A modest proposal for MMO developers...

ladyattis

Branching is the name of the game here.

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I was thinking about this quote in another thread relating what the OP thought what needed to be removed for MMOs to flourish and retain a veteran/seasoned population. This quote in particular is a response to that list, which I believe encapsulated the entired issue about linear questing/story-telling in the proper context. Consider how in many single player games they follow linear paths with an unfolding story. Now, that's all well and good for a single player game because the developers are largely focusing on the game play aspects of the game itself, so the story often is written either to parallel the key features of the game play or to simply help the nerdier folks feel 'immersed' in the game (giving objectives or goals that have to be met, or reasons for doing the objectives or goals in the first place).

What is the story was part of the game play? What if deciding to do X over Y does something to the game world? Whether it's a single player game or an MMO such a feature often gets truncated because of the assumed 'bad' side effect of unintended behavior(s) from the PC and NPC respectively. Whether the 'bad' side effect means a player cannot go back to a location to seemingly complete/turn-in a quest, or the player cannot use a given item or resource they regularly used before. But to combat that 'bad' side effect, making the branching generative, where from one decision new decisions are opened up by a meta-AI (an AI that controls the other AIs in-game) to prevent dead ends or loops (where the conditions of one's decision making leads to a perpetual state that is self-contained where no further progress can be made outside of the given sub-states).

Thus, such a branching and generative structure to story telling could lead to a persist game world, where one's actions do matter. It's not computationally hard to design such a system, considering most of this exists as genetic algorithms and artificial life programs. The question remains: which developer has the balls to take on such a development project?

Amalaric

Play Knights of the Old Republic, there you can be as bad as you want and not be punished by the game mechanics.