Lee Hammock Talks Post-Apocalyptic Storytelling in Fallen Earth

By Steven Crews | June 23, 2009 | | Filed under: Features, Interviews

The MMO Gamer: The counter to that is, which to a player would be more memorable? The ten guys they fight throughout the entire game or the thousand guys that they have to fight, ten guys per day, every day that they play?

Lee Hammock: Well, I would agree with you. The one guy is more memorable. But, the one guy every hour is not necessarily what gets them… basically it’s not getting them that regular excitement.

Because most people don’t even read the quest text.

The MMO Gamer: Ah, that’s a whole other giant issue. But, I’ll get into that after your answer.

Lee Hammock: Well, most players, when they get into a game, they will go in, they’ll take all the missions they can and they’ll go out in whatever direction is most sufficient for them.

Trying to get those people into the story is hard. You can do it, but at the same time you have to give people enough to do to keep going.

While at the same time providing challenges and stuff like that, that everyone can go through multiple times.

You know, because nobody can create content so fast that it outruns the people who are playing it.

The MMO Gamer: Except City of Heroes with the architect patch. That was an interesting move.

Lee Hammock: It was interesting. But very repetitive. I mean it’s kind of like, yeah, it’s the same building, the same dudes.

The MMO Gamer: That was always the problem with City of Heroes even without the architect patch.

You had office number one, cave number three, sewer number five….

Lee Hammock: Exactly. Which is why I got up to the 30th level was like okay, I feel like I’ve seen everything in this game.

The MMO Gamer: That was pretty much the same for me. And I’m sorry, did I interrupt you?

Lee Hammock: No, I don’t think so. But you said you wanted to go on to people not reading the quest text.

The MMO Gamer: Right. Of course, that’s been the bane of pretty much every MMO on the market.

And that’s due in large part to the fact that, because of those kill fifteen guys quest, players go into new games now with the expectation that they don’t have to read the quest text. It’s going to be boilerplate crap, basically.

These days they even put a little dot on the map for you, and an objective on the right side of the screen, telling you exactly where to go and what to do.

So there’s not even really a point to the quest text anymore. You might as well just have a box that pops up saying, hey, kill fifteen rats, I’ll give you this rusty dagger and five copper. Accept. And that’s it.

How do you begin to train people to realize that in your game that’s not the way things work, and there actually is a story worth experiencing there?

Lee Hammock: Well, we’ve tried to do that in a number of ways.

One thing, we do have waypoints on some of our missions because we initially didn’t have waypoints on any of them. And our world is so big, people would basically be like okay, you know, go south of here and look for the rock or whatever.

And hey, there are some raiders there and they have this widget I want back. But the problem is if somebody missed the rock, they could literally wander around for an hour and be like “Where’s the damn rock?”

What we have tried to do, for folks, is, set it up where if you read the text there is more information there. For example, in some towns if you read the text you’ll find other missions or other areas. People will talk about in the flavor texts, “Hey, here is this other area you can go to,” if you happen to read it.

And we also have a lot of conversers set up in towns, we have a lot more flavor text conversers than most games.

And also, one of the things, for example, WoW does, and Warhammer to some extent, when you talk to an NPC who has a mission, it just brings up a text. It says “Hey, here’s my mission.” And you click accept or deny. And that’s all that it is.

We actually have a conversation system where you can click on someone and he’ll say, “Hey, how’s it going?” You can say, it’s fine or do you have work? Or “Hey, that’s a big chicken!”

And you have this whole list of responses, so you can actually go through a whole conversation with someone, possibly getting different missions or different options for what you want to do, meanwhile finding out more about them and more about the story through that conversation.

A lot of times we’ll have NPCs in town that their only job is to have those conversations. They be just like, hey, the Franklin’s Riders, who are like the mailmen, if you go find them in a town, a lot of the time they have the conversation that is basically, here’s all the important people in town, here’s what is going on in town, here’s the story, here’s where all the merchants are if you want to find them.

So it’s, you know in WoW you can go and talk to a guard, and he’s like here is where all the stuff is and that’s all he tells you. He won’t tell you what the story is, who’s looking for work, you know, any of that stuff. So we’ve got a lot more options in terms of conversations with people than other MMOs.

The MMO Gamer: You mentioned that conversations can lead you to different quests. Are any of them truly non-linear?

When you’re talking to an NPC, can one line of discussion lead you down one path, while another line might lead you down a complete polar opposite path?

Lee Hammock: We do have branching mission trees where basically if you choose down one tree you can’t go do the other one. They are not non-liner in the sense that you can do them in any order you want.

It is very much a, you know… basically you are given choice A. You can choose A-1 or A-2. And then from A-1 you can choose B-1 or B-2. So we can have this huge tree of choices, based on what you want to do.

The thing is, the way our system works, you have to kind of… the choice for example, if you basically got this mission where this guy said, hey, take this piece of paper somewhere or take this widget somewhere, and give it to this person, we could have a conversation option for, you know, give it to this other person, or you know, do this other thing with it.

The MMO Gamer: That’s interesting. There seems to be reluctance on the part of many developers to even attempt anything of that sort.

The feeling seems to be, if we do the non-linear go kill rats quests, we’re 100% certain that players are going to use that content.

If you give the player additional options there’s no guarantee they’re actually going to use them, and we’ll probably just end up wasting a whole lot of money on content no one will ever see.

So, better to just play it safe.

Lee Hammock: We have a very heavy emphasis on re-playability in general. For example, we have enough content where you can play through the game multiple times, three or four times without ever having to go to the same places.

In a lot of games like WoW for example, where everybody ends up in Stranglethorn Vale eventually. And we don’t really have places like that.

I mean sure, if you have multiple characters who are the same faction, you are going to see a lot of the same stuff. But if you are not in the same faction, you can go to all the different towns, if you don’t want to be part of any faction, you can do that, if you want to go do PvP you can go do it, if you want to completely ignore PvP you can do that, if you want to play a crafter you can do that, if you want to play someone who ignores all the crafting, you can do that too.

So basically we are trying to give a lot of people different experiences in different areas with different content, and in a lot of that the branching stuff plays into that.

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