“What’s the story?” - David Braben Pens First Column for Develop

[Bungarus]

I am not a native Englisch speaker so please pardon if my writing is imperfect.

I am a veteran in computer gaming who is retiring from it now for a year or so, but hopes to find the time to come back to it. If I should sum up my experience with storylines in games I'd say: Quality is far more important than quantity. Keep it to the minimum, but do it well, create a haunting atmosphere, present a stunning world that makes my heart beat faster when I think of the possibility to be part of it. But then: Let me define my ways in there, don’t interrupt the game flow with linear storytelling that consumes my time and restricts my fantasy and my freedom in the game - and quite often annoys me.

I think in the future I will mainly be interested in playing MMOGs. I played two of them in the past, Mankind and Jumpgate, and I think in those games it is even more important not to overdo the scripted content. All that should be there are the outlines of an interesting world where the players create the storyline by their actions in the game. From the two games I mentioned, I liked the latter much more gameplay-wise, since I played E1 until Elite and really like space simulations since then, but I must say Mankind (RTS in space and on planets) was much more satisfying concerning every other aspect of gaming than gameplay. It was a real sandbox-type of MMOG with a maximum of freedom for the players.

I found it very annoying in Jumpgate that I had to chose one of three factions and was then confronted with the situation of hostilities between the factions just because "that is the story." I like to decide on my own who is my ally and who is my enemy, and I like to base these decisions on experiences I make in the game with individual persons or organizations they belong to (military and / or political organizations like guilds, defensive pacts etc.).

The guilds in Mankind were very advanced, almost state-like organizations, with elected or monarchic governments, ministries, constitutions, diplomatic relations etc. It was fascinating. Compared to that most squads in Jumpgate were merely lose combat groups within a faction, following the scripted storyline of faction war and hunting the evil AI-NPCs. In Mankind, there even was a guild that played the role of a university; one of their projects was an Encyclopaedia Galactica where they kept track of the history of the galaxy that evolved around the relations and wars between the guilds and alliances and actions of famous single players – it was brilliant stuff. That is definitely the kind of storytelling I prefer in an MMOG.