(Disclaimer: I have a cold and am writing this on 3 hours of fractured sleep and cold medicine. So if it's insane or spelled very badly, that's why.) This past few months I've been taking a tour of some MMOs. I had already played Neopets and Gaia Online, then I tried A Tale In the Desert, Flyff, Maple Story, and Dofus. I have never liked free-roam RPGs, and the more MMOs I played the more I realized that they are all free-roam, except that you keep finding players of the same level in the same area of the game anyway - because those are the highest-level monsters they can kill, or because that is what they have to do for the quest that just became available when they attained that level. ATItD, Maple Story, and Dofus all had a quest check list, (rather similar to a honey-do list of chores IMHO) which acted as the players guide through the game in the same way story objectives act as the player's guide through the game in a linear RPG. (I am using 'Linear' here to include branching, modular, and any other kind of game where the plot progresses toward some climax/ending. Actually that's a terrible way to use that word - so let's call it a Teleological RPG instead.) Since the level grind which males up the fabric of the average MMO can be considered to move in lock-step with these quests which are a (poor) substitute for plot, it occurred to me that a 'level' of an MMO could be considered equivalent to a 'chapter' of story, and also equivalent to the older gaming sense of 'level', a room or group of rooms in which play occurred until the player progressed to the next room. Chapters of a story often take place in the same physical location but a different time. In a free roam game you often end up coming back to the same area levels later and seeing it in a different light because of your different relation to it. Linear RPGs like Final Fantasy have often represented this progression in time by changing NPC dialogue and position/existence of NPCs, and also changes in music. MMOs generally fail to do this because they are attempting to have one consistent version of the location for players of every level, resulting in the infamous reaction "WTF I worked hard to do what this NPC said would fix a problem, they said the problem is fixed, but it doesn't look fixed at all to me." Talk about breaking immersion and sense of disbelief! So, I was thinking about how one would build an MMO around a teleological progression through chapters of a story which equated to physical levels. An immediate and interesting effect of this would be that players would be surrounded by other players who were at the same place in the story, the same level. This would encourage more discussion about how to do things in that particular level, and limit spoilers by people who were farther ahead in the story. This could also be used to balance the economy between new characters and high-level characters, because there could be resources which were only available in the early levels of the game which new players could sell through a world-wide market to high-level players, as well as the normal opposite flow of hand-me-downs and crafted products from higher-level players to lower-level players. As I was getting at above, players progressing to a new chapter of the story might find themselves revisiting an earlier location but with small changes made to show the passage of time and completion of earlier quests - this helps the game not need an impossibly large amount of art assets to be created for a long progression of new locations, and also fits nicely with avoiding the heavily cliched "hero's journey" type story which is the only kind which makes sense with continually traveling to new locations. In a game with a limited number of locations it would even be possible to fake the feel of a free-roam game by allowing players to travel freely between level-appropriate versions of all the locations they had been to. At these locations they could do freely-repeatable crafting or mini-game playing including party quests, or repeatable quests unconnected to the story such as a time challenge to 'tag' each NPC in the location as quickly as possible. Now the question I am pondering is, how to make it equally possible to progress through the story by combat only, or by avoiding combat and doing crafting instead, or by a mix of the two. Probably the world-market could again be used to balance this - monster drops would be crafting supplies, crafting results would be combat equips, and fighters and crafters would sell the fruits of their labors to each other. All monsters would thus have to be avoidable, and PvP contained to specific areas where non-combatants would not need to go. The story would be like harvest moon in that the plot progression would end but that max-level character would remain available to play minigames, craft, and fight with. It would also be like a new game+ in that the player would be encouraged to create a new character and use the abilities of their maxed-out character to help the new one achieve a different/better path through the branching story to a new ending. These paths through the story would basically replace classes/races as descriptive rather than prescriptive classifications; although there might also be bonus races or weapon types which were only available to a player who had already completed the game with one avatar. So, thoughts...? Would you want to play a game like this, would you want to make a game like this?

Question: If it is highly linear, what is the point of playing with other players if everything is basically the same?

What impact will other players have on this?

I think Guild Wars is MMO game fitting most to your description... you have a progressing, but it isn't rushed, you meet mostly players of your own level etc.

Quote:Original post by Talroth
Question: If it is highly linear, what is the point of playing with other players if everything is basically the same?

What impact will other players have on this?

There will be cooperative mini-games such as party quests, and diceless roleplaying between players will be encouraged along with other social interaction. Seeing other players take different paths through a branching story than you are taking could be quite interesting, as could discussing whatever bit of story has just happened with them. Perhaps the community could be organized around a messageboard open to all levels of players, as is the case with Gaia Online, and the topics of discussion restricted to exclude spoilers for future parts of the story.

Quote:Original post by Iron Chef Carnage
But so much of the interest in story-writing comes from changes in the world, in addition to changes in the character. If players at different points in the story had to be able to interract, you could never kill any NPCs, never change any political boundaries and never alter the landscape in the course of the story. What fun is that?

The player could kill an NPC resulting in a different political side taking over by the end of the story. I personally hate it when other players screw up my game world, especially when the story has started without me when the MMO started 2 or 3 years ago, and when world events are always decided by the few highest-lvl characters and are not affected at all by little lvl 20 me.

As a writer, I'm more interested in personal growth/transformation and romance, not particularly interested in world politics.