Story Structure Speculation

Well, i said it before. Given that we are playing a mercenary, I am interested in seeing interesting short stories collection each with a cast of interesting and bright NPCs that can serve as adventuring aids to a solo player and provide a bit of background colour for MP people.

I think this type of approach will be novel and will let solo folks enjoy the side of BioWare writing they did not see before if they did not play FPs and Operations in Swtor & bring back bioware’s Old talent of writing an episodic character that catches your eye and is just awesome/bright and does not move in with you and follow you for 100+ hours and providing you with the background farming option.

Also gives BioWare space to create those short stories with separate beginnings, middles and ends without sticking them all in loyalty missions, and stop trying to keep laboriously pushing the main storyline wellpast when the “end” was resolving the issue with the snowballing consequences and involvements and the “story so far....”

Finally lets the player part with the characters Fairily fast instead of being forced to accept “plot important” for all eternity.

I mean, Bio is a brilliant character writer, so capitalizing on that without trying to browbeat it into the barely related storyline like in ME2 might not be a bad idea. Like imagine ME2 that is about a mercenary that helps all those cool characters without collecting them as companions for the sake of overarching plot that just gets in the way.

I covered some of my speculation in the How To Achieve SP With Seamless Co-op thread. I believe the two are deeply linked: how you implement a good narrative depends on how co-op and SP are implemented as well.

I don't think a sweeping epic like HZD is possible in this format. It's hard enough to balance narrative vs. agency in a 100% SP experience, how the hell does a writer do it with dynamically changing co-op groups? That said, it would be possible to do a sweeping epic iff your character is more of an observer than the lead. Kind of like how, in Star Wars Rogue One, there is this side-story going on, set against the backdrop of the grander epic. The world as a whole may be experiencing an epic story, but you're more or less swept along and react to it, rather than driving it. You are Jyn, not Luke.

Or, it's a bunch of faction or separate story threads, that are not really tied together other than having a shared environment.

Recast for the story perspective, my speculation bullet items:

It really is a shared world.

Whoever progresses the story, solo or with co-op friends, progresses the story for everyone in the instance, period. If a friend misses out on some story stage, tough luck, they missed it and have to catch up with where the story stands today. The only way to get a do-over is to start a new game/character.

This is probably the simplest implementation, but is also the least enjoyable experience, despite it being the most "realistic".

Parallel world McGuffin

Everyone gets their own instance, just like Soulsbourne. You can invite friends, but their experience of the story in their own instance has no bearing on yours. They can tell you spoilers over VOIP, but nothing they do in your instance has an impact on the story of their own instance, and likewise, any decision you make in your instance has no impact on theirs.

This is also relatively simple to implement, but again, not a very enjoyable experience, and clunky to justify with in-game lore. Some kind of quantum parallel world McGuffin? In which characters are fully aware of parallel worlds, in order to bring character knowledge into alignment with player knowledge?

Multiple variations of a story quest

The system detects that members of your co-op team have already completed this story stage, and alters details of who, what, how and why in the story, while still using the same high-level plot template. So when your friend did this story quest, it was rival gangs fighting over a trading depot outside the Hub, but when that friend helps you do the same quest, it's two brothers in a single large, extended family fighting over the depot. The decisions you make and the plot are the same, but the NPCs and motivations are different.

A slight alternative of just unrelated variations is for each story quest to have a progression of stages which are only seen if multiple friends play through the same "quest". For example, Variant 1 is two rival gangs (see above) and you help one gang or the other take control of the depot, while Variant 2 is the gang that was selected in Variant 1 having an internal dispute, with two capos wanting to depose the capo di tutti capi, and you side with one capo or the other, and Variant 3 is a bunch of Freelancers coming in and cleaning out the crime boss running the place, restoring the depot to Hub control. Whoever of your friends or you get to the story quest first get Variant 1. Whoever gets there second -- which may include the player who did Variant 1 in the co-op team -- does Variant 2, and so on.

Medium hard to implement and will eventually hit a limit. You can only rewrite so many variations of the same story. The variations have to be done by hand, as well, because just changing the names or colors of the gangs randomly isn't going to be very interesting to play through multiple times.

Split up your friends and isolate them from key decisions

You experience the story more-or-less solo. Your friends are just supporting characters, much like the ME3 Citadel DLC "Citadel Archives" quest. Your friends join you for battles and non-plot oriented parts, but when it comes to cutscenes and decisions, they are either just in the background with no speaking part, or physically isolated in some other area, doing recon or sweeping up survivors.

Easy to implement, should also be a pretty good experience, if a bit contrived.

The way I understand it, in the first case whenever the dialogue pops up everyone becomes the Player 1 and makes his or her decisions and interact with the NPcs/environment, the other people need not know what you said and choice, they are enjoying their own version of the dialogue.

In the second one, it's like in SWTOR, you come along in the story instance, but the guy who owns the Class story is the main character and the game ignores the friends (they only fight and spectate). For example, my Consular and her companion sits in the jail-cell next to my husband's Knight and Kira, but everyone acts like the only prisoner is the Knight and Kira.

Yeah, but it only works when you have separate class stories like in Swtor so you do each other’s instances as you clear the planet as a trade off. Otherwise, why would you spend your precious gaming time on fighting and spectating for someone else?

No, I can't see spectating friend even if you take turns as mission lead. With class stories it made sense. I played with two girlfriends, and we all rolled different Imperial classes, so we all went through the three class stories while doing the planet in swtor. But if the entire is story is shared, how can you give up Player 1 to someone else?

I can see it now:

"ah, good game mate!"
"yeah let's watch the scene together no problem"
"Ooh, that chick is hot, romance her"
"wait, what are you doing?"
"Nooo, not the fat one!"
"My eyes, I don't want to see this, how do skip this?"
MESSAGE: CAN NOT SKIP CUTSCENES.
"Friendship. over."

It was not random, you won your roll I don't mind that and how in operations all cutscenes focused on your character for each player moving the others to the background Overall, I probably only will have time/desire to play the game anyway if they would have solo version with the support god-tier NPCs rather than with "friends" MP dailies stuff.

In parallel world, each player has their own instance of persistence, exactly like Soulsbourne. Nothing is shared

"Split up your friends", assumes a shared world, but if your friend has already played the "lead" role (the character who gets to make key decisions) in a particular story quest, the system prevents that friend from making that decision again, they can only enter the quest as a side-kick.  You could kind of think of it as a serially parallel world, where everything non-quest related is shared, but everything story related is solo, or at least, lead character with silent side kicks.

Arguably, from the friend's character point of view, it is a parallel world, since they are deja vuing the same quest again, only from a different perspective.

Well, it works well in Swtor because it is for class stories, and there are 4 different ones, so as long as you picked a different class story you can play the rest of the things on the planet together, but trade off the class story spectating/participation. If it is the same story, unless there are some specific benefit to taking a low level player through it, there zero reason to replay the story instances with mmo-friends. So we are down to gagging in the Gen chat for someone to run it with you...

Well, Destiny does a “Guided Game” bit to encourage player clans to Sherpa solo players through the endgame content. I don’t know what the reward is, never been on that side of it, but they could create special rewards for helping other players out with their content.