Characters are what characters do (and what they go through)

One thing that interests me a lot is what makes a story interesting, and I’ve found that a large part of the answer involves interesting characters. Of course, all that does is invite the question “what makes a character interesting?” Fortunately, I think there’s a more useful answer to that one.

To put it simply, it seems that bootstrapping characters simply doesn’t work. Dreaming up some dude, giving him a name, a look and a background isn’t enough, no matter how deep or complex or tragic or “badass” those are (whatever tickles your fancy).

In order to make the... story-absorber (let’s call him a “player”) care about the characters, they have to identify with them, and the only way of doing that is accompanying said characters through their share of gut-wrenching situations. Therein lies that mysterious leap between “this feels plastic” and “this feels real”. The actual situations don’t even have to be extremely believable or interesting: cook up enough cheesy situations to put your character through and he has a chance of earning a place in someone’s heart... somewhere. Want a demonstration? Go watch a soap opera. If people can become attached to those characters, then they can get attached to anyone if you can only get their attention long enough.

Also, there’s probably a limit to how many characters a player can genuinely relate to. The specific values probably resemble those that govern human relationships (a handful of close friends, a few tens of people on speaking terms, several tens of acquaintances, with variations between individuals, of course). It’s a relatively thin line to walk, because the divide between a “main” character and a “filler” one tends to be blurry, and the player’s attention budget is fairly limited (no, I’m not mocking anybody).

But the lesson I take from all this is that trying to brute-force a character into “main cast status” doesn’t tend to yield good results. Stories have a way of telling themselves, as anyone who ever tried to put one down knows.

Inevitably, of course, some characters are going to be more important than others right from the start (you do need some semblance of a main thread to get the thing going) but the specifics of how they develop, which are going to come out as pivotal, and which will become tragic fodder* is something best left to be digested for a while in the writer’s brain, along with the story itself.

In other, shorter words, characters need to be cultivated.

Which is why I’m cautiously optimistic of a BlizzCon interview where the devs kinda sorta implied that they were peppering the game with candidates for the post of “important character”. That’s good. Here’s hoping there will be no more Deathwings (probably the most arbitrary villain in the fictional universe to date, and that’s saying something) and Varians (a valiant attempt but one that feels a wee bit plastic, but then I didn’t read the comic).

The whole “time-travel-but-not-really” aspect is... euuhhrm... well, you know. Weird. But like I wrote above, it doesn’t really matter if the character’s adventures and misadventures are cheesy, so long as they keep coming in a relatively consistent thread. Let’s be honest here, Arthas’s development had plenty of “wait, what?” moments, and he was still quite probably the most well-loved character in Warcraft, ever**.

So, who knows... maybe Garrosh can become what Thrall in my opinion failed to be (and not from lack of trying, Lord knows): an orc with a personality, and a story to back it, so that we players (and, more importantly, Metzen) can have a backlog of his choices and actions, good and bad, that can be reasonably extrapolated from to create a verisimilar story – or as much as can be expected from Warcraft.

They mentioned Anduin and Wrathion. If that’s about it (one per race?), I still think that Blizzard are putting their eggs in too few baskets. Surely in a game this size there are other characters that can be kept around for tentative promotion. Say, for example, whatshisnameagain, Saurfang the Elder; or Brann Bronzebeard. Those have been around plenty long to make for interesting main characters. And there are lots of others, of course.

Unfortunately, some other characters that were meant to be mains like Thrall and Jaina will probably need some kind of special treatment after years of being bland guys who went around doing random good deeds without any apparent goal. Maybe they could go in the Tragic Deaths bucket?

Jaina, specifically, looks like she’s being honed for becoming a villain, after all the “tolerance” crap she was made to repeat over the years. That’s unfortunate, since villains in WoW tend to become raid bosses sooner rather than later – and then either corpses or the fodder of “it was only a setback!” jokes. It would be much more interesting if she could follow in her father’s footsteps and become a harsh voice of remembrance of the evils that glory-lusting orcs can perpetrate. For two reasons:

First, it might redeem the whole simplistic crap in the Frozen Throne about Daelin being a “prejudiced, intolerant human” (the notion that Warcraft humans are pompous versions of pea-brained Southern rednecks being fairly pervasive at the time***). Maybe Jaina’s father was being shortsighted, but you have to admit that after the First and Second Wars, he had a compelling point. As Jaina found out.

Orcs are “savage but honorable”, they say – but the latter doesn’t excuse the former, nor does it hide its ugliness. I’m all for people who try to cultivate their virtues and fight their vices, but the idea that orcs under Thrall are goody-goodies who simply enjoy some playful axe-swinging every now and then is laughable.

Second, anything has to be better than the “she went crazy and had to be put down” excuse that “explains” a large portion of Warcraft’s bad guys.

Well, that’s enough blabbing for one night. Thanks for reading!

*GRRM for one likes to put the former and the latter in the same bucket, which some may call “ballsy”. I think he’s just a frustrated liberal who likes to portray humanity in the worst possible light.

** Like the joke goes: “tell them only that the Lich King is dead... and that World of Warcraft... died with him.”

*** I’ll take the company of a trailer park redneck over a collective-guilt liberal’s any day of the week, too. Both have thick skulls and intractable tempers, but at least the former is a more honest idiot.

Big Pointless Ideas!

It’s been a PITA week and now that Friday’s finally here, I feel like I have a whole month of vacation ahead. Time for some more WoW rambling! And this time I’m really going to let my imagination fly. We can start with: OK, so everyone says WoW is dying because it’s old. Fair point.

Dying from old age, or chronic sameness?

But what exactly is old, the mechanics or the world? The devs make a point of implementing relatively radical changes to gameplay on a regular basis, presumably to prevent everyone from getting so used to their characters that they doze off on the job, Euro Truck Simulator style.

People don’t always like the changes (I know I don’t), they don’t always like where their class or faction ended up, but I don’t think many people actually quit over that (and the devs apparently agree, if their disdain towards “I’m quitting because my class is broken” is any indication).

I think the net effect of regular changes in mechanics is positive. People generally like learning new things, so long as it doesn’t overwhelm them.

So if the button mashing itself isn’t a major inducer of sleepiness, what about that same old quest design – “kill 10 rats and bring me 3 of their tails”? This is one nail that keeps getting hammered on, but unfairly, I believe. Some age-old, repetitive things make up a necessary part of everyone’s day, such as going to work and sleeping with one’s spouse. (Not that I would know about that last one.)

Humans will be humans, always prone to thinking that someone is out to unfairly get them. So there are always going to be accusations of quests being an unnecessary time sink imposed by the greedy company just to make more money off the players, just like there will always be those incomparable talents unfairly kept down by The Man (i.e. mediocre, lazy people who keep telling themselves they’ll work harder... if they get a raise).

Okay, I’ll try to stay focused. What I’m trying to say is that questing is the bread and butter of any story-driven game, including MMOs. They’re the boring stuff that make the cool parts worth it. The darkness that reminds us of the light’s beauty.

You say: “dude, there’s more than enough darkness in my life. I just want some LCD panel sunshine at the end of the day.” Well, there will always be the question of how much darkness you can take before being shown a little light, true. But I trust the devs to figure out the specifics of each demographic. The point is, saying that

“WoW could do better if it got rid of questing”

is akin to saying that

“Modeling would be more interesting if the kits came already assembled and painted.”

I think that, if players just wanted most of the thrill with none of the work, they wouldn’t be players, but TV couch potatoes.

My contention, then, is that the issue with WoW’s growing rheumatism isn’t the method, but the substance.

Story, verisimilitude matter

Yes, even for those players who purportedly just want to log on and kill stuff. The human brain works in terms of stories, on various levels. There’s a reason why the biggest questions of all are “How did we get here”, “Where are we going” and “Why”. Continuity.

That is what’s sorely missing in WoW today. When a fictional universe’s fabric is young, supple and taut, it can take all kinds of hits without falling apart. Any story in development is constantly bombarded by inevitable inconsistencies and arbitrariness. In the case of a game, that is compounded by practical frustrations such as bugs and balance issues. In the beginning, those things are largely overlooked in the exhilaration of discovering all the traits of a new world. That’s the single biggest driver of nostalgia.

Inevitably, though, like a canvas roof exposed to sun and rain, the fiction becomes dry and cracked and eventually full of holes, until it ceases to provide any shelter from reality and becomes just another ugly reminder of the arrow of time.

Let’s try again without all the bullshit: WoW’s fiction is no longer gripping, it no longer invites suspension of disbelief. You’re not a rising hero fighting through unlikely odds to gain new powers and discover new mysteries. You’re just a guy trying to get the damn boss to drop the shoulders token so you can complete the armor set. That invites the awkward question, why do you want the armor set? Any kind of internally consistent answer to that question will involve the fiction. Belief matters, even for the most “professional” of players.

WoW’s fictional fabric has been particularly frayed by Blizzard’s increasingly desperate appeal to the “heroicness” of everything that players do. When every other NPC has a desperate issue that needs resolving, when existence itself is endangered fifty times every patch, it gets harder to keep a serious face.

“But,” you may say, “Pandaria tried to do exactly that: get back to a more down-to-earth story. Instead of some cosmic menace, we get a war between factions as the main driver of the story. We even got farming, for goodness sake.”

Yes, true, and I applaud Blizzard for that!

“And Pandaria sucked for Blizzard. They haven’t bled so many subscribers in... well, forever.”

Also true. But I don’t think the dive in subscriptions happened because of a lack of heroic stuff to do. On the contrary, Pandaria feels like an acceleration of the “excessive heroism” problem. It’s supposed to be a mysterious new land, yet the player, a complete foreigner, can just walk in like he’s always been around and save the land from a number of ancestral threats that are somehow all rising up at once!

Replacing the Canvas

I think by this point I’ve meandered about enough to make my main point. WoW needs a reboot. A sincere, head-to-toes, bone-deep refresh, especially of the story. Wait! By that, I don’t mean a sweeping retcon. No, no, no. I mean a change in temporal perspective.

You needn’t look further than Warcraft itself for an example. A mere 20-year interval in the fictional world between Warcraft 2: Tides of Darkness and Warcraft 3: Reign of Chaos allowed for dramatic changes in the layout of things.

Take Lordaeron, for example. In WC2 Lordaeron was a newfangled, ill-explained kingdom that served mainly to justify why the humans hadn’t been wiped out after their defeat in the first game. In WC3, thanks to nothing more than WC2, Lordaeron appears as a storied, familiar nation, whose sudden fall was all the more shocking and gripping thanks to this appearance.

There’s nothing new about this effect. Tolkien used it very effectively, leveraging his previously written mythology to create an awesome perception of depth in a newer, fresher age of the fictional world in which his most successful works took place.

Even Blizzard showed they could bootstrap some ancientness with things like the Dark Iron Dwarves of Blackrock Mountain, and the Night Elves, who didn’t exist prior to WC3 and suddenly became one of the most interesting races of the world afterwards.

An interesting occurrence of this effect, but backwards, is the shift from the original Star Wars timeline to that of Knights of the Old Republic. The original timeline is old and worn (read any of the novels following up to the movies if you don’t believe me). Enter SW:KOTOR, and wham! You have three thousand years of “anything could have happened” before the movies take place, and you get to take part in the pivotal events that helped to shape the world of the movies. That is quite possibly the most amazing reboot ever.

I’m not suggesting that Blizzard make their next big title “World of Warcraft: the Troll Wars.” (Actually that would be pretty cool, but I digress.) But I do think that it’s high time for a Warcraft 3-style reboot with a fast forward of 2 or 3 decades.

New, interesting characters of Arthas’s caliber could be introduced. The balance of power could be changed; old locations could have very different denizens from what you remember. New cities, forts could be built. Forests could be grown and leveled. Heck, mountains could change places – there is such a thing as magic in the world, after all.

Ancient ruins could be uncovered at a more believable pace. Factions that were previously just another rep grind can be incorporated into the social, economic and political structures proper. There would be a more reasonable explanation for the sudden reset of item levels, the arrival of new abilities, new mechanics.

And, last but not least... a new strategy game could take place in-between. Something to remind the peons (players) that the real world-changing events take place with true heroes in the front row, not a band of nameless loot-crazed mercenaries. And to inspire said peons to try their best to make their own dent in the world.

But... Cataclysm...

Cataclysm is not the same as what I’m proposing. Yes, it would similarly require a massive reworking of the world, something that Blizzard doesn’t seem all that keen on (GC is on record as saying that he’s “not sure the bang for the buck was there”). I can appreciate the sentiment, but I disagree. The game’s longevity is no longer a given, so it might be worthwhile to start considering measures that may not seem “investment-grade” at first sight but could help to steady the boat in the long run.

Besides, considering that they charge the price of a full AAA game for each x-pac, I think it’s not so unreasonable to expect them to provide one.

Another benefit of a remake of the world would be that leveling could be kept realistic and interesting. One of the main complaints from older players is that they can’t stand going through that same crap all over again in their alts. Well, there would no longer be “that same crap” if the leveling process was revamped more often. Thus leveling could go back to being an integral part of the game, not just an awkward time sink to prevent people from just rolling maximum-level characters.

I don’t know about everybody else, but I find the idea of re-encountering a seemingly unimportant NPC from a previous expansion as a grizzled veteran, or a tired old hermit, or the usurper of a kingdom very appealing. Untold stories – just waiting to be dug into. Much more appealing than “uhh... Brann? Didn’t I see you in Northrend a week ago? I see... you found a major Titan complex. Again. Riight.”

Microtransactions

I’ve always been a pay-for-what-you-need-not-for-the-whole-package person, but for some reason I’ve yet to determine, the idea of paying for an advantage in a game turns me off. In games, I want to prove myself with raw determination and skill. Must be the same thing that makes those crazy people climb mountains on foot instead of taking a helicopter.

Anyhow, I recognize that the free-to-play model is lucrative and effective, yadda yadda yadda. Anyway, I have a thought. Mostly unrelated to the reboot idea. What if there were microtransactions that appeal to people who dislike your typical microtransactions? “Elitists”, so to speak?

The specific idea I had was to sell a more palpable (as far as bits go) sort of “bragging rights”. You’ve killed Grug the Belcher, have you? Well good for you! You can tell all your friends! Now, how about you buy this here “Head of Grug” that still belches even without a stomach attached?

You get the idea. Tabards, mounts, titles, your name or your guild’s as the official slayer of Grug on the server (or the world!)... the possibilities are many. Just attach the product being purchased to the actual game, making it an extension of gameplay, not a substitute. And for sanity’s sake, stop selling actual advantages in gameplay mechanics. RAF, I’m looking at you.

Do I realize that none of this is ever going to be considered, let alone implemented? What, do you think I write this hoping that it will? It's called a "ramble" for a reason.

Thanks for reading.

The Elder Scrolls: Wild Hunt?

As excited as I want to be at the prospect of another Witcher game, the first two having been masterpieces each in their own way, some of the data flowing out of CD Projekt Red has me worried. In their interviews following the announcement of the game there were a few hints of “making the game more accessible than its predecessors” and “more like an open-world sandbox, in the likes of Skyrim”.

Well, the “accessible” part speaks for itself, I think. One of the great things of the first two Witcher games in my humble opinion was the limited amount of hand-holding. Apparently the devs think that ended up hurting their bottom line (read: “easy stuff sells more”).

I won’t bash them for that belief because recently I’ve gotten anecdotal evidence that it might indeed be true. Some people (with fairly decent purchasing power) are turned off by what they heard is a “hard” game. One guy in particular was scared of Witcher 2 because he’d heard that “once you die, it’s over” (which is true only in Insane difficulty, and even then you can always start over).

Oh well. Still, that can be gotten over. If the tutorial can be skipped, and if there’s an engaging difficulty level, and if the mechanics aren’t too dumbed down, it’s quite possible that a “more accessible” Witcher will still scratch that itch for a game that you must pay attention to in order to get through.

That’s a lot of “ifs”, and a lot can go wrong. The changes from the first to the second Witcher game point in the direction of a lot more hand-holding. But it’s the least of my worries. What gets me wringing my hands is the reference to Skyrim.

Let me say that I never really got it with Bethesda games. They seem awfully soulless. There’s plenty of ego stroking, of the cheapest variety, without even a Fable-like hint of good-natured mockery. The characters seem mass-produced from Ye Olde Fantasy Factory molds. The plot reeks of cliché from a mile away. It’s also looser than pajama shorts, and it has to be, to make way for the bloated array of side quests than have next to nothing to do with the main story. I’m also no fan of the bajillion races – so many that none really stand out, except for being each uglier than the last.

And to top it off... the combat system. Powers that rule this world, what have we ever done to deserve Bethesda’s craptastic FPS-RPG hybrid? And why, why did it have to infect Fallout? That’s as close to a cosmic gaming tragedy as it gets. I’m still reeling at the thought of what New Vegas could have been if it had a proper, Fallout-ish game engine.

Anyway... The Witcher 3. The first two Witcher games had at least one strong point in common: verisimilitude, the feeling of context. Fitting the player into that context wasn’t done so well, but there’s no denying that it felt as though you were playing in a believable world with believable characters, one that could conceivably go on without the player. That feeling is much harder to accomplish in a sandbox-style game.

If the player is limited to a certain area, as he was in both Witcher games up to now, then auxiliary plots can be kept tied in a relatively tight manner to the main plot. The fact that the plots weren’t “world-shattering epics” (especially true of the first game) helped to achieve verisimilitude. “I’m going to kill some drowners to make a buck. It’s not like the world needs saving or something.”

In a wide-world game – particularly one where the world is on the brink of radical change, which seems to be the case in The Witcher 3 – the only practical way of keeping the weave of the fictional universe together, and reducing inconsistencies, is by assuming that each location is largely isolated from the others (Fallouts 1 and 2). Otherwise, making the NPCs in one location aware of what’s going on elsewhere becomes harder by a factorial rate based on the number of locations.

Or, alternatively, you can just make the weave of the world incredibly loose and elastic... which is Bethesda’s favorite solution.

I think that has a lot to do with their games being “seamless” sandbox experiences. When you try to create a whole world with a limited team of developers and put it in a machine with limited resources, that world invariably ends up seeming rather small. It’s hard to pretend that two cities are far off and isolated when there are only a handful of miles between them, and the inhabitants of one are well aware of what's going on in the other.

Paradoxically, limiting actual gameplay to relatively small areas and putting a world map of sorts between them is the way to go in creating a feeling of scale. That’s what the original Fallouts did, and it worked wonderfully. Between world map travel taking several weeks, and the positively dangerous random encounters, there was a very real feeling that the cities were isolated.

Bethesda tries to make up for this by filling the landscape between interesting locations with ludicrous numbers of randomly-spawning enemies. It succeeds to some degree – you think twice before venturing out into the world, which does create a feeling of isolation. But it’s rather gimmicky (and thus annoying). And instant travel, another Bethesda staple, instantly defeats it.

So there you go. This one-map ‘seamless’ approach, and its implications for plot development and side quests, is what worries me the most about the upcoming Witcher 3. New Vegas proved to me that it’s possible to create a relatively believable world within a sandbox, but I fear that The Witcher 3 will inevitably sacrifice much of the cohesion and purpose of the previous games and move towards an approach like that of MMOs: the quest giver just stands there waiting for a Hero to appear and move things along.