Online Worlds Roundtable #16, Part Three
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The beauty of NPC text (and the reason we rely so heavily on it) is that it's relatively easy. Most companies have simple tools that allow writers to put it in the game themselves without any extra programming work.
The problem, of course, is that words are just not very immersive. Text is a very effective tool when it's part of a novel, surrounded by pages and pages of the same, but how can two paragraphs of two-dimensional words compete with a vibrant, alive, three-dimensional MMO world? In other words, the rest of the game actually wars with the story for the player's attention.
To end this competition, we need to make the story part of the world itself - start relying on the environment more to tell the story rather than the text. We can see aspects of this in the cinematics and cutscenes games have employed for years.
The trouble, however, is that we haven't yet gone far enough. Cutscenes are few and far between. They're not often interactive or dynamic. At best, they are rewards for completing a particularly climatic moment of gameplay. At worst, they are tedious dumps of too much information that repeat when you fail - driving you to stab yours eyes out after the fifteenth viewing.
At this point, we haven't pushed game development into the realm where the tools needed to tell an effective, immersive story are the highest priority for the development staff. Even if we assume in-game, pre-rendered sequences (perhaps the least expensive method), you still need ways to manipulate the camera, control the actors - both players and NPCs - the ability to trigger interesting events, and so on...
