An interesting story told by a good storyteller will not leave anyone indifferent. People listen to stories, read stories, watch stories, play stories and create history themselves. In some games, the story is the cornerstone around which the game is created, somewhere it is an unimportant but pleasant element. However, most often the story is cement, which tightly binds together all parts of the game, uniting them into a single whole.

Over the years working as a screenwriter for various projects, from board games to the largest domestic MMORPG Allods Online, I have come across a variety of approaches to creating and presenting stories. There are a lot of nuances of working in different game genres, but current trends are such that more and more games are becoming online - and therefore in this article I want to share my experience in the field of MMO.



Before talking about the story, it is worth thinking about who we are writing this story for, that is, about our target audience.
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Lecture hall

The audience of IMO has certain properties that any screenwriter must take into account in the process of working on the script.

The first property: competition .

In online games, players must compete with other players. Actually, for the sake of this, players play MMO. Achievements in the network game are valued much higher, because they are obtained in the course of competition with other players. Almost like in life! The audience of the IMO is interesting and history, and high-quality graphics, and complex, diverse content, creating a "Challenge". But first of all, they are interested in being better than others . That is why you should not put history at the forefront in network projects - leave the story-driven approach for single RPGs. Players play MMORPG not for the sake of dashing plot twists and deeply developed world. A good story adorns any MMORPG, but the main thing is the gameplay. Therefore, the story should support competitive gameplay, and not be a value in itself and a thing in itself.

The second property of the audience: heterogeneity .

Each game has a specific target audience. The narrower is the niche occupied by your project, the more accurately you can determine the audience at the stage of the project’s pre-production, and the easier it is to create a story that is interesting for your players.

MMORPG audience is very heterogeneous. Network games attract men and women, teenagers and retirees, students and businessmen, people from different cultures and social levels who have different worldviews, experience and interests. Therefore, the story for the MMORPG should be as universal as possible. Familiar to all images that do not require specific knowledge to understand the plots - what should be the basis of the history created for the MMO. What is clear to all players. We can say that in MMORPG scenarios Hollywood rules the ball.

And finally, the third property of the audience: sociality .

MMO players are very social - they love to chat, to unite in groups and guilds, make friends and foes. And the screenwriter can use this sociality. For example, to throw up ambiguous subject riddles, which are interesting to discuss on the game forum, leave vagueness and uncovered stories that players will think about with pleasure themselves. And, not least, the story should encourage players to play together. This can be realized, for example, through tasks that cannot be accomplished alone, or by embedding the associations of players in the history of the world and giving them the opportunity to become “co-authors” of history. High sociality peculiar to most of the players in the MMO. The simultaneous presence of many characters in the game can be a headache for the screenwriter, because often there is the problem of "a million main characters." However, the mass gives a wide scope for creativity and the disclosure of history through those game mechanics that are impossible in single games. Thus the social factor can be another tool in the hands of the screenwriter and an anchor that keeps players in the game.

And here we come to the next question - what are the skills that an MMORPG screenwriter should possess?

The role of the screenwriter

Any screenwriter somewhere in the depths of his soul considers himself the greatest creator. He dreams of Shakespeare's laurels and Tarantino's fees. Alas, the harsh reality usually pretty quickly breaks these bright dreams.

The IMO screenwriter is not primarily a screenwriter, but a game designer. He must thoroughly know his game, understand all the mechanics and functionality, know all the features of his project and other projects in the MMORPG genre. What is it for? Only having deep knowledge of game design, the screenwriter is able to correctly assess what exactly his game attracts players, how they play, what they prefer to see in the game, etc. Using this knowledge, the screenwriter can create a holistic world that does not cause rejection, and stories that will work correctly and set the dynamics of the gameplay. Therefore, the screenwriter must be able to use the most diverse tools, from the banal Excel to specific game editors, in which levels and characters are created. This is required so that the scriptwriter himself can see what a character or location looks like, how the tasks work, how well they correspond to the story he has invented while working on the script.

And this implies the following requirement: the screenwriter must constantly be in the work on the project. It is the link between the work of artists and designers, because it is history that unites what is happening in the game as a whole. And if the story invented by the screenwriter does not correspond to what is happening on the screen, the players certainly will not like it. And in order to know what the players like, the screenwriter must have marketing knowledge and be well versed in the gaming industry and the MMORPG market: be aware of all current trends, know what content is now in demand, and what references will be relevant. The process of developing an MMO is virtually endless - successful games live for decades, and what was in vogue ten years ago will now cause only bewilderment.

The screenwriter needs to know how his project makes money, and how it is monetized, because any large project is commercial. The plot and history can be monetized, starting with the direct sale of content in the game and up to the books written in franchise. Naturally, the screenwriter needs to be able to write. MMORPG imposes many restrictions on the volume of the text and imposes strict requirements on their quality, so the screenwriter must speak the language perfectly.

And only having all the listed skills, the screenwriter becomes the scriptwriter, that is, the person who creates the story for the vast virtual world. And here we finally come to the question: "How can we build a story correctly?"

Making history

The story stands on three whales of screenwriting: the world, characters and events.

The basis of any story is the world - the place and time where the action takes place. It can be very different, from bright epic fantasy to brutal cyberpunk or hardcore post-apocalypse. Regardless of what kind of world you are inventing, there is a strict requirement - it must be logical .

The fact is that the viewer, reader, listener and player enters a state called suspension of disbelief . In this state, a person partially disables critical perception and agrees to believe that dragons exist, and interstellar flights are something commonplace. Due to this, the player much more deeply empathizes with the characters, perceives himself as a part of the world, concentrates on what is happening, forgetting about the real environment. Therefore, before inventing names, characters and events, you need to create a strict inner logic of the world - those boundaries beyond which the flight of fantasy of scriptwriters, artists and designers should not go. As long as the invented world exists in the rigid framework of pre-written logic, the player believes in it. If the basic logical principles of the existence of the game world are violated, then its integrity suffers. And the more such logical contradictions accumulate over time, the sooner the whole world will turn into an unconvincing mosaic canvas, and the player will lose the main thing that history can give - a sense of belonging.

In the MMORPG there is another underwater stone - the time of the world. Each player in the MMORPG has his own - after all, not only do the locations exist regardless of the player’s presence on them and the actions they perform, so the high repetitiveness (repeatability) of the gameplay requires additional support from the story. If in single-player games you have the right to change the world at any time, forbid a player to go back and so on, then you can't do that in an MMO - you have to come up with additional explanations that fit the logic of the world, or, in extreme cases, write off what’s happening as a game convention . However, such manipulations also have a certain limit of trust on the part of the player. This is especially true of interaction with the characters.

Characters are subject to the same requirements as the world - their actions must fit both the logic of the world and the character of the character itself. Princesses do not rush into battle with dragons, and gangsters do not speak in the stilted style of armchair scientists. But besides this, the characters in the MMORPG also have a number of specific differences. In the MMORPG there is no main character. Why is that? Because when a player creates his avatar, he still has no history. Avatar - the continuation of the player, he has his character, his perception of the world. The player will not be able to empathize with the main character, because he himself is the main character. That is why the story in the MMORPG is revealed through secondary characters .

It is the minor characters that are the total protagonist . Each of them must have some kind of prehistory, a bright character with which the player will become acquainted during the game. It is the secondary characters who will direct the player, prompting him to get into the world, empathize with what is happening and reveal the story. Key characters must be well developed and significantly different from the typical characters in the game, both visually and behavior. This will make them memorable. There should not be many such characters, otherwise the player will be confused. 3-7 key characters, each of which is bright and memorable, is enough to tell a story of any complexity.

However, in addition to the protagonist in each story must be present and the antagonist - the very evil that the player will prevail. Unlike the collective blurred protagonist, the antagonist is always concrete. Jedi - a lot, but Darth Vader is always alone. The concreteness and definiteness of the antagonist at any given moment in the story is required in order for the player to clearly understand why he must fight the antagonist. And so that the player internally agreed with the need to plunge the enemy into dust, the enemy must be clear to him. Evil is not abstract, it must be completely understandable, concrete and causing the desire to destroy it. If this rule is observed, then the opposition of the collective protagonist with a specific antagonist will look holistic and relevant throughout the events.

Events - the third component of history. Like everything else, events in the IMO are distinguished by their specificity. To the deep regret of all the writers, the events in the MMORPG are always linear. Why is that? Because if in non-linear games non-linearity motivates the player to repeat, then in MMO the player wants to achieve maximum development (which is impossible if you start playing MMO every time from the very beginning). Therefore, the story in the MMORPG player is interesting once - he is unlikely to re-pass the entire game. This means that any nonlinearity will not work, and the forces and money invested in the creation of branched stories will be wasted. However, the linear story has one huge advantage - it allows you to build a storyline in the format of the series. Given the fact that the MMORPG live and develop for many years, the plot should be in theory endless. It is this infinity that the serial approach allows to achieve, when each part of the game has its own plots connected by a common storyline, emerging from the original concept of the world and stretching through all the "seasons" of the game, connecting the separate "episodes" together.

The lack of a linear history can be attributed to the complexity of the disclosure of the conflict. Since the player has no choice on whose side to stand, he will have to think over conflicts in such a way that there is no doubt who the good guys are and who the evil enemy is. The conflict must be prescribed very well, and give it the most attention. Conflict is the motivation for players to act. Conflict moves the story. No conflict, no story. Peasants have been able to grow wheat in their fields for centuries, and this is not interesting to anyone. But it is worth the evil lord to burn their fields and declare the right of the first wedding night - this is where the story begins. The story begins with a conflict!

Expressive means

In conclusion of the article I would like to tell you a little about the expressive means available to the scriptwriter.



The writer has the most powerful tools with which he can tell the story. This is text, gameplay and art .

The text should be capacious, concise and alive. The rule of any screenwriter, both in games and in movies - if the phrase does not move the story, you need to get rid of it. Any word in a dialogue with a character that does not reveal the character and does not motivate the player to act must be cut out. Spacious descriptions can afford writers in the books. In games, especially in online games, players perceive text that is more than 200 characters in length very poorly. Because the player wants to play, not read . That is why the main tool of the screenwriter is gameplay.

Gameplay is what people generally play games for. Therefore, the main rule of the game screenwriter is not to tell, but to show ! If the screenwriter wants the player to be involved in the story, he should build the script so that he understands what is happening during the execution of any game actions, and not read about the result in the dialogue after the task is completed. That is why the gameplay always comes first. The story should support the gameplay, and in the event of a conflict between the script and the gameplay, the script writer should give way - all parties will benefit from it.

Personally, I use such a simple test: when the next location is ready, I delete the entire text of the tasks from there except for purely technical explanations and ask someone to play. If the subject understands what is happening in the story invented by me, without reading the dialogues, then everything is fine, the story works and supports the gameplay.

Finally, art . This includes both graphic design and sound. Art is a seasoning that makes the plot even richer, and the gameplay is even more exciting. That is why the screenwriter should interact very closely with the artists. No need to think about how this or that object looks like - professional artists will achieve this much better. It is enough just to describe what place this object occupies in history, and the artists themselves will cope. But it is necessary to monitor the compliance of the visual with the very limits of the logic of the world, which was mentioned earlier - guns in the world that do not know gunpowder look strange.

Conclusion

The process of developing scenarios in the MMORPG has many nuances and pitfalls. This includes both the vastness of the audience, and the limited possibilities of presenting the story - the absence of the main character, the infinity of the central plot, the priority of the gameplay over the story. That is why the work on major MMOs is almost impossible apart from the project - the screenwriter must be constantly involved in the development, know everything about his game, from the mechanic used in the game process to marketing research of the target audience and monetization systems. This is the only way to create a truly high-quality scenario that players will not get bored with and will encourage them to stay in the game longer to wait for the next round of history.