Does an MMO need a story?

i tell you an mmorpg without a story is like a person without a personality. That is what cataclysm has become for wow.

I have to admit that I'm getting used to the voice over that going back to text base questing like in wow would be very boring.

Every thing you listed except the more responsive combat and space combat I agree. However, I don't agree on the flash point, operation, lfg, and more warzones. If you played wow before lfg you would realize wow was more story base than what it is now or even in woltk. Wow has no immersion at moment. That is why a lot of people are leaving.

As for making your own story that is unacceptable to me. Any game including wow should have a rigid story. That's another grip I have with wow. The more wow drifted from warcraft 3 the worst the story became due to the fact that Blizzard was creating the story to fit with their raid instances. A raid instance is epic if it has an excellent story and game mechanics. That is why ulduar and Naxxramas were unique. Ice crown was another good raid instance in part cause it mark the end of the warcraft series story with the death of arthas.

Cataclysm and that panda expansion will never match up to vanilla, bc, or woltk due to the lack of story. Each raid instance and boss feels hollow almost like Blizzard wants each boss to be a loot pinata. Thus, Blizzard wants you to become a gear whore cause it's easier to create new bosses that drops higher level gear, but with very little story and poor mechanics like what we have in cataclysm. The opposite is more difficult and requires a good story and mechanics.

A good story for a raid doesn't just start when you enter the raid, but is the culmination of many quest and is built into the story to be final encounter of a story arc. That is what naxxramas, icecrown citadel, black temple, tk, and ssc had that was unique. Each of hose raid had a unique end raid boss that was rich with lore/story.

BW isn't there. They need to improve game mechanics and have better boss mechanics. BW has the story part down, but needs to improve in other areas as I mention. Also needs to come out with non-buggy raid instances.

Personally, I think naxxramas 40 man in vanilla was epitome of end game raiding. You needed 40 people to coordinate and every single person needed to play perfect to defeat Kel'Thuzad.

Here is link to the original boss fight not the dump down version of woltk:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JFCvFepmQX0

As the lore in WoW is what really drew me in. If it was just me as (I mained a warlock 5ish years) an undead shooting shadow bolts at stupid stuff I didn't care about I would have never stuck. Sylvanna Windrunner was the head of the undercity. I forget how she got turned into a banshee... Something to do with Arthas I think..

What swtor has going for it is the story, people will stick around ad long as they feel the game elements are improving, which they seem to be with the upcoming 1.2 and the story is continued and expanded. You discount story and lore way too much.

I forgot to answer the question posted so I'm editing. Yes an MMO most definetely needs a story. A dang good one in fact.

Then they go a ruin the entire experience with the grind of repeating dailies and that the Flashpoints, Warzones and Operations are all instanced (with teleports/queues into warzones).

So we have the makings of a good MMORPG and the end game is a bunch of FPS style mini games.

Can't say I'm surprised by that. It's an unfortunate fact that artificial imagination hasn't been invented yet, so endgame content will inevitably start to repeat itself sooner or later. And since this is still a relatively new game, it's more likely to be sooner than later. I'm hoping that with time, the storylines will be extended with new human-created content and the variety of endgame content will be increased to offset the onset of boredom.

Anarchy Online has a mission generation system that supposedly produces unique content on demand, but in reality it's based on a very limited set of rules. There's five different basic types of missions, but the gameplay in each of them is mostly the same, with the only difference being the action needed to complete the mission. Each type has two or three different backstories (with randomly filled names, serial numbers and such), but these are irrelevant and not really worth paying attention to after you've seen them once or twice. It's a fairly similar system to SW:TOR's crew skills in fact, except that you get to run the missions yourself instead of letting your crew handle them while you concentrate on something more important.

Yes. Fully agreed.

Is this policy of BioWare good or bad? Hard to say. It's a choice. Don't call it a game, call it an interactive movie, or a story with some gameplay in the mid... But it works. Sales of ME3 show it.

Once people were reading books. Or going to cinema. Or watching a painting. Or listening to a symphony. Now they play an electronic application, which has lots of different languages combined. Wagner would be pleased.

Personally I like it in single-player games. In multiplayer it promises well, as I pointed out some pages before. It just needs some more opening to other players, and would be just perfect.

... wow... i did not realise that i was able to disagree so strongly with any one person... Thank you for helping me reach an entire new level of silent disagreement.

You sir, are not my favorite person.

okay, reading through this thread... I know many of you where not around for pre-cu, you look at swg after life support, before, it was still thriving.
1.7 million comes up alot, that was in december, the month it opened.
Many of you have no idea what MMO meant, just what it means now. And it ain't anything for me.
-as for roles, yeah choose either healer,dps or tank. Don't actually Roleplay, cause that seemed to vanish some where when wow opened its doors.
-for those around for SWG pre-cu Patch 14 to be exact, that game was getting to the point of awesomeness, just needed some form of fixes, i've never played such a great game, other than EQ1, if you looked at it like a grind, you werent living or thriving in the world at all.

^ this.


I like a good story, everyone does. Problem is, I want to be a factor in that story in an MMO, not merely a bystander that observes it. One of the most innovative ideas in gaming came in WOW where the world changed based on whether you had completed a quest in the game. That's a good idea- what you do affects the world.

Problem was , it affected it only one way, and so therefore once again became irrelevant.

When I first started playing SWTOR I paid attention to every nuance in my choices thinking there was significance to them. Later on, I just started smacking the space bar when I realized nothing made any real difference in the end. Even now, the development staff is starting to remove restrictions on high end lightsaber crystals to cater to the whiners. In the end light and dark will simply mean the color of your skin.

As the Emperor says: "Anakin, you have long desired to be jedi of importance and lead a life of some relevance"

I agree. While its fun to be jedi, its far more entertaining to be THE jedi.

My god is Gankdalf still around? He had "quit" like mid-December I thought.

Professional troll is professional.

the sad truth about the voice acting that I have not notice many people mention is have you ever actaully counted how many NPC quest givers don't speak basic

fully voice MMO is utter rubbish its not even close they did do a lot of VO work but they used just as many if not more random made up alien languages with subtitles

smoke and mirrors