Words Words Words

RIFT has words. Lots and lots of words.

MMOs have a great deal of world building to do, more than a typical singleplayer game due to their far greater size and scope. Those that take place in an already established setting have it easier - a lot of the work has already been done for them before the game was ever made, and the devs can assume that the majority of their players will have at least some prior knowledge of the setting.

I have wondered at times about the experience of those players who come to games like Lord of the Rings Online, Star Wars The Old Republic or Star Trek Online without any prior knowledge of the source material, though it would be an achievement in itself to no know something of these settings going in since they're so omnipresent in popular culture.

In a way I've had something of this experience with Guild Wars 2. That I've never played the original Guild Wars might be part of why I find some of the storytelling in GW2 so sketchy, though I also feel that the brevity is an intentional choice by the devs to keep things moving quickly.

MMOs that aren't based on an already existing work have to get all that background in somewhere, and take a variety of approaches. Secret World Legends has a ton of exposition in the first hour or so, but draws a clear line between essential information and optional information. It helps that it's so well written and the voice acting is so good that it's all worth taking in.

City of Heroes keeps it simple early on, painting the world of the game in broad strokes of Good vs Evil, and it's obvious who's who because everyone dresses the part. There's a lot of good world building in the background but you don't need to know any of it to understand that the Hellions and the Skulls are bad guys and you should punch them.

Fallen Earth used to have a long tutorial sequence that, among other things, introduced each of the six factions individually. That's long gone and the current tutorial is shorter and faster paced, though there's still a fair amount of info to take in. Once out of the tutorial there's a lot less exposition, since most of the NPCs the character encounters - certainly in Sector One - have strictly local concerns and even those who are connected to something larger - like the Bankers and the Franklin's Riders - don't see much beyond their own small part.

Final Fantasy XIV takes a different approach, locking the player down like Malcolm McDowell in A Clockwork Orange and force feeding them with information. This is a Final Fantasy game though, so you knew going in that you were in for the death of a thousand cutscenes.

And then there's RIFT.

RIFT feels like the MMO equivalent of an epic fantasy novel series - epic in word count, at least. Every so often an NPC will drop a new batch of names and places and history into conversation.

"We were here when the Mathosian Empire was sundered. We were here as the Eth Empire crumbled back into the sands. We have been here since the Bloodstorm was cast down."

What?

I know what one of those things were, but the rest is just words words words, and all the NPCs in this game talk in Standard Fantasy English so after a while it all sounds the same. The delivery doesn't help ether, because it's all so flatly written.

"You're certain the soldier was slain by a wolf or yeti? This is awful, but thank you for bringing me the news. I only wish you'd had the chance to save him. I know you would have wanted that opportunity as well."

It's so stilted I had to look up where the game was originally developed, in case something had been lost in translation, but that's not the case. Trion were a US developer, so this is how it was meant to read.

Recently I spent an hour or so exploring two zones controlled by the Defiant faction (I was scouting out more dungeons) and since almost all of the NPCs were hostile to me I didn't talk to anyone. It took nothing away from the experience. In fact the world was more interesting when no one was explaining it.