Vanguard: Once Upon a Time

Once Upon a Time...

Remember the good old days of adventure games and the early role-playing games? What has happen to all our stories? Although the genres have expanded the idea of story should not die. Are we sacrificing ideas for game play? Are players just to preoccupied to involve themselves in a great story? What about feeling like part of the world? Can we really be part of and influence an online world?

My days of gaming began with adventure/role-playing games. In fact, my first game I ever played was Ultima 1. The graphics and game play by today's standard are archaic and crude, but the story it was wrapped in keep me playing very late and getting yelled at to go to bed often. During the early age of PC gaming the story was very important to the game. The classic games of Origins, Sierra, Dynamix, Interplay, Lucasarts and other early success brought us great laughs, sadness, and awe at the story and not the graphics.

Sadly, as graphics got more intense and computer faster the story slowly started to slip away and holding the average gamer attention in a faster and faster paced world. This causing the adventure and role-playing genre PC games to fade away and be replaced the plethora of first-person shoots and real-time strategy. While many great games came out of those genres, the story, or one that was compelling enough to pay attention to was few and far between.

In the late 90's some joy was restored with a small company out of Canada, Bioware. Baldur's Gate not only was designed well, the story drew you in and I wanted to see every bit the game had to offer. I spent hours just getting involved in the side quests while working on the main story. Small glimmers of hope started to pop up in the gaming community. Such game as Gothic, Morrowind, Neverwinter Nights, Longest Journey, Baldur's Gate 2, and Tex Murphy sequels (Under a Killing Moon, Pandora Directive, and Overseer.) Even more recently such games as Oblivion have shown you can keep the story and bring on the technology. Old titles have even been given new life with Sam & Max just down the road. The idea of stories and gaming seem to be coming back and a large selection of adventure games are coming to the market. Even game creator legend, Al Lowe, is return with a new everyman hero adventure game.

Where does this leave us today? With the ever expanding MMORPG market and the plethora titles being developed even as you read this. Will these games continue to be nothing more then cookie-cutter copies of one another with a mere system and background story change? Very few games even to this date have tried to really make the player a part of the world.

Horizon attempt to get players into building the world, but fell short with very things a player could do to actually manipulate the world itself except where the designers saw fit. You could build a bridge to a new island to find more land or repair long lost crafting site destroyed by war, but this was the limit to it. The story still stayed mostly as the development teams willed it to be. The plot line stayed the same and the players still never attached to the world. Other game have fallen to this same path, even World of Warcraft which boost the most successful launch to date, still bends players to the will of the developers and the players have no influences on the world itself.

EVE Online has managed whoever to take a great leap forward and base it game around the players and not a completely set storyline. While EVE does use expansion to move the universe forward, players actually have a political and world changing ability in its universe. The EVE staff itself have even strived to involve player in world changing events where the outcome of the event influenced the direction of the story. Players drive and change the universe alongside the developers on movements of the timeline. Can this replicated in other MMO genres? Can we have a successful fantasy MMO in which politics, warfare, and player creations can influence and change the very content of the world we play in? Can my characters actions start or move a chain of events can lead to larger scale changes in my world? To look at my character and say "Ha, look what I did!" and know you've done something others will see the effect of and maybe even learn the cause?

I know much of this is still a pipedream. It would involve companies to not only invest in a product but in people and imagination that could run a game just as well, and the tools and freedom they would need to manipulate it. As technology expands and new ideas are thrown into the lion's den gamerdom, we will see were people ingenuity and courage will take backbone that is story.