LOTRO devs talk about... Achievements (is this on Xbox 360?) |
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No it's not. Achievements are just Turbine, Inc.'s way of telling a story in a genre where telling a story is nearly nigh impossible. After all, MMOs, by nature, are about interaction, not sit-down-and-listen, says Cardell "Annuvin" Kerr, Lord of the Rings Online Design Director, in Turbine's latest dev journal. So how do you tell a story in a game where it's hard to tell a story? And remember, we're talking about "?Lord of the Rings" here, where the story is what sells the experience in the first place!
Answer: Achievements. Yes, just like Xbox 360 Achievements, where the activities players do unlock these Achievements that go on their gaming record. Unlike the 360 Achievements, which are simply about bragging rights in Live, LOTRO Achievements are all about telling the story. Each Achievement comes with a narrative that somehow ties your activity and Achievement to the general LOTR story happening around you, says Content Designer Jesse "Vastin" King, who wrote that narrative.
Call it role-playing, Vastin implies, There are four categories of Achievements players can choose to achieve to build their life story: Socializer, Achiever, Explorer, and/or Killer. Pretty much self-explanatory terms, especially when you relate them to the LOTRO gameplay. Each Achievement also comes with a "title" of sorts - Vastin mentions something about wanting to collect these titles in your bag. Hmm... any "Sir Robin the Chicken-Hearted" Achievement in there? Or how about "Nazgul groupie"?
Well, seriously speaking, Achievements LOTRO-style look like a good way to bring a story to a game that generally resists storytelling, in a license that DEMANDS a story (and not just any story). Depending on how well-written these Achievements are, this may infuse an interesting life into a sortie in Middle-Earth - or make Achievement-hogging nuts out of players, like a few cases in Microsoft's console.
Oh, and if you're wondering why this writer's paired up Gandalf with Final Fantasy X's Tidus? Remember what he keeps saying? "Listen to my story... This is my story..." My, my, my. Get the point?
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