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Storyboard: Anyone else but you
Welcome back to another installment of Storyboard, and another week of discussing romantic relationships in roleplaying. If you missed last week's column, it's a helpful primer, talking both about why it's a terrible idea and why the odds are high that you're going to do it anyway. And I can't criticize on that front -- I eat at McDonald's even though I know it's bad for me, I buy new Transformers even though I know it's not the best use of my money, and I watch Persons Unknown even though I know it's only going to last one season. Still, a bad idea is only as bad as you make it. To continue my above analogy, as long as I know the whole time that the show is only going to last one season, I can enjoy the heck out of that season. (It's not Lost, but it's pretty darn good.) And while you can't fix all of the fundamental problems with roleplaying relationships, you can do a lot to make sure that the course of love runs smoothly for the players, if not the characters.
The Daily Grind: Straight pointers or vague hints?
Quests do a lot of good for the MMO genre as a whole, but they do occasionally have the downside of turning the game into a series of flashing arrows from one destination to the next. World of Warcraft shows nearby quests on your map, just on the off chance you might miss them. Patch notes frequently involve telling players where to start the most recent new content. Guild Wars has been taking the opposite approach with its recent War in Kryta content, however -- there are no pointers, just small bursts of content that players can stumble across. Content without clearly defined start-to-finish markers certainly helps make the game more entertaining and immersive, and gives a stronger feeling of a world instead of a collection of fetch missions. On the other hand, it also runs the very real risk of players flying straight past the additions and never experiencing what's meant to help rope them in. Which do you prefer from a player perspective? Would you rather keep the feel of spontaneous discovery with the risk of missing something, or do you prefer a straightforward experience instead?
