Æon
The Darklight Hero
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Well, AQW is more gameplay (if you can call it that) and item-based, so a solid, unbroken story is a lot harder to come by.
Especially with all the breaks in-between story releases. Time is divided up between holidays, birthdays, and even random events (the stick of butter thing, the chicken war).
The thing about AQW is that it's a live game. The primary breadwinner of the company, even.
While you can afford to set aside a few weeks in DF to spell out a fantastic story, in AQW you have to deal with:
—The fact that it's a multiplayer game.
With a few hundred paying customers, the company can't afford to NOT have an interactive (or at least somewhat meaningful) release each week. If something were to jive the wrong way with their customers, they'd lose money fast. Which is lame, because I'd love for the company to set aside a week or two—maybe even the first week of each month—to address major bugs, glitches, and even revamp old areas of the game.
Unlike a static game like DF, where you can play offline and enjoy things at your leisure, AQW thrives on new, "interesting" content each week—which doesn't always include a story.
—Asset Building
In DF, you can easily build a cutscene-only quest with slightly-edited art assets and lots and lots of text. You can't do that in AQW.
Sure, we could get away with reusing some of our stuff—but a lot of kids wouldn't want to sit through tons of "boring" dialogue without moving their characters around and punching innocent monsters—even at the cost of alienating players like yourselves, who'd enjoy a a nice story.
And even for a team like ours, it takes a while to have the necessary assets built in time—specially for background scenery and new monsters & NPCs. If an ongoing story is ever broken up between releases, it's usually because we needed a "break" to get the physical assets flushed out in time. Not to mention we have to get approval for them, and have everything tested...
Now for the cutscenes...ugh. The cutscenes are what really get the story across in AQW—but they take a REALLY long time to animate—even for just one. Ghost spends the entire week, up until the release goes live, working on the cutscenes for that week. So he doesn't have any time to get a head start on the next week's cutscenes, not with all the music and stuff he has to create as well.
Adding to that, scripts need to be trimmed down HEAVILY (dialogue > action) in order to make things easier on him. If anyone of you entered the Design-a-Release contest last year, you'll remember how that was emphasized with the sample script.
Shorter, less detailed cutscenes means you get less of the story across—and you can only be so creative with the quest text and NPC dialogue. And a cutscene-only release in AQW, like in DragonFable? Out of the question (too much time, assets, and resources allocated into something with limited interactivity).
—The Audience
Again, even though there are tons of players like you guys who enjoy the underlying story (and you have my thanks for that)—there are tons MORE players who literally log in every week just to see what the new release is, what new gear it has, and then log out and not play again until the next week. See how many people just chill in /yulgar? There are plenty of them on Twitter. But again, THOSE people also help keep the company afloat by buying gear and ACs. So you can see why the company isn't opposed to creating recolors, dual-wield variants, etc. all the time...
—Holidays
This, I want to say as a writer, is the single-most annoying thing that interferes with the story process. There's literally a holiday every other week, especially those in other countries, that need some sort of dedicated release. And of course, that cuts into the allotted story slots HEAVILY. In fact, once October starts, there's literally no other room for non-holiday stuff up until after the new year.
In DF, at least, an entire month or more is set aside for a holiday story.
—Other Game Features
It's actually pretty apparent on the Forums, but I mean, think about classes. It's probably the single hottest topic between here and DragonFable's forums, even though most of AQW's classes are just minor tweaks and clones of each other. A lot of people (for some reason) care about skills, damage, and PvP—and of course, it's prioritized over the story. I'm sure many of you can name more class designers than you can writers. :P
And then, of course, there's all the gear, items, and bonuses that everyone wants...
—Executive Override
We've got plenty of ideas and plenty of stories—but sometimes, they just don't make the cut with the higher-ups. Sometimes in favor of the above reasons, and sometimes because of time/resource constraints. Things are pushed back a LOT. And again, a LOT of paying players could care less about the story than the items that come with it—some literally skip through cutscenes and dialogue and don't even realize (or care) that it's there.
Which is ironic...since DragonFable literally gets its fame from the amazing stories (and combat system) it has. It's also a lot less cartoon-y and more realistic. (The other games should really take a leaf out of its book...)
AQW, on the other hand, seems to thrive on humor and randomness. There's not much to like about it, but it is what it is.
—The Story Itself
This is where it gets tricky. AQW has several writers, including Artix, and we all have very different ideas. Canons conflict, and AQW's timeline placement is just messed up. One week, we're helping village peasants, the next week, we're somehow in space fighting robot-cyborg-zombies in a quasi-medieval setting. The week after? We've just discovered that we're some draconic god entity and yet we still can't beat a giant tentacle lady. The story is literally ALL OVER the place. And while that may keep things fun and interesting for some players, it also makes it very difficult for any sort of storyline to get started. Some (if not most) players would prefer a solid, overarching storyline (like this past ToD saga); but others prefer a random schedule so they don't know what's coming up next. It's...not easy to deal with, that's for sure.
There's also the question of writers. It'd be easy if it was just one writer, like Artix, who wrote everything—that way, there'd be a single, continuous flow at the very least. But AQW has multiple writers, and each one has their own story to tell. So Artix can't just take over Laken's storyline, cause it's his, and Inanitas can't just take over Memet's. Different stories get different priorities, and things are assigned so that each writer has at least one shot at writing something each year.
If I wanted to have a single story arc (outside of the main storyline) fleshed out, not including breaks between releases, it would take 2 or more years to secure the timeslots for maybe 5-6 releases. Especially since it's not a high priority. In comparison, the script for an entire saga would take less than 2-3 days to write.
And this doesn't factor in releases getting pushed back because of delays, promotional stuff for other games, or random ideas that the higher-ups come up with.
(apologies for the wall of text—I'm racking my brains trying to remember this stuff, but hopefully it'll give you guys a little more insight)
@Phastore
Hiya! No, I don't have anything to do with the Dage vs. Laken storyline—though I know Laken's already gotten most of it figured out. It just needs another release or two to finish up. And with all the reviews it's gotten, there's no way the team would forget about it.
And nope, I don't have anything to do with the current QoM saga. Not at the moment, anyway.
@Veya
quote:
You know, this only serves to make me indulge into random rants further, I am pretty sure I give at least 2 rants per week already around these parts.
I don't mind! You and Shiny_Underpants generate some really interesting discussions around the Forums.
< Message edited by Æon -- 10/21/2016 0:12:58 >
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