On Myth

Bungie Software is a company that I've been extremely conflicted about for quite some time now. Everyone knows them for Halo, sure, but nobody's aware that they ever made anything else. The fact is that they did, and those games are games that I've sunk more hours of my life into than any others. The Marathon trilogy and the Myth duology are the two that I'm the most invested in. Tonight I want to talk about Myth, partly because it's so dear to me and partly in keeping with the fantasy/medieval theme of World of Warcraft. Next time I'll dive into Marathon.

I'd played other RTS games in the past, namely Starcraft and Civilization, but Myth: The Fallen Lords grabbed me in a way that those others didn't. Resource gathering? None. You didn't build armies of units with the full expectation of losing some, and just throw them at some enemy targets. You had what you were given at the start of the level, occasionally you got reinforcements, but that wasn't anything to rely on. You had to position them wisely, plan ahead, and use the terrain to your advantage. Each one of your men were valuable.

The story was another aspect of Myth that captivated me. Each level opened with a journal entry, which is an ingenious mechanic to present a human element and a character to connect with in a game when you essentially see your characters as units looking all the same. Though you never definitively see the narrator ingame, you still follow him through the entire game, only a couple times does he write about events he wasn't present for. Though the writing in the journals is straightforward, with a great battlefield diary flavor to them, there are details that people have picked apart for years, trying to figure out all the nuances and backstory of the game which lie hidden. This isn't the same as World of Warcraft's sprawling, skippable world story - Myth tells a tale that's like Lord of the Rings crossed with Vietnam war fiction, grim and desperate. The larger questions about the workings of this world, the whereabouts of several of the Fallen Lords (sorcerer generals held in the main bad guy's thrall) and the earlier years of the war, go unanswered in the journal of a simple soldier. And yet, hints of these things make themselves known, whether in the journals as the narrator mentions in passing something he's heard, or in flavor text for the units.

The sequel Myth II: Soulblighter I felt to be a little bit thinner in terms of story, but it made up for it with some superb maps, and the release of the tools needed for one to make new maps, units, plugins, and just about anything one wanted, given the proficiency. My 2D art skills in Photoshop led me to creating the texture maps for new levels, spending many happy hours blending grass into dirt into sand into water into mud, trying to evoke the most convincing landscape possible when overlaid on the terrain mesh. I realize this isn't exactly story related, but modding for Myth led myself and many others within the community to write new stories, some set in the Myth universe, others entirely new, for our custom maps, units and scenarios to follow. Granted, I was rather young and most of the backstories I wrote when I was in Chemistry class don't look as good to me anymore as they once did, but it was the earliest and most intimate brush I had with the story element of video games.

Related links

http://myth.bungie.org/ - The place for anything Myth, really. The Asylum used to be a huge center of discussion about the story, but it's pretty dead these days. Still, all the journals and everything are there.

On World of Warcraft

So a month or two ago, I started playing World of Warcraft again. I'd played before in the two open betas, and then sometime in early 2007 when a friend sent me a 10-day trial invite, which I used up without getting the actual game. That same friend gave me another 10 days, and through some tortured reasoning in my feverish mind, I decided to get the actual game. It's changed a lot since the beta days.

One thing I notice about it, though, is the accessibility of it, even to people who've never played the Warcraft series of games (I'm guilty of that, yes). It's interesting how much it hints at this massive backstory beneath the world, but in the process of running up to an NPC and blindly hitting "accept" when they offer you a quest - which happens often due to every denizen of Azeroth needing your help - all that backstory gets lost. PvPers don't care about lore, and even players who stop to read the quest text and read the books lying about the world only get small snatches of the story that's going on. And it's such a sprawling, overgrown, convoluted story. Massive wars and heroes turned villains and corrupted magic and redemption litter every corner of the world. Hell, even cougars drop rare magical items sometimes. I've stayed up late reading the WoW Wiki, partly because of my nasty habit of getting fascinated with Wikis and clicking link after link after link, and I'm getting a sense of the Warcraft universe's story. And it's ginormous.

I imagine that Blizzard has done this to ensure that no matter what level you're at, every part of the world has something interesting about it, and has a sense of history. But how well does it work? Regions are more strongly defined in-game by their look and feel, as is the game itself. That's more a product of art direction than any writing. (In fact, it's due to this sense of atmosphere and feeling that I've said in the past I'd rather see a Diablo MMORPG from Blizzard than a Warcraft one.) The quests you go on, of course, were written by someone, and they're usually bookended by text or scripted dialogue involving NPCs, but the bulk of quests is killing things, which is the point of the game.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that WoW is a paradox. At the same time, the game is too big for the story, and the story is too big for the game. Reading it out of a game context, it makes me feel like I'm reading about the world of something like Lord of the Rings. Which isn't in and of itself bad; but in this case it's as if everyone has a copy of Lord of the Rings but isn't reading it, using it instead to bap each other over the head and yell "LOL N00B LERN 2 REED!"

My analogy starts to break down after this point, but you get my meaning.

At the same time, there's so much to do in-game, especially with whole ranks of people who only play for PvP, that the story falls by the wayside. I've seen one person say "Blood Elf lore makes me vomit," but that doesn't deter them from playing one bit. Story is incidental to enjoyment of the game, though the skeleton of it is there if the player wants to see it. But even in a world so large, there's too much story to fit into the game and still present to the player.

I have no idea how much of the bloated, twisting, convoluted story behind the Warcraft universe was actually imbued in the RTS series of games and how much has been added in order to function within the World of Warcraft gameworld. And I'm not saying it's really a bad thing. If I were designing an MMORPG that wasn't based off an existing lore, however, I would start with what framework of story was needed ingame, hinting at a greater story underneath to give a sense of depth. Ideally, as content changed and expanded, more story would be added with it, and the world would change and evolve in some ways, including new story-driven alterations to regions players had seen before, giving some incentive to go back and removing some of the monotony of a huge, sprawling, unchanging landscape like World of Warcraft.

In the end, however, I'm not convinced that the MMORPG is a format of game that really relies on story. A regular RPG certainly does, but once you add the MMO aspect to it, the model almost seems to break down.

Mission Statement

So, I'm a writer. Maybe not the best writer ever to exist, but I pride myself on having a way with words.

One of the potential jobs that I'm interested in is writing for videogames. Naturally, the videogame industry isn't the easiest to break into - it probably takes magnificent feats on the order of something that might actually be depicted in a videogame. But I think a good place to start is to write about videogames, and especially on their stories and the role of writing in them, as well as the plotlines for game concepts I've had myself.

If I do that, then eventually it's possible that will morph into writing for videogames as well, isn't it?