Story Telling

One of the largest, erm, issues as of late is FC's storytelling, both ingame events and out of game movies. Many people have issues with both, and as time passes, the situation only seems to degenerate, most recently with, well, nothing happening ingame and the announcement of no more movies.

The ingame department isn't something we can really help. That is up to FC.

The movies, however, is something that can't be left alone. For whatever reason they were dropped (I think we can safely assume economics played a role), they, well, have to remain. But I don't think they need to stay in the same form.

What *I* would do If I were god would be to assume divine control of FC and change several things, but among them would be the conversion of the movies to voiced comic strips, perhaps Flash. Not only can these tell a story quite dramatically, they can easily create a mood, be made much more quickly and cheaply with a smaller staff, be made more frequently and for smaller events, and fill in a lot of the storyline.

The wonderful artistic style of AO, and even the movies themselves, have a comic book atmosphere that would work perfectly as, well, a comic book.

If FunCom doesn't see fit to make something like this happen, and quench our thirst for story telling devices, us as players can. As I said, it wouldn't be something that would be terribly hard to set up.

The second thing I think should be addressed is recording. We can do logs of the IRC events, but the way almost every online game works would allow a small demo that basically logs the player/mob data, their actions, and location, and be able to play it back locally at a later date using the engine by making it think it was being fed info from the server. This would be great for recordign events... news feeds... parties... :-p That would be a long term goal, but I think it would be a worthy one.

Comics would be great :)