WildStar Wednesday: Quest Text in 140 Characters (More or Less)
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Nobody likes being forced to read a wall of text. Especially not in an MMO, when you may have a group waiting on you or a Frost Giant trying to smash your character's head into an ice floe at the same time a bunch of exposition is competing for your attention. Therefore the narrative design team set about finding the minimum amount of text that can convey story and character without immediately being skipped over for the "tl;dr" of quest objectives and visual icons. After much trial and error, we settled on the Twitter-length text limit of 140 characters (i.e., letters, spaces or punctuation marks).
A tweet's worth of text is like a text molecule--not the smallest unit of text, but close to it. A word-o-cule, if you will. Need a bigger story? Add more word-o-cules. Want to strip the story down? Reduce that word-o-cule to a word-atom. This simple writing rule would come to require us to tell stories in modular chunks that the player can easily spot, read, and comprehend. Text so short you can't help but read it.
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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.
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Cinematics, on the other hand, take control away from the player momentarily while conveying plot twists and epic visual moments. These cinematics are a compact and effective way to drive home major story developments, especially those with a concrete impact on the area in which you're playing. Did your character manage to deactivate the Eldan weather machine? A cinematic will show this happening, and afterward the local weather might be drastically different. If we just stopped using the snow effect and threw a dialogue box telling you why, a player is unlikely to read that. They'd likely cancel out of the dialog box and not even notice until leaving that zone that the weather is different--but with a short but flashy cinematic, the player can't miss it.
