Splinter Topic: Narrative Design Hell Is Other People

Well that 'daunting trickle down storytelling' is actually exactly WHY I am a lot more in favor of player expression lead narrative design. Everyone comes from an at least slightly different life perspective if not drastically different. The more modular and flexible the story telling elements, the more likely different responses are going to frame entirely different personal narratives. Set up a really good node system with some PvX like Elite Dangerous dose and you get MOUNTAINS, maybe PLANETS worth of... not really 'fanfiction' but player written stories set in the world given of their own personal narrative. Seriously if you are at least a little into sci fi E.D. and Eve Online have a ton of dedicated people who just go wild with stuff.

That was originally why I thought Ashes was going to be a great rp game. I no longer think that is the case and they have done a lot to alienate that part of the supporter base, but hey 'it's still a work in progress' I guess.

That being said I do like really strong narratives. There is a reason FFXI remains my favorite MMO. The stories there are about really well defined characters and they explore the narrative and morale themes that made the worldbuild what it is fairly well without getting in your face or making you feel like you did something 'ultra super special'. You just 'happened to be the right adventurer at the right time'. My personal experience of the games story is way different than any one else I got to know in game and that is largely since I started quite late, but also because I'm a Windurstian and I really wanted Summoner to be my main job. In order to get that class unlocked I had to do some fairly high level things at low level because it was sort of intended as an 'expansion' class for people who already played the game to the level cap at the time. So I actually did have to rely on other people and the whole experience of gaining my summons afterwards really painted my initial journey.

Ultimately though I think the real reason why the narratives that the game gives you are really important and deserve to be written well is that they kind of allow the player base to come up with their own consensus. When you have a pre-written character with a pre-written journey you kind of are 'telling the players what behaviors are acceptable'. When you have npc's and the player is whatever they want to be within the world build you gave them, you are SHOWING them what behaviors are POSSIBLE but the player base consensus kind of 'decides what behaviors are acceptable'. That's the type of cooperative story telling and community building that I expect from mmos and it is something I felt Chatgpt didn't really dig in to but thought you might appreciate me pointing it out.

To bring this back to the topic of the thread here though, ultimately 'design hell' is people kind of twisting narratives on their head and distorting the meaning of the message of the author or vice versa and the author distorting the player experience to an exacting predetermined thing rather than adding to their own inner narrative.

If you need a good example of a really 'loose' way of going about world building as a game dev that maximizes player freedom I highly recommend looking into Elite Dangerous a bit more. It's not the best story telling and the core 'world' story line kinda sucks sometimes, but they serve as a good case study of how an average games story can be great depending on how much effort the players themselves put in.

And to that, I am reminded of the other part of Narrative Design Hell, player characters don't truly fail until the player quits (unless you are playing a Hardcore game/server/ruleset.

This means that 'dangerous cool areas' that are 'nearly never explored' in lore can't exist 'in reality'. Elite can do this because Elite has a Galactic-tier exploration requirement, but for most other forms of interaction, our 'immortal locust' status does not help.

https://forums.frontier.co.uk/threads/powerplay-2-balance-murder-rewards-far-too-low-committing-crimes-task.629066/

I'm not here to argue about the above or that players should or shouldn't murder NPCs for personal/factional gain, my only point there is that you can't actually stop this no matter how many times you kill the player. Previously I've talked about that from the perspective of competition but it's not even required, for it to be an issue.

A single player game's protagonist failing something normally can just be reloaded from save/reset until they win or if the game allows for a true fail condition, they choose to accept the failure for whatever reason and move on. Randomness can help (i.e. the thing spawns once, if you reload there's no guarantee it will again) but people are... determined.

All that is great for the player but not for the narrative designer because if they lock the state too early, then in the case of most biome related gameplay, the first group to bullrush the content enforces their narratives and the followers/less invested have almost no impact.

tl;dr if a situation like this happens in Elite and 'the murderers get there first' and 'get ahead' in the 'murder vs protection' score, then there can be a problem where 'nothing changes that from there'.

EDIT: And another encapsulation of why it's harder to believe things will work in Ashes as described...
https://forums.frontier.co.uk/threads/trailblazers-update-3-4.638963/
(it's 'short' and doesn't require a massive amount of game familiarity to understand the core problems, though the deeper game design issues might be less visible)

A 'problem' that seems to have a simple answer yet we never get that one implemented either (rather than decay, simply raise undermining multipliers, it's not perfect, but 'never let the perfect be the enemy of the good', etc)

I don't think you are, it's just that generally persistent 'biome' type gameplay doesn't end up being within that realm.

In Elite this happens when a group of players in a region that is normally low traffic, suddenly finds that their sector has become part of a targeted PowerPlay 'attack'. And this is mostly also treated as 'working as intended'.

The difference is that in a more 'realistic' situation, putting the entire sector on high alert because of a pirate incursion would lead to a concept of 'successfully repelling the pirates', whereas most games don't allow that because 'the pirates are players too and have to be allowed to have fun within the same ruleset'.

Without going into every other aspect of the piles of 'issues' Ashes has with balancing its design goals, I'd moreso point out that for most people trying to 'experience a story', it's not the incursion or pirate attack that is the issue, it's the endlessness of it. Ashes has promised not to let this happen for Nodes (as of now) but it kinda didn't work during P1 because various forms of Wars ran into this problem.

Node Wars basically locked 'noncombat citizens' out of the capacity to do anything within their own Nodes. Acceptable, to a point (this is moreso a matter of lacking housing and escape routes/useful places to escape to). But any situation where the actions of players are, in aggregate, affecting a biome, is much more likely to fall into that 'uncomfortable' space where it is controlled by the most invested players (zerg or not).

This is how it plays out in Elite, with the main 'saving grace' being that most people don't care because Sci-fi/Space sim players expect this rather than the alternative (and, ofc, the fact that there are 11,000+ star systems to fight over even in the <0.01% of the galaxy that all that happens in).

No, but the reason is because of the design type that you actually don't 'like', or at least wouldn't choose to build, supposedly.

At that point we're talking about theoreticals for a different game, basically.

In Elite, if a large group of players comes to your system, you don't know that they are Pirates until they start killing people. Once they do start killing people, simply because the game allows them to always kill people, they never have to stop until they run out of money (eventually they would stop because Elite has a 'better corruption system than Ashes', but even then, that's only because they stop being entirely determined to do it, there have been times where people just did not stop).

Similarly, because PvP games almost never balance things such that PvP players actually have to face non-PvP challenges (they lose the players too fast if they do), it's less likely that any ingame 'PvE' military force would stop them and often if such a force existed it would be incredibly immersion breaking OR a thing people spawn on purpose for challenge of some kind (again, warping the narrative).

But, again, this is a matter of 'you visualizing a different type of game', whereas the Splinter exists because I know my group would want to tell you 'that type of design is incompatible with Ashes' and then explain/complain about why.

As far as I can tell, you would never design a game with the same core principles as Ashes of Creation, because you don't 'believe in them' either.

I believe that Ashes intends for this to be able to happen endlessly, as part of the design, and also constantly, and that makes most Narrative Biome-related Gameplay unsuitable for the game.

"Spending two weeks building up your Node so you can craft something that would then only available in your Node and then being constantly killed at Storage/Crafting station before you can craft it, losing the materials required to do so." -> Working As Intended.

Biome Narratives with the amount of complexity from the original post are that, but 5x worse.

Wait... Now that I am thinking about it. Didn't AoC use this exact type of 'narrative biome based gameplay' in a showcase?

https://youtube.com/watch?v=p8DVCxYD_28

This one I think. I remember watching it and having a lot of the remarks about how often this type of thing was going to result in player deaths and the flaws in the design Azherae has been explaining being apparent to me.

Thanks much, I'll count that as 'mission accomplished' in the sense that I can't imagine any group members reading that last post of yours and concluding somehow that you 'didn't understand the problem/concerns' in any way.

As for me personally, I wouldn't want to ascribe any direct meaning to the data from Alpha-2 Phase 1 (or 2) in terms of Intrepid's design direction, I still believe they can pivot whichever way they want, they're just subject to stricter constraints than the games that are built around 'protected/instanced PvE+encouraged PvP'.

And, for Intrepid, my group afaik has no preference which way you take it, as long as it isn't an inconsistent overly-hopeful muddle (but admittedly if y'all commit to more 'segregation' between PvP and PvE you'll have to beat Throne and Liberty on Economy alone, for us). Though I guess there's also the outlier chance that you can win on RP/PvP-RP potential...