Developing an Interest in the World of Verra

McShave

MMOs do a terrible job of making players develop an interest in the world they are playing in. I have played many decent MMOs that I dropped because I had no idea what my character's goal was in the world they were in. I go from random person to random person doing what they ask and then eventually I group up with people to kill a tough boss that I don't know what he is doing or why he is there.

How will Ashes be able to help the player become interested in the world they are playing in? WoW was cool because they had the first 3 warcraft games that developed the world and then players got to live in that world when the MMO was released. I don't think any MMO has been able to meet the same level of interesting world that WoW was able to create, but it would be great if a game could do that.

Also, a lot of games have an interesting world, but boring gameplay, and a lot of games have a boring world but interesting gameplay. Hopefully Ashes can balance the 2 with interesting world and interesting gameplay. ESO, FF14, GW2, all had interesting worlds or stories, but I found them lacking in the gameplay department and dropped them after the story was over.

tautau

I get the impression that:

1. AoC is putting real effort into writing an engaging back story and putting it out to be available to the player base, and
2. We will be writing our own history as we build up our nodes and tear down others. This will become the history that we really care about after a couple of years...the nodes we built that still stand today! The nodes we built, that were ruined, then we built again! The nodes we built, that were ruined, and that become ancient history, like Carthage and Egypt, tales we tell the new players of ancient glory.

Caww

Gads... I hate to say it, but as long as the PvP massive siege warfare aspect of the game truly develops, I won't care what the story arc is trying to present.

Raise

I'll be honest.

I am playing just because it's an MMORPG and I have no clue about anything in this world at the moment.

Creating a new world through a MMO, and thinking people will care about it for long is a huge risk if you are relying on just typical MMO text-based information.

This isn't the late 90s to early 2000's.

I also don't believe in establishing — attempting to rather — meaningful lore through an MMO nor do I believe it works most of the time. And yet, it is very much so needed for your game to survive in the long run.

Sure, I like to read books, at times, but investing a world is a mental investment (especially with millions of them out there) and it's up to the creators to garner that from the players. Especially because of the rise of audio and motion media; we no longer have to "read" to get details of a story, but rather have it read to us.

It's not easy getting people invested in a world they weren't exposed to — or at least the amount of people needed to make something go "mainstream" — because most times, it's a chore. The only reasons WoW was popular was because of Blizzard's reputation for making quality games, cut scenes, stories and overall being one of the "good guy" studios. Blizzard had all of the pieces to the puzzle.

A lot of people that never heard of Warcraft or played a MMORPG before came because everyone else was. I don't see that happening here without a previous property or lore establishment. In my opinion, WoW lore and writing is equivalent to Saturday Morning Cartoon shows or some type of comedic parody.

Anyways...

It can happen but I don't know how this development team operates. Most of the times I am seeing a common pattern with most publishers and developers: It seems that they are more concerned with short-term gains and profits.

A lot of people can do world-building and create a MMO or game.

But getting people to care about that world is the hardest part.