[QUESTION] Story creation

[Steff]

Because maruum is since weeks now in the state to be ready for serverside content I run into some managment problems.  Did someone of you ever start to implement story with quests/npcs/gobjects.  And if perhaps even in a team? And i do not talk about 2 or 3 simple kill x quests.its about filling a fully map with life and mood.

My question is.  How would you manage this task.  I have some ideas already,  but i first want your experience.

For me this part seams to be  much harder then all the map,  script or gameplay stuff.

[Laduguer]

Because maruum is since weeks now in the state to be ready for serverside content I run into some managment problems.  Did someone of you ever start to implement story with quests/npcs/gobjects.  And if perhaps even in a team? And i do not talk about 2 or 3 simple kill x quests.its about filling a fully map with life and mood.

My question is.  How would you manage this task.  I have some ideas already,  but i first want your experience.

For me this part seams to be  much harder then all the map,  script or gameplay stuff.

As part of my project we wrote a very large amount of lore. And that's really necessary before you begin designing quests and NPCs. You need to have a deep understanding of the world you're working on; what the state of everything is, what people would be thinking, doing, what happened in the past, what's about to happen, what the atmosphere would be like in that area etc. If you have a good enough knowledge of that, then designing quests becomes a straightforward process because you'll know exactly what needs to be happening in each area.

[Steff]

Yes and this is the easy part to get a red line through all of you world.  What realy makes the problem are all the zone related stuff.  All the hundreds of quests that need to be there to fill the world with life but have to be not boring.

How to organice this,  manage idea finding,  implementation.  Give  the stuff a good flow.

[Temptation_Town]

My question is.  How would you manage this task.  I have some ideas already,  but i first want your experience.

It depends on your project's gamestyle.

In my PvP-focused project quests looks like "oh, our base is under attack, need def it", "now we need x lumber to fix the garrison", "go ahead and kill their general". They are used as some background, ambience, not as core of gameplay. The core is PvP beetween players.

As for global story, it determinates the whole conflict and creates the motivation for PvP.

And also using the "flow tension" in games is mainstream now. Or, at least trying to use it.

According to this principle your story stuff (quests/npcs/gobjects) must unconsciously hold player in the game flow and not to be boring, as you say above.