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: The thought I was getting to was, will there ever come a point when the death of an NPC in an MMO will make a player actually break down and weep?

There was such an attachment to them, you know, they’ve been going back to them for five hundred hours of gameplay, and now some big bad guy has come and killed them.

That’s why people remember Final Fantasy VII for fifteen years after they played it; the… I don’t want to spoil it for people who haven’t played it… but let’s just say that there is a…

Ragnar Tørnquist: [laughs] I think at this point, that spoiler’s not really a problem.

The MMO Gamer: Well, then let’s just leave it at that. I don’t need to get any angry emails.

Ragnar Tørnquist: [laughs] Yeah, no, absolutely, I do think so.

I think that to a large degree in an MMO attachment has a lot to do with time, and time invested in the character.

If there is a character in an MMO which you have been returning to, which has been sort of an important part of your progression through the game, to have that character then suddenly go away and never be able to visit them again? I think that would get an emotional response from people.

I think some people would cry and curse us, and hate us for doing that. So, it would be an interesting thing to try in the long run.

You can’t do that all the time, because the moment you cut out the character you also cut out a whole bunch of content, and you need to put something else in to make sure you compensate for that. But, it’s definitely something that we would like to think about in the long run.

The MMO Gamer: Let’s talk a little about the story delivery systems themselves, now.

Generally in MMOs, it’s a little box about three inches wide by four inches long telling you, “O, great (insert class here), you look like a strong (insert race here), could you please go to the next village over and yadda, yadda, yadda?”

How do you get past that? Is there even a way to get past that?

Ragnar Tørnquist: Yeah, there’s a way to get past that!

First off, you just have to care more when you make the game. Caring more is harder work, we’re seeing that; I mean, when we are developing and creating and implementing missions, we see that actually providing more context and more believable context is very hard, but it’s definitely worth it.

It makes people feel much more of a connection to the characters, and to the story. And our content isn’t dispensed in tiny boxes.

It’s done completely differently… and I can’t really tell you exactly what that means, but it will feel much more like console games, where the story is focused on adventures, where you are actually getting a story told through other means.

We’re not going to have that pop up box that says “Click Accept Here” that’s not going to be the way we do it.

The MMO Gamer: Alright, let’s move on to world building, now.

You’ve obviously drawn a number of myths and legends from the various stories of the real world… In the video I saw references to things that were evocative of everything from “The Lord of the Rings” to “Left 4 Dead.”

How do you sit down and decide where to start drawing all this stuff in, and then where you decide where to draw the line?

Ragnar Tørnquist: Yeah, drawing the line is always very hard.

We’ve been working on the setting and the universe for at least seven years-I’ve been working on it personally even longer than that.

We start very broadly, like arms stretch out for everything, and then we sort of try to narrow it down into the important elements while still referencing things that aren’t necessarily in the game now, but characters will mention things that might be in the game later on.

So, we are sort of pointing to different types of mythologies and legends and histories and, you know, conspiracies that we’re not really expanding upon now.

We are sort of saying, “No this is important, but it might pop up later on.”

We’re sort of narrowing it down, at least for launch, for the locations we have at launch.

So, when you go to London, it will be about London mythology and London legends, and those things associated with London. The same thing with Egypt, as well. That’s how we narrow it down. That’s how we choose what’s really important.

At the same time, we keep an eye on what’s our story, what’s our motivation behind this universe. What is happening, and that’s the sort of stuff we are not going to reveal, because that’s our unique take on everything. That’s the thing that adds the twist to everything else.

How is this in tune with this idea? Okay, this fits. This works. Okay, then we can use that. If it doesn’t, then we can eliminate it.

But it’s a hard process, and when you have a wealth of information to draw from, then it’s hard to be frugal, definitely.

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