Narrative

Narratives (Meta-stories) that play out on a particular server are driven by various story arcs.

There is of course a meta-story. That meta-story gets informed by regional stories and regional outcomes; and depending on how players progress within their personal stories, that could be either racially based or could be their class-based. They could be a per-node basis. All of those things support a grand structure of the meta-narrative. – Steven Sharif

Narrative events

Narrative Events help shape the story of Verra based on the choices that players make during key questlines. While narrative story arcs take time to develop across a server, Narrative Events will show players that their choices play a bigger part in shaping the world around them through individual actions. – Peter Bisulca

Narrative events allow players to shape the story arcs that unfold on their server through the choices they make in key questlines.

• It is possible for some storylines to relate to a darker/evil path, if a character should choose.

Story arcs

Depiction of Laria Lemonte, an important character in Ashes of Creation lore.

Story arcs drive narratives that play out on a particular server. Within these story arcs are specific points that can pivot to tell different stories based on predicates in the world.

Within the context of these story arcs, there are specific points that they can pivot to tell a different story. That different story can be based on predicates that are in the world: from a player decision standpoint, from a cultural representation standpoint, from situational to which node gets developed. There's a lot of different components that interact with the way the dialogue and narratives play out on a particular server; and what that means is- and I've said this from the beginning many sandbox MMORPGS, they do not create as much curated content as theme-park MMORPGS; and their excuse for doing that is because they incorporate player-driven mechanics. But that's a bit of a cop-out and it's the opposite approach that we've taken with Ashes of Creation; and the reason for that is, if you give the player a door and there's nothing behind that door then opening the door is meaningless. So what we have to do is we have to create a very functional story arc system that provides content in many different ways, but is behind a door of world progress or world development that is then executed by the player population. And that's how we construct our narrative systems. – Steven Sharif

• Player decisions and personal or class-based quest lines.
  • It is possible for some storylines to relate to a darker/evil path, if a character should choose.

Even player driven mechanics will still have story components. There will be a reason why the player driven mechanic is available or required of the player; so you know every system that's created touches a story. – Steven Sharif

• Cultural representation and cultural quest lines.

• Regional quest lines.

• Node development.

Every stage a node develops it's unlocking narratives, storylines, it's changing the spawn population of the area around it, changing what bosses exist, it's triggering events where you may have legendary dragons attack the city. It's basically writing the story of the server based on the actions and determination of the players. So, you may experience a dungeon one month earlier and have a completely different story that relates to this location the next month, because something has changed either geopolitically or from the node standpoint. – Steven Sharif

Some of the following information has not been recently confirmed by the developers and may not be on the current development roadmap.

Certain story arcs can be unlocked through the bulletin board system. Certain requirements would need to be met in order to access story arc quests.

• Mayors require certain resources.
• Buildings are required within a node.
• Social organization tasks need to be completed.

Player driven narrative

The world of Verra will be the same on each server, but Nodes will develop differently. Different servers will have different narratives. Things that happen on one server may not happen on another.

• The overarching narrative of Ashes of Creation is that players are the returning children of Verra but they will not be characterized individually as "saviors".

We want as many people as possible to experience the main server Narrative. These will branch at different scales, but largely at the personal level. Where things change is at the Node level – different parts of the story will be unlocked based on where and when Nodes grow. Unlocking a part of the story in a certain way locks out progression of the story in a different way. You’ll see different antagonists, different NPCs, and different calls to action depending on what’s happening with the server at that time.

It kind of redefines what the players will experience in an MMORPG to come into a wilderness that is devoid of really any structure outside of what the community creates themselves; and then what can be created can be changed, if they want to experience a storyline that's been seen on another server, but you know you're fighting a dragon because you're near a mountain and the other server's fighting a Kraken because they're near the coast and you want to fight that Kraken because of its drop table. If you want to meta it or because you just want that under your belt: to be the server first to take out that Kraken and you have yet to develop the node there, you know it's incumbent upon you to manifest that in the game. – Steven Sharif

Narrative quests

Narrative quests will focus on gameplay that reflects the story and won't contain "filler".

What you find in the Narratives category is where you’ll find most of what you might call traditional quests. Because we’re jettisoning filler, we’ll have the resources to craft a really excellent story, with gameplay that reflects the scope of that story.

See also

• Lore
• Quests