It’s not easy to tell a good story in an MMO. While cut-scene-heavy story sequences in games like BioWare’s The Old Republic and Funcom’s The Secret World are more effective at evoking specific emotional responses, they don’t feel like especially social experiences. They tell very rigid stories that make you feel like you’re playing a single-player game, which is great for a change of pace after a round of questing, but can also take away from one of the chief benefits of the genre: the sense of community.

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ArenaNet mixes numerous styles of story delivery, offering up more directed main story content but also events, which are basically dynamic open quests that occur out in the main game world. When an event takes place, there’s no need to read a lengthy text box or ensure the right quest is active and at the proper stage of completion. After arriving at an event area the quest is essentially auto-activated, allowing anyone to start fighting, collecting, escorting, or whatever the objective happens to be.“A good dynamic event is going to bring people in just through the nature of what’s going on through visual effects, audio effects, what the NPCs are talking about, what the story is,” said ArenaNet’s Mike Zadorojny. “People are just naturally interested because they’re curious, they want to see what’s happening. Also because that’s where you’re going to get Karma, so there’s a reward system built into it to encourage people to go along that path as well.”Of course simply dangling the carrot of Karma in front of players isn’t going to be reason enough to keep them coming back throughout the entirety of the leveling process. If the event involves staring at bunnies for twenty minutes, really ugly bunnies, chances are nobody is going to bother sticking around to earn the rewards. Zadorojny explained how the team goes about building the events to ensure the action is as much of a motivating factor as the rewards.“We actually had the early dynamic event system working in the Guild Wars 1 engine before we could even work on Guild Wars 2 . That’s how long we’ve been iterating on this process. A straight collection event isn’t necessarily exciting. A straight kill count event isn’t necessarily exciting. But when you layer in additional things, like you’re using a gun to collect something, or you’re using a gun that transforms creatures and then from there you’re collecting items. When you start layering additional mechanics it becomes more engaging to the player.”ArenaNet links events with bits of fiction so it feels like one connected storyline, even as outcomes change depending on whether or not objectives are met. In the Asura starting zone, for example, there’s an Asura trying to repair a gate so she can travel into an ancient laboratory. “When she actually gets down there, there’s an event that basically escorts her through the location,” said Zadorojny, “and there’s a side objective where if you find these extra data crystals you can give them to her. If you give her enough data crystals, the follow-up event is different. If you don’t do the side objective, when she gets to the end there are golems that don’t recognize her as the owner of this facility so it puts her in a stasis field and players are defending her from the golems. If you give her enough crystals, she can fake the system into thinking she’s the original owner, and so the secondary event is no longer about protecting her from the golems, it has to do with destroyers that are coming up and causing problems. So you’re doing something with the golems instead of against them.”In another event chain on the same map, a reactor explodes and it’s up to the group to help an NPC clean it up. If everyone manages to protect the NPC through the entire cleaning process, a gigantic fire elemental stomps into the area and starts attacking all nearby. If the group fails to protect him, he gets captured by enemy forces and turned into a hostile golem, and stopping his destructive rampage becomes the objective.“If you’re doing an escort that leads you into a new area and [the NPCs] set up shop, there’s a good chance that events are going to spawn off of those locations. Based on the states of the world, who’s located where, where safe havens are, you can start seeing this spider web of events that are trailing off to various other locations.”ArenaNet doesn’t only allow one group at a time to experience this type of content. Many can join in throughout the course of an event and participate. “We have a scaling system in place that handles a lot of this,” said Zadorojny, which is used to boost the difficulty level of encounters as more players join, adding in things like additional attack types for bosses and minions, to ensure encounters can’t simply be steamrolled over by larger groups.But there’s far more than quest structures to consider when telling stories in an MMO and setting a tone, as designer Ree Soesbee explained. “We want [players] to go find things and when they find something Asura kids telling jokes or a pirate house or just a really gorgeous vista we want them to feel like they’ve accomplished or they’ve discovered. And if you go there and it’s meh, then you walk off. It’s much cooler if you go there and these NPCs are reacting as well, they’re doing stuff.”“It creates the idea that they’ve got their own lives,” said ArenaNet’s Jeff Grubb. “For our main cities we really wanted to give them a sense of place and a sense of being alive and we did that with a lot of voice over that is not directly tied to what you’re doing. You may encounter it and you may not encounter it, but that has a feel for the spontaneity.”Depending on which are you start, ArenaNet hopes to preserve the distinct personalities of each race, from the warlike Charr to the hyper-intelligent, overconfident Asura. “The Asura are brilliant and confident and irritating,” said Grubb. “They’re a race of mad scientists as a result.”It was important to ArenaNet to give all players a sense of all races, so it’s not necessary to play an Asura to know what the Asura are like. “In Charr lands you can still get an understanding of what the Asura are about,” said Grubb. “So I’ve played Charr and I know everything about the legions and I meet this little Asura guy and I go oh, that’s different. What’s that? Hey he’s smart. Whoa he insulted me. Hey what’s his story? You get interested in what their story is because those NPCs throughout the world are conceptualized from something that is really potently distilled so that it is a reflection of that. Then maybe you go and play as an Asura.”To tell more directed stories, ArenaNet uses a personal story system threaded throughout each zone, which takes you to instanced areas and uses voiced dialogue sequences to tell the most important parts of the story, more in the style of a single-player game. These stories won’t be the same for everyone, but tailored to the decisions made through character creation as well as decisions made at crucial moments throughout leveling and questing. “You get three, three or four choices right off the bat,” said Soesbee. “More than that if you count things like your race and your class. Those things each spawn a little storyline.”For example, if a player picks Sylvari and specifies during creation that the character dreamed of a white stag, a white stag will be involved in personal story quests, and it might lead to a meeting with an NPC that would never otherwise happen. “You get this revolving cast of NPCs and situations that is very mutable based on what you’ve done in the world,” said Soesbee. “So either you’re going to go save that guy and fight a big boss who is holding him prisoner, or you’re going to save the town and the fight is going to be you against a thousand little guys who are trying to burn the town.”Soesbee explained how ArenaNet had to be careful about how to tell these stories without fumbling the emotional impact. “We don’t want to tell you what your character feels. That’s kind of a no-no if I went up to you and said this guy died, you should feel sad. We try to just set the scene so that you do feel sad. We try to show that death or show that event in whatever emotional context it is and let you feel what you would feel about it and just tell the story around you and let you interact with it as much as possible.”“We’re not above manipulating your emotions,” added Grubb, “but we do recognize that you can feel different ways about it.”“That’s one way that the choices in the stories and in the personal stories can be very useful to us,” continued Soesbee, “because we show you two NPCs and one is really funny and one is really serious. And then we say one of them is going to die. They’re being attacked. Which one do you save? Well we’re not saying you have to feel strongly about this funny guy because you might pick the other one, but because you’ve chosen which one you like, we know that you are going to be more invested in that story of saving that guy.”ArenaNet plans to build in more events and story-driven content following launch, though so far is only giving hints as to what that content might involve. “We’ve laid out a lot of hooks,” said Grubb. “I came in on end of Factions so I worked on Nightfall and Eye of the North. I did a lot of research on the basics of the world to figure out okay, why is this happening? What have we said? How does that help create the basis for new stories? One thing that Ree mentioned early in her movement of the world which was sort of like our story manifesto was that we refer to the various elder dragons. We talked about a sea dragon, just one line. We haven’t talked about it since. The fans haven’t forgotten about it. And will we talk about it? I don’t know. If we come up with you know good stories for it, yes we will.”We’ll know for sure if ArenaNet’s take on story implementation is ultimately a good one overall after the game launches on August 28.