The Mana World Forums

Will TMW have an overarching plot line with quests that progress the story which unfolds as players play, like most other MMORPGs?
-If so, does anyone have anything in mind?
-If not, what structure will the game take?

Overarching epic questlines in the spirit of single player RPGs don't make much sense in the context of an MMORPG, in my opinion. When there are thousands of players and every player plays through the same story at the same time it would lead to awkward situations when you try to roleplay them. "I am the chosen one", "No, I am", "NO, I AM!!". Not everyone can be the big damn hero who single-handedly saves the world. There is also no plausible way to have the main quest take effect on the game world. You want one place in the story where the hero unintentionally activates an old artefact of doom, the sky turns purple and demons invade the world destroying multiple towns? When you do this in an MMO this will happen every few minutes and wouldn't have any emotional impact on the player anymore when its his turn to cause it.

So when we have an epic main quest it should be conceptualized in a way which makes sense when hundreds or thousands of people solve it parallel but at different times. I already wrote a basic outline for such a quest, but it was overtaken by the world development and now large parts of it don't make sense anymore:
http://wiki.themanaworld.org/index.php/Main_quest

Another aproach more viable for an MMORPG is the sandbox approach: No main storyline but a dynamic, immersive world where storys write themself through random events and player interaction. A concept for this can be found here:
http://wiki.themanaworld.org/index.php/Dynamic_Quests

Good story .

Crush wrote:Overarching epic questlines in the spirit of single player RPGs don't make much sense in the context of an MMORPG, in my opinion. When there are thousands of players and every player plays through the same story at the same time it would lead to awkward situations when you try to roleplay them. "I am the chosen one", "No, I am", "NO, I AM!!". Not everyone can be the big damn hero who single-handedly saves the world. There is also no plausible way to have the main quest take effect on the game world. You want one place in the story where the hero unintentionally activates an old artefact of doom, the sky turns purple and demons invade the world destroying multiple towns? When you do this in an MMO this will happen every few minutes and wouldn't have any emotional impact on the player anymore when its his turn to cause it.

Yup. I thought exactly the same thing. I rather like the idea of a sandbox game with dynamic quests where the game world and story is moulded by the players. Story quests that can plausibly be done by everyone would be good, but I don't think they should be essential to progress through the game.

sandbox vs epic questlines


i think the sandbox idea is good and can work with elements of a epic ....why not group some sandbox quest together to tell to give the pic of a bigger story and not just quest to quest...
why not have 4,5,6or 9 epics made up of 4-6 or so quest going on at the same time...
any way its what i think-skipy

Not really quests, but could be used as part of ideas for a story. There could be at some point new monsters come.. lots of them, like a certain amount and players could help each other kill the monsters and when a certain amount are killed something happens?