Ragnar Tørnquist: Storytelling and World Building in The Secret World

By Steven Crews | April 8, 2009 | | Filed under: Events, Features, Interviews | Tags: Funcom, The Secret World

The MMO Gamer: That’s a whole other issue; you could make a character on launch day, and the village you start in is under attack, then a year later you decide to roll an alt… and the village is still under attack, from the exact same guys, with the exact same quests you have to do to save it.

Ragnar Tørnquist: That’s a goal we have, actually; to make sure that it doesn’t just feel like you’re treading water all the time.

If we could sacrifice content at the altar of story, I would love to do that.

The MMO Gamer: Do any MMOs these days even have a story to sacrifice to in the first place?

Ragnar Tørnquist: I think most MMOs treat their story primarily as spice or sort of texture, and that’s fine.

Their stories are largely just backstory-if you want to read on the website, or read the literature, you can go and see how things ended up the way they are now.

We’re doing that too, of course. But, very few MMOs are integrating the story into how you play and experience the game like we are.

We have a couple of mechanics, that we’re not ready to reveal yet, which make the story something you play, not just something you read about. Makes it feel like it’s an important part of the game, rather than something that’s just there. You really need it.

And also the way we communicate the story in the game; we’re doing that differently than other games. We’re putting a lot of emphasis on that, and we’re building very strong characters, very story stories that you can go out and explore.

Hopefully all of that combined, and all of that team’s skill in telling stories from Longest Journey, and Dreamfall, and Anarchy Online, and Conan means that it definitely feel like a game where the story has more importance and it feels a lot stronger.

It will be also be interesting to see what BioWare does with Star Wars, because they are also emphasizing the storyline. But I think they’ll do it differently than we do it.

The MMO Gamer: Going back to a point you made earlier about the characters who say, “Thank you, you’re the hero. You saved us all…”

If I recall correctly from English 101, characterization is one of the most important aspects to storytelling. Most characters, or NPCs, I should say, in MMOs these days are just your boilerplate hapless farmers, or the king’s squire who wants you to go out and kill 15 Orcs.

How does a player come to care about a character in an MMO who is giving them a quest, and not just have it become a random mission dispenser?

Is any focus going into that at all?

Ragnar Tørnquist: We are putting focus into that but yeah, it’s hard. A lot of the times for people NPCs do just become mission terminals, a place to just go and get whatever mission you need, or a cool item.

Really, that’s the thing that matters: How do care about somebody when you know that whatever you do is not going to really affect their destiny in any way? That it’s just sort of a static person.

I think there are a couple of ways to solve that. First off, the easiest way, at least for us with our experience, is that they need to be well written characters.

They really need to be interesting and cool, and-again, we are doing things which we’re not ready to reveal until I can actually show it to you, because it’s the kind of thing that you show don’t tell.

The MMO Gamer: Well, without showing too much, how do you get an NPC in an MMO to not be as static?

Ragnar Tørnquist: It’s the way we sort of present the gameplay, and the way we present the characters, and the way people interact with them.

It’s going to make it feel more interesting when you’ll be able to actually talk to these characters and learn about them and sort of dig in to their histories a little bit, not just have them be somebody who says [robotically] “Greetings, I need you to kill 15 Orcs!”

That’s something we’re trying to avoid, by doing it in a much more cinematic way than I think most MMOs are doing.

At the same time, also, how can you affect these characters? Well, we have gameplay which is more about learning secrets, and finding out things that other players may not know. So that will also play into how people will feel about these characters.

But obviously, you’re not going to be able to kill an NPC [laughs] and that NPC is then gone from the world and you affect the world in that way.

So, that will still remain a challenge, but like I said, I would love for the game after launch to be a changeable, in a mutable state where you can actually-suddenly a character is gone because something happened, I mean that would be fantastic, because then people would start caring. Maybe this character won’t be around forever, you know?

The MMO Gamer: What do you mean by caring? If that character, as you said, isn’t there anymore, would there be an emotional attachment?

That’s another problem with characters in a present day MMO, you move from one to the next constantly without ever getting a real feel for who they are, why they’re there, why they want you to kill fifteen Orcs…

Ragnar Tørnquist: Yep! That we’re putting a lot of focus on, though. There’s always a reason for them being there, what they’re doing, what they’re asking you to do and then it’s not like, this is not going to be a game where characters randomly tell you to go and do something.

There will always be a very strong incentive behind it, and you will always be able to revisit characters and learn more about them. Most characters will have a sense of progression when you interact with them.

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