks to quest pacing, introduction to reoccurring factions and the art design of the opening lands.
• Undead:  In a twisted variation of the Draenei's starting quest (although this obviously came first), the Undead are also trying to find their place in the world.  Severely isolated from their un-trusting allies of the Horde, the Undead are left alone to fight pockets of the Alliance sooner than any other race.  As if that weren't bad enough, members of The Forsaken remain in constant struggle against their former master, the Lich King, and his Scourge.
• Blood Elves:  Although destroyed by Arthas during his initial campaign across Azeroth, the area around Silvermoon City is strikingly gorgeous.  The rapid rebuilding of the once decimated land is thanks to the race's heavy use of magic.   However, players will quickly come across numerous abominations of the magical kind in the fabled woods.

Ebek does have a point.  There is a semblance of a story in each of these zones, but most of them are entirely unremarkable and that is the issue.  Generally speaking, the content is little more than fleeting connections to land that surrounds your "birth."  Aside from the human struggles with Van Cleef, a questline that eventually leads you to Onyxia, not a single opening story will follow you past level 10.  The homogeneous experiences also offer little incentive to start alts outside of class boredom or to fill a role in a guild. Why is it that the humans alone are guided into such an awesome questline?  The rest of us struggle with monotonous grinding, while they are off saving diplomats and putting down rebellion.  Heck, for the most part the connections between the early racial quests are far to subtle to reconize while you are doing them!  We are hit with so much information up front, especially new players, that subtlety isn't the best route. The next time Blizzard adds a playable race (Pandaren please) I want to see two changes.  Mostly, I want the player to be handed a lengthy quest chain that will follow him throughout the game till the late levels.  Rather than forcing players to bounce all over creation, phase the chain so it can be completed in numerous towns.  Roaming NPCs anyone?  As for the chain's direction, it should be used to show the history of the applicable race at the get go, before moving in the direction of the current main conflict (ie Arthas for Wrath).  Second, the opening racial cinematic should set the stage for the quest clearly.  If Blizzard had grabbed Ms. iTZKooPA's attention with the opening machinima, shown her race's importance to her from the start and strung her along with interesting plot points as she became accustomed to the game, I think she'd still be playing instead of labeling MMORPGs as a chore.

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Hey all you writers out there - Blizzard's got a deal for you that may be hard to pass up. The makers of WoW announced this week the company's first global writing contest. I'm looking at all you roleplayers and lovers of Blizzard's intricate lore. Whether you're a seasoned writer or just starting out, here's a chance to have some fun with the storylines that we've gotten to know in-game. The grand prize winner gets a trip to Blizzard headquarters in Irvine, Calif. (just south of L.A.), where you'll meet (and apparently eat with) the staff behind the lore that we all love. And the lasting prize is your very own RL Frostmourne sword (valued at $429), for whenever you feel like you need a bit of power eternal. Seven runners up also will be chosen to receive signed copies of the Warcraft Archive, Warcraft War of the Ancients Archive, Diablo Archive and StarCraft Archive. Here's what Blizzard posted:

To enter, submit a 3,000 to 10,000 word story written in English and set in the Warcraft, StarCraft, or Diablo universe by April 12 and earn your chance to visit the Blizzard Entertainment headquarters and meet the writers and staff behind the lore seen in the games and books.

The official contest rules are pretty straight-forward. You've got to be of legal age in your country of residence, and although it's called a "global" contest, it is limited to residents of 22 countries, including the U.S., Canada, Australia, most of Europe and parts of Asia. Oh, and apparently if you live in North Dakota, Vermont, Connecticut or Maryland or Quebec, you're ineligible. So you'll have some competition. But that's part of the fun of it! You'll also have to sign a release, make sure your work is original, etc. Now for those of you who are looking for a more lasting prize, check out Blizzard's job openings page. Last I checked, there was an opening for a writer for StarCraft II. For anyone who's more interested in other aspects of game making, there also are several openings for WoW and Diablo III. The exciting part of looking at the page is seeing what kind of work they're doing. Included in the listings under the WoW tab is a position for a Dungeon Artist. More dungeons, anyone? But back to the topic at hand. I'm thinking of giving this contest a try. Any other takers?

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