Ten Ton Hammer - Taking MMO Gamers to the Next Level!

This week’s WildStar Wednesday is inspired by the “TweetQuest” talk given by WildStar Senior Narrative Designer Cory Herndon at GDC 2011 and is all about bringing down the wall of text and telling a better story with less words and more visuals.

One thing many players dislike having to do is sit through tons of quest text while they’re trying to grind out a level. Then again, there are those of us that soak up every line of story a game has to offer. But what’s the right amount? Where does just enough quest text become too much? That’s a question Herndon attempts to address in this week’s WildStar Wednesday.

Herndon explains what the Carbine devs are doing to make the WildStar quest text just right – giving it a Twitter style limit of 140 characters. That’s right folks; the quest text will be the length of a tweet. The devs hope that this will inspire people to read what they write so that all that effort to craft a narrative for the world doesn’t go to waste.

Don’t worry lore junkies. If you’re looking for more detailed story, Herndon does state that the team has written lots of extra story and lore that you may never see while out doing the usual questing, but may rather find its way into the game via an archive and through other methods.

If you want to deliver a story in an MMO, it's important to remember that story does not necessarily equal onscreen text or mountains of exposition. There are plenty of other tools that can tear down the walls of text. These include things like VO (voiceover), visuals, animations, cut scenes, and music cues, none of which require text-averse players to waste precious eyespace with words. But you don't have to know everything that's going on word-for-word to know what is happening in the story.

Learn more about what the devs have in store for the story in this week’s WildStar Wednesday.

Source: WildStar Wednesday – Part 1: Less Text, More Story