What I have to say about quests is currently not applicable to any game I know of to date. Ok, think about any fantasy novel you've ever read which involved some sort of quest. At it's core it's basically the same sort of thing you see in these games; go to X location and perform Y action. But in stories the majority of the quest is not so much what you do when you get to your destination...it's getting there in the first place. It the challenges and adventures you have along the way. Yes, the final action is important too but 90% or more of the quest is just getting there. Unfortunately this can't translate into mmorpgs as we know them. For the journey to be the important part you would need a very large game world with no easy travel options and it would have to be a dangerous world, not a walk in the park.
It could work very well. However, the quest parts would have to be instanced so that story elements could be used effectively.
You see, that's the thing, it's all about implementation.
Earlier in this thread someone said something along the lines of "no escort quests".
Well, it's not the escort quest it's how it is implemented.
Let me guess... all of us have had escort quests where the prisoner, kidnapped person, etc was attacked and killed in seconds or that the one you were escorting went on her/his own and started attacking everything. I certainly know that in Oblivion it was sort of like this. And in LOTRO as well. Hate their escort quests.
the with proper scripting these things could be mitigated. One thing I like about Aion's escort quests is that it's more about you making it to check point A so you really don't have to worry about the one you are escorting.
I mean, the movie "3:10 to Yuma" is all about an escort quest. And whether or not you like westerns, it's actually a good little movie.
So what if part of the epic quest chain was an escort quest except there was more to do at each part of the quest than just walking and fighting?
What about getting the your charge to check point A. then you learn that there is a group after them. They are holed up somewhere in town so you have to gather clues as to their whereabouts. Thing is you find them but overhear that they have reinforcement's coming. So you have to get them through certain areas before those reinforcements arrive.
Essentialy what I'm saying is that quests have become too generic and too throwaway.
As the individual above stated, he has jobs, kids, etc. Well, make it so that quests can be done in 30 minute stints.
Not everything has to be so epic that it takes hours. Heck, in LOTRO there was a book quest that supposedly took a very long time. Well, every time I was asked to do it I turned it down. I can't be expected to sit for 3 hours without a chance that I might have to get up and leave.
so shorter quest blocks would work just fine.
The point is that instead of making us go out for 15 minutes to kill 20 Umber Hulks maybe one can go out there, have a real story reason for doing so and in the process just kill about 20 Umber Hulks anyways.
Like Skyrim? Need more content? Try my Skyrim mod "Godfred's Tomb."
What I have to say about quests is currently not applicable to any game I know of to date. Ok, think about any fantasy novel you've ever read which involved some sort of quest. At it's core it's basically the same sort of thing you see in these games; go to X location and perform Y action. But in stories the majority of the quest is not so much what you do when you get to your destination...it's getting there in the first place. It the challenges and adventures you have along the way. Yes, the final action is important too but 90% or more of the quest is just getting there. Unfortunately this can't translate into mmorpgs as we know them. For the journey to be the important part you would need a very large game world with no easy travel options and it would have to be a dangerous world, not a walk in the park.
It could work very well. However, the quest parts would have to be instanced so that story elements could be used effectively.
Sorry for cutting the majority of your post. I was just trying to reduce the size of this posting.
Anyway, I don't think we're on the same "wavelength" so to speak. You seem to be talking about highly directed, scripted, instanced quests which can be done in very short time frames.
What I'm thinking of is a game world which is very large and in which traveling around is itself a big challenge. So imagine a game world which literally takes real time weeks to cross from one side to the other. Ok, now in your home town you get a quest to go to the <Vaguely Ominous Mountian of Almost, But Not Quite Certain, Doom> and destroy the <Rather Nasty, Disgruntled Wizard>
But the mountain in question is a long ways away from your starting point. It will take you roughly fifteen hours play time to get there assuming all goes well. The game world through which you are traveling is also very dangerous and filled with all sorts of nasty creatures you might encounter along the way, perhaps physical obstacles to negotiate like cliffs and chasms, wandering mobs who's location cannot be predicted, and so on.
You still have to kill the wizard when you get there but now the REAL quest is just getting there. But the thing is; it's up to you how you go about it. You pick your own path. For example, you could head straight through the Gloomy Swamp as it's a more direct route or you could work your way around it because you deem it too dangerous. You could go over that mountain pass or through the caverns below. You could detour to reprovishing at <that> town or you could bypass it entirely.
You still have a fixed goal at the end but now 90% of the quest (which is trekking through the dangerous world) is much more open and flexible and the chances of luck and timing will make it different for you than for anyone else at least in the specific details of the things which happen to you along the way. And now we would have something which actually somewhat resembles the quests from fantasy novels.
That long travel time might sound bad to some people but remember you don't have to do it all in one sitting. You could log out anywhere along the way and pick it up again tommorow. The travel time in this scenerio is not "downtime" the traveling IS the game and the challenge or at least the majority of it.
But this sort of thing would require a game world that is specifically built for this sort of thing. Otherwise it just wouldn't be worth a damn.
What I have to say about quests is currently not applicable to any game I know of to date. Ok, think about any fantasy novel you've ever read which involved some sort of quest. At it's core it's basically the same sort of thing you see in these games; go to X location and perform Y action. But in stories the majority of the quest is not so much what you do when you get to your destination...it's getting there in the first place. It the challenges and adventures you have along the way. Yes, the final action is important too but 90% or more of the quest is just getting there. Unfortunately this can't translate into mmorpgs as we know them. For the journey to be the important part you would need a very large game world with no easy travel options and it would have to be a dangerous world, not a walk in the park.
It could work very well. However, the quest parts would have to be instanced so that story elements could be used effectively.
Sorry for cutting the majority of your post. I was just trying to reduce the size of this posting.
Anyway, I don't think we're on the same "wavelength" so to speak. You seem to be talking about highly directed, scripted, instanced quests which can be done in very short time frames.
What I'm thinking of is a game world which is very large and in which traveling around is itself a big challenge. So imagine a game world which literally takes real time weeks to cross from one side to the other. Ok, now in your home town you get a quest to go to the <Vaguely Ominous Mountian of Almost, But Not Quite Certain, Doom> and destroy the <Rather Nasty, Disgruntled Wizard>
But the mountain in question is a long ways away from your starting point. It will take you roughly fifteen hours play time to get there assuming all goes well. The game world through which you are traveling is also very dangerous and filled with all sorts of nasty creatures you might encounter along the way, perhaps physical obstacles to negotiate like cliffs and chasms, wandering mobs who's location cannot be predicted, and so on.
You still have to kill the wizard when you get there but now the REAL quest is just getting there. But the thing is; it's up to you how you go about it. You pick your own path. For example, you could head straight through the Gloomy Swamp as it's a more direct route or you could work your way around it because you deem it too dangerous. You could go over that mountain pass or through the caverns below. You could detour to reprovishing at <that> town or you could bypass it entirely.
You still have a fixed goal at the end but now 90% of the quest (which is trekking through the dangerous world) is much more open and flexible and the chances of luck and timing will make it different for you than for anyone else at least in the specific details of the things which happen to you along the way. And now we would have something which actually somewhat resembles the quests from fantasy novels.
That long travel time might sound bad to some people but remember you don't have to do it all in one sitting. You could log out anywhere along the way and pick it up again tommorow. The travel time in this scenerio is not "downtime" the traveling IS the game and the challenge or at least the majority of it.
But this sort of thing would require a game world that is specifically built for this sort of thing. Otherwise it just wouldn't be worth a damn.
Id love to see a game with this style of play. That said, In order to keep things fresh and not "force" players into questing you would need to run the entire character leveling system on some sort of "real-time" skill training, sort of like EVE's skill up system. Something of that sort in which your combat/questing does not necessarily = levels/stats would force users into playing for Playing sake and not for the purposes of grinding (which thus destroys "the adventure" aspect if you ask me). without that sort of system no player would choose to disregard any missions along the way (which, though i may be wrong, does sort of make the difference between linear/sandbox gameplay) because it would "gimp" their character. Thus your Mountain of doom/wizard encounter becomes just an overall quest that the player would end up seeing as a sort of "raid"/engame content thing instead of a goal to work towards. Also one would have to figure out how to scale mobs accordingly if no real-time skill progression were in place. That could make the difference between 1 person making it to said encounter after 1 year of gameplay and fighting in all those quests (if questing gave exp) and the guy who just ran straight to the mountain to fight.
Im sure what im saying is a little confusing so i apologize in advance. Hopefully you can make some sense of it though
What I have to say about quests is currently not applicable to any game I know of to date. Ok, think about any fantasy novel you've ever read which involved some sort of quest. At it's core it's basically the same sort of thing you see in these games; go to X location and perform Y action. But in stories the majority of the quest is not so much what you do when you get to your destination...it's getting there in the first place. It the challenges and adventures you have along the way. Yes, the final action is important too but 90% or more of the quest is just getting there. Unfortunately this can't translate into mmorpgs as we know them. For the journey to be the important part you would need a very large game world with no easy travel options and it would have to be a dangerous world, not a walk in the park.
It could work very well. However, the quest parts would have to be instanced so that story elements could be used effectively.
Sorry for cutting the majority of your post. I was just trying to reduce the size of this posting.
Anyway, I don't think we're on the same "wavelength" so to speak. You seem to be talking about highly directed, scripted, instanced quests which can be done in very short time frames.
What I'm thinking of is a game world which is very large and in which traveling around is itself a big challenge. So imagine a game world which literally takes real time weeks to cross from one side to the other. Ok, now in your home town you get a quest to go to the <Vaguely Ominous Mountian of Almost, But Not Quite Certain, Doom> and destroy the <Rather Nasty, Disgruntled Wizard>
But the mountain in question is a long ways away from your starting point. It will take you roughly fifteen hours play time to get there assuming all goes well. The game world through which you are traveling is also very dangerous and filled with all sorts of nasty creatures you might encounter along the way, perhaps physical obstacles to negotiate like cliffs and chasms, wandering mobs who's location cannot be predicted, and so on.
You still have to kill the wizard when you get there but now the REAL quest is just getting there. But the thing is; it's up to you how you go about it. You pick your own path. For example, you could head straight through the Gloomy Swamp as it's a more direct route or you could work your way around it because you deem it too dangerous. You could go over that mountain pass or through the caverns below. You could detour to reprovishing at <that> town or you could bypass it entirely.
You still have a fixed goal at the end but now 90% of the quest (which is trekking through the dangerous world) is much more open and flexible and the chances of luck and timing will make it different for you than for anyone else at least in the specific details of the things which happen to you along the way. And now we would have something which actually somewhat resembles the quests from fantasy novels.
That long travel time might sound bad to some people but remember you don't have to do it all in one sitting. You could log out anywhere along the way and pick it up again tommorow. The travel time in this scenerio is not "downtime" the traveling IS the game and the challenge or at least the majority of it.
But this sort of thing would require a game world that is specifically built for this sort of thing. Otherwise it just wouldn't be worth a damn.
This sounds very much like a single player experience. If your friends are not on the same quests you will not get to play with them. If you all go do the same big quest, you will have to schedule your playtimes to sync up since otherwise you quickly become seperated by hours of gameplay. I am a fan of non-group content in MMOs but this is pushing things too far.
I have always thought about a WH40k MMO that is RTS style. A single player has his avatar with all the whatnot that goes along with it (customization, skills, exp, ect). Each player has a resource allocation that is used to buy additional units for your squad. Those squad members you bought can be outfitted just like your own character and would level just the same with differences in what skills are available, ect. When a squad member dies, it is permanent. When your avatar dies, you would respawn with some type of penality (doesnt matter what it is).
Player avatars can use those resource points to buy wargear and squad mates. Your resource points increase dependent on how helpful you are to your races goals. When someone mentioned phasing, I could easily see this as entire worlds using phasing. Here is an example:
The Imperium of Man has been fighting off the Tyranids in Kalriva XI. Initially when the MMO first opens, the world is phased where the Tyranids only hold a small portion of the world (essentially the location where they began their invasion). Each side has quests that a Space Marine Sargeant or Tyranid Hive Tyrant would need players to do to progress their invasion. The current objective for the Imperium of Man would be to defend a firebase located near the Tyranid invasion point. Also, as a side objective, do not allow any Tyranids to enter any other zones around the area (basically just keep them back). The objectives for Tyranids is to destroy the firebase located near the invasion point or take smaller objectives around the invasion point. Like maybe destroy a local wildlife dense area to be biomorphed to sustain the Hive Fleet above. If the Imperium of Man destroys the main invasion point, it phases over into the Tyranids are now eliminated from the world and do not attack for some random number of time. If the Tyranids win, they continue deeper into Kalriva XI until they consume the entire world.
Basically, each step has a certain number of NPC waves that spawn. Generally, the NPC waves should be evenly matched (except maybe for a small number of certain objectives). This forces players to fight back the NPC waves to met the objectives. This also allows players to defend objectives needed to while others attack.
I have many, many other thoughts about how this could play out. But this is just a start. Maybe?
MMOs Played: I can no longer list them all in the 500 character limit.
This sounds very much like a single player experience. If your friends are not on the same quests you will not get to play with them. If you all go do the same big quest, you will have to schedule your playtimes to sync up since otherwise you quickly become seperated by hours of gameplay. I am a fan of non-group content in MMOs but this is pushing things too far.
You bring up a very good point about the difficulties in keeping a group together. That could be solved pretty easily though by linking members of a group to each other so that when you log back in tommorow it will put you back with your group.
So let's say five people are grouped for this long journey. They set out on Thursday evening and after playing for three hours Bob says he has to quit for the night. The other four go on for a hour and then Sam, Marry, and Alex drop out. Jim keeps going alone for another twenty minutes and then he logs out.
The next day Bob is the first one to log in so what happens? Log him in at the last place a member of his group was when that person logged out. So Bob will log in at the position Jim was at when Jim logged out. Now that one member of the group is in the game any subsequent members who log in will simply appear next to him when they log in. So Bob starts out alone and then as the other group members start logging in they appear next to him and they go on together.
This prevents the need to carefully schedule playtimes and the problems which would inevitably arise when someone has to quit early or start late. You can see that it would also create the possibility for one person in the group to end up being "dead weight"; in other words not logging in much so the rest of the group is basically carrying him/her without the benefit of his/her help along the way. But that's up to groups to sort out for themselves. If someone is getting a free ride from you while offline it's up to you to decide if you want to stay grouped with that person.
It also creates some possibilities for exploiting. For example, you see a group of nasty mobs ahead, instead of fighting them you have everyone log out except the guy who can sneak past them. Once he is past everyone else logs back in and appears beside the stealthy guy. This sort of thing could probably be mostly avoided by putting a time requierment on how long a person has to be logged out before the game will shift their log-in position. If that didn't work there are other things which could be done.
Originally posted by Neanderthal Anyway, I don't think we're on the same "wavelength" so to speak. You seem to be talking about highly directed, scripted, instanced quests which can be done in very short time frames. What I'm thinking of is a game world which is very large and in which traveling around is itself a big challenge. So imagine a game world which literally takes real time weeks to cross from one side to the other. Ok, now in your home town you get a quest to go to the <Vaguely Ominous Mountian of Almost, But Not Quite Certain, Doom> and destroy the <Rather Nasty, Disgruntled Wizard> But the mountain in question is a long ways away from your starting point. It will take you roughly fifteen hours play time to get there assuming all goes well. The game world through which you are traveling is also very dangerous and filled with all sorts of nasty creatures you might encounter along the way, perhaps physical obstacles to negotiate like cliffs and chasms, wandering mobs who's location cannot be predicted, and so on. You still have to kill the wizard when you get there but now the REAL quest is just getting there. But the thing is; it's up to you how you go about it. You pick your own path. For example, you could head straight through the Gloomy Swamp as it's a more direct route or you could work your way around it because you deem it too dangerous. You could go over that mountain pass or through the caverns below. You could detour to reprovishing at <that> town or you could bypass it entirely. You still have a fixed goal at the end but now 90% of the quest (which is trekking through the dangerous world) is much more open and flexible and the chances of luck and timing will make it different for you than for anyone else at least in the specific details of the things which happen to you along the way. And now we would have something which actually somewhat resembles the quests from fantasy novels. That long travel time might sound bad to some people but remember you don't have to do it all in one sitting. You could log out anywhere along the way and pick it up again tommorow. The travel time in this scenerio is not "downtime" the traveling IS the game and the challenge or at least the majority of it. But this sort of thing would require a game world that is specifically built for this sort of thing. Otherwise it just wouldn't be worth a damn.
Id love to see a game with this style of play. That said, In order to keep things fresh and not "force" players into questing you would need to run the entire character leveling system on some sort of "real-time" skill training, sort of like EVE's skill up system. Something of that sort in which your combat/questing does not necessarily = levels/stats would force users into playing for Playing sake and not for the purposes of grinding (which thus destroys "the adventure" aspect if you ask me). without that sort of system no player would choose to disregard any missions along the way (which, though i may be wrong, does sort of make the difference between linear/sandbox gameplay) because it would "gimp" their character. Thus your Mountain of doom/wizard encounter becomes just an overall quest that the player would end up seeing as a sort of "raid"/engame content thing instead of a goal to work towards. Also one would have to figure out how to scale mobs accordingly if no real-time skill progression were in place. That could make the difference between 1 person making it to said encounter after 1 year of gameplay and fighting in all those quests (if questing gave exp) and the guy who just ran straight to the mountain to fight.
Im sure what im saying is a little confusing so i apologize in advance. Hopefully you can make some sense of it though
I'll admit I'm a little unclear on what you were saying.
But I'll add that for this sort of thing to work (and this is where everyone will probably turn against me) I don't think the game could be level based. In fact, I don't think you could have a huge increases in character's overall power and toughness at all. Because for this sort of thing to work you would need a reletively consistant game world.
In other words it would make a total mess of it if the world were broken up into different level areas. If the Gloomy Swamp is a level 15 area and the Ominous Mountain is a level 40 area it would completely screw up the whole idea. If traveling from any point A to point B would send you through areas of various level ranges it just wouldn't work. You would either be too low level to get very far or you would be too high level for most of the trek to be interesting and challenging.
"I'll admit I'm a little unclear on what you were saying.
But I'll add that for this sort of thing to work (and this is where everyone will probably turn against me) I don't think the game could be level based. In fact, I don't think you could have a huge increases in character's overall power and toughness at all. Because for this sort of thing to work you would need a reletively consistant game world.
In other words it would make a total mess of it if the world were broken up into different level areas. If the Gloomy Swamp is a level 15 area and the Ominous Mountain is a level 40 area it would completely screw up the whole idea. If traveling from any point A to point B would send you through areas of various level ranges it just wouldn't work. You would either be too low level to get very far or you would be too high level for most of the trek to be interesting and challenging."
Using quotes to cut out some of the excess Quoting
It seems you pretty much hit my point dead on. I dont agree that the entire world would have to be consistent however. You could very easily have the swamp at level 15 and the ominous mountain at 40 (using the experience leveling system as an example), provided that the ending of said quest (kill the wizard) ended with a manageable battle (perhaps he's level 20...somehow..this being the hard part to figure out how to employ). Frankly, having some areas of the game that your "required" to pass through, or at least able to pass through, containing enemies of much higher level than your party, would mean that you would be forced to rely on tactics other than combat to traversse it. this could open the game up to Rogues, wizards, etc as a means of having a reason (other than DPS and combat related skills) to be part of your party. Maybe the rogue can allow the party to pass by the mob undetected, or the wizard can cast invisibility on the group etc etc.
Im all for an MMO thats actually using spells and special abilities for things other than combat. I think games now adays focus far to much on combat, buffs, etc and very litle on "puzzles". Ive had tons of memorable times fighting in various MMO groups, but I really remember some of the times Ive spent an hour or so trying to "solve" an MMO puzzle like the ones i mention above.
This sounds very much like a single player experience. If your friends are not on the same quests you will not get to play with them. If you all go do the same big quest, you will have to schedule your playtimes to sync up since otherwise you quickly become seperated by hours of gameplay. I am a fan of non-group content in MMOs but this is pushing things too far.
You bring up a very good point about the difficulties in keeping a group together. That could be solved pretty easily though by linking members of a group to each other so that when you log back in tommorow it will put you back with your group.
So let's say five people are grouped for this long journey. They set out on Thursday evening and after playing for three hours Bob says he has to quit for the night. The other four go on for a hour and then Sam, Marry, and Alex drop out. Jim keeps going alone for another twenty minutes and then he logs out.
The next day Bob is the first one to log in so what happens? Log him in at the last place a member of his group was when that person logged out. So Bob will log in at the position Jim was at when Jim logged out. Now that one member of the group is in the game any subsequent members who log in will simply appear next to him when they log in. So Bob starts out alone and then as the other group members start logging in they appear next to him and they go on together.
This prevents the need to carefully schedule playtimes and the problems which would inevitably arise when someone has to quit early or start late. You can see that it would also create the possibility for one person in the group to end up being "dead weight"; in other words not logging in much so the rest of the group is basically carrying him/her without the benefit of his/her help along the way. But that's up to groups to sort out for themselves. If someone is getting a free ride from you while offline it's up to you to decide if you want to stay grouped with that person.
It also creates some possibilities for exploiting. For example, you see a group of nasty mobs ahead, instead of fighting them you have everyone log out except the guy who can sneak past them. Once he is past everyone else logs back in and appears beside the stealthy guy. This sort of thing could probably be mostly avoided by putting a time requierment on how long a person has to be logged out before the game will shift their log-in position. If that didn't work there are other things which could be done.
This system still locks you into a group for a long time. If you are part of this kind of 'fellowship' then you become very limited in what other things you can do. Say one night you log in but are tired and really do not want to continue with the quest but rather do some crafting or fishing. So the group can move on without you or not continue with the quest for a while. Alternatively they could continue on their way and then you would be teleported to them by the game when you next log in. No matter how you set it up you have to trade flexibility for immersion/dificulty. The less flexible the system becomes, the more 'hardcore' it becomes and fewer people will be willing to put up with it.
Let's see... Uncover a conspiracy that involves a faked plague and a condemned West Ardougne (pronounced Ar-doyn), travel through a trap-ridden, evil-infested Underground Pass to kill a disciple of chaos, rediscover the separated land of elves, overthrow a (seemingly) corrupt king trying to conquer the land of elves, rediscover a Temple of Light that holds secrets to the creation of the world, and find a way to reconstruct the elven capital city... and who knows what after all that? That's just one quest chain and it hasn't been finished yet. Do you agree that's how quests should be? There's a reason why players in Runescape are called adventurers. They go on adventures, or quests in the truest sense of the word. Funny, eh?
There's a reason why 99% of people playing Runescape are immature, pre-pubescent 10 year-old kids. Funny, eh?
Yeah, it's called Jagex marketed to the younger market before realizing their mistake and easing up a bit. Do you really think more complex quests attract stupider kids?
The reason we have "go there and kill 10 of x" type quests is because we have allowed level based MMORPG titles to dominate, and as such they need these quest forms as rails to get us to max level. On the other extreme we have allowed sandbox MMO developers to believe that the only good sandbox is one built exclusively for hardcore players.
The next breakthrough in MMO gaming will come when a company understands how to build story based quest lines as optional components in a sandbox world that is designed to be either casual or hardcore. Sandbox does not have to equal hardcore time intensive. When this happens the next gen MMORPG will be born.
Let's see... Uncover a conspiracy that involves a faked plague and a condemned West Ardougne (pronounced Ar-doyn), travel through a trap-ridden, evil-infested Underground Pass to kill a disciple of chaos, rediscover the separated land of elves, overthrow a (seemingly) corrupt king trying to conquer the land of elves, rediscover a Temple of Light that holds secrets to the creation of the world, and find a way to reconstruct the elven capital city... and who knows what after all that? That's just one quest chain and it hasn't been finished yet. Do you agree that's how quests should be? There's a reason why players in Runescape are called adventurers. They go on adventures, or quests in the truest sense of the word. Funny, eh?
There's a reason why 99% of people playing Runescape are immature, pre-pubescent 10 year-old kids. Funny, eh?
Yeah, it's called Jagex marketed to the younger market before realizing their mistake and easing up a bit. Do you really think more complex quests attract stupider kids?
LOL i do believe he just tried to use "stupider" in a sentence....that speaks wonders about your post...
Quests are as diverse as much as the designers are given time to come up with and realize ideas, and even more important, as much as the game allows. If a game is to 99% about fighting, then quests that are not about fighting will be rare. A game about crafting will have a lot of "craft X for me" type quests". A game that allows terraforming might have "dig a hole", "pile up a mountain" or "build a stable mine shaft"-quests. A game where you could build stuff by actually piling objects on each other and such could have quests like "build a stable tower as high as X" or "build a hall with enough space for X people". And so on and so on. Current MMORPGs are simply to 90% about combat, so 90% of all quests are about killing something.
Yeah, it's called Jagex marketed to the younger market before realizing their mistake and easing up a bit. Do you really think more complex quests attract stupider kids?
LOL i do believe he just tried to use "stupider" in a sentence....that speaks wonders about your post...
Originally posted by Kain_Dale Also get rid of icon above NPC that has quest or not... if there is none.. and it force people to go up to them and read than just look for number and who then click ok accept and go without reading the other unimportant comment. Also, when you try to talk to NPC, NPC will talk to you on Chat box only, no options menu! No hint color highlight. You figure it out, makes it more fun..
It won't solve a thing, people will just go to websites to find out who is giving what quests and what they have to do, every step of the way, to get through them. It won't even slow people down.
Originally posted by Neanderthal You bring up a very good point about the difficulties in keeping a group together. That could be solved pretty easily though by linking members of a group to each other so that when you log back in tommorow it will put you back with your group.
This system still locks you into a group for a long time. If you are part of this kind of 'fellowship' then you become very limited in what other things you can do. Say one night you log in but are tired and really do not want to continue with the quest but rather do some crafting or fishing. So the group can move on without you or not continue with the quest for a while. Alternatively they could continue on their way and then you would be teleported to them by the game when you next log in. No matter how you set it up you have to trade flexibility for immersion/dificulty. The less flexible the system becomes, the more 'hardcore' it becomes and fewer people will be willing to put up with it.
I see what you're saying but..I don't know. Would it be that big of a problem? Would people really find it so terrible to commit themselves to one group for four or five sessions? Would groups be ruthlessly unforgiving if one person missed a night? I really can't answer those questions I guess.
As for the immersion breaking thing of having group members pop in beside you; I can see that too. But without it the idea wouldn't work at all. And I don't think it would really be all that much more immersion breaking than the fact that our characters vanish when we log out of a game but people accept that readily enough.
I could expand on this idea a bit more but, ah, maybe tommorow. I know it's pointless to discuss this stuff here and it isn't going to make any difference what-so-ever so it just depends on if I feel like prattling on.
Quests only belong in dumbed down games like WoW and WAR and AION. Know why? Because dumb players don't know what to do and can't figure out what to do without constantly being told. It's like it would be too difficult for them to naturally explore or talk with other players to figure out where to go. So they need to be told to kill 5 rats every few minutes otherwise they will forget how to play the game.
Intelligent players prefer no quests and an even playing field.
They were dumbed down in DAOC as well. The jump from EQ to DAOC questwise was huge. Of course, back in the day, everyone said DAOC was a clone of EQ, much like today everyone says every MMORPG is a clone of WOW.
But the non-dumbed down quests of EQ were ALSO stupid/meaningless. A large number of quests, and the only way you'd find them is to talk to every NPC (basically another grind) and even if you got a hint of a quest, it was incredibly obscure. Very few of the supposed hardcore players actually did those quests.
DOAC gave you this clean, go here do X quest. With 2-3 paragraphs of explanation laying it out very simply.
Intelligent players are far too varied to be pidgeon holed the way you claim. As long as their are npcs, there will be quests, as long as the game is remotely realistic.
First of all, calling the "Go here, kill x" system "questing" is retarded, it is merely a TASK. Secondly, the way i'd like to see a quest system would be player-made quests. IE, in every city there is a bulletin board where a player has put up his task, something like "That guy killed me and stole my gear! If you get me my gear back i will craft x high quality item for you and give you a discount whenever you buy things from me.". This would increase player-interaction and actually be a wonderful change from the current ridiculous threadmill-systems.
A lot of people complain about how they hate how quests are all the same. "Go Here, Kill X", but they never suggest a solution. And after thinking about it, I can't really think of anything to suggest either. When looking at quests, there are three quest types: Kill Quests = Must kill X amount of said creature. Gather Quests = Must gather X amount of said item. Travel Quests = Go here, talk to this person. Now, I dare you to think of a type completely unique from those three. In fact, I welcome any new type that makes sense, but I know, that even new types will eventually be considered the norm and boring. The only solution I can see to this problem is by making the job more unique, the world more unique. Make it so when I go to kill X amount of said creature, something fun could happen, add in hidden quest elements. For instance: ""John heads over to kill five goblins, upon killing three for the quest, a giant Orc bursts through the nearby trees. Quest objective has now changed from kill five goblins, to slay Orc Ambusher."" Another example could be: ""John heads to collect twelve berries from a berry bush. Upon arrival, he notices another creature picking through the berries. John must now choose, will he kill this creature and take his hard earned berries, pay said creature, or just sift through the bush on his own.""
I myself have no problem with how quests are, but I would like to improve them either way. Now, if you'll excuse me I seem to have spilled my tea all over myself...
There are hundreds of different ways to conceive quests, i've always provided examples.
One of them would be to not spread random NPC's with random excuses for errands... one of the problems with the cloned quests-system we are stuck with atm, is that you are told where to go by some bozo you don't give a hoot about. Instead the game could concentrate all the task managing inside a building with some kind of bureau of commissions. In there there could be a map, a great chart with lots of needs... needs for protection, for water, for any resources... people who need escorting, areas that need patrolling. You could have ALL shown in the map, different spots coloured some in red some in blue some in ocra, dynamically changing and you deciding who and and what assist. There's noone that tells you "go here kill x of that", you just know there's need for something and you go there and you will see the results of your work because that area becomes thriving... this example does away with the NPC, his exclamation mark, his brief description of his bullshit... which is all stuff i hate.
Another system that's completely different from yours is what we had in anarchy online. You access a terminal, select the "mission", change the degree of difficulty, push ok, grab the instantly produced key, go to the designated "door" that leads to the instance. Then you kill everyone inside and the boss(or not, you can also skip the mob and just take care of the boss).
In one of these missions
-there's no such a thing as killing a certain amount of people
I personally prefer to "go kill the boss and loot my reward" than "going to town activate the reward-drop from an NPC with an exclamaiton mark on his head then go kill the boss then come back to recieve my reward and XP."
One example of avoiding a "Quest Driven" design of MMORPG is to make enough interesting Dungeon Crawling content where the fun part is tackling challenging in these dungeons rather than running back and forth collecting items and doing errands. I explained here why Quest Driven MMORPGs are bad.
Quests are fine but they shouldn't be the rail-road of the game and us being a train. They should be something we can do whenever we feel to. It shouldn't be mandatory and it shouldn't be overwhelming (30/30 quests and more that you can not accept).
I've written a Developers Guide to the MMO here and Devs must think outside the box.
A lot of people complain about how they hate how quests are all the same. "Go Here, Kill X", but they never suggest a solution. And after thinking about it, I can't really think of anything to suggest either. When looking at quests, there are three quest types: Kill Quests = Must kill X amount of said creature. Gather Quests = Must gather X amount of said item. Travel Quests = Go here, talk to this person. Now, I dare you to think of a type completely unique from those three.
There are hundreds of different ways to conceive quests, i've always provided examples.
One of them would be to not spread random NPC's with random excuses for errands... one of the problems with the cloned quests-system we are stuck with atm, is that you are told where to go by some bozo you don't give a hoot about. Instead the game could concentrate all the task managing inside a building with some kind of bureau of commissions. In there there could be a map, a great chart with lots of needs... needs for protection, for water, for any resources... people who need escorting, areas that need patrolling. You could have ALL shown in the map, different spots coloured some in red some in blue some in ocra, dynamically changing and you deciding who and and what assist. There's noone that tells you "go here kill x of that", you just know there's need for something and you go there and you will see the results of your work because that area becomes thriving... this example does away with the NPC, his exclamation mark, his brief description of his bullshit... which is all stuff i hate.
Another system that's completely different from yours is what we had in anarchy online. You access a terminal, select the "mission", change the degree of difficulty, push ok, grab the instantly produced key, go to the designated "door" that leads to the instance. Then you kill everyone inside and the boss(or not, you can also skip the mob and just take care of the boss).
In one of these missions
-there's no such a thing as killing a certain amount of people
-There's no gathering a type of object
-And there's no travelling to talk
...there you go.
Methinks WoW killed everyone's imagination.
New type of quest, go here, craft item X. Was in DAOC. Next problem?
Bureau of Commisions? An NPC by any other name. That may work for AO, but not for most fantasy games. Furthermore, it still ignores the fact individual npcs will have needs that aren't registered with the bureau.(that would be silly).
Don't like the floating !, give npcs who want to talk to you a unique animation, maybe they'll all be waving you over.
A lot of people complain about how they hate how quests are all the same. "Go Here, Kill X", but they never suggest a solution. And after thinking about it, I can't really think of anything to suggest either. When looking at quests, there are three quest types: Kill Quests = Must kill X amount of said creature. Gather Quests = Must gather X amount of said item. Travel Quests = Go here, talk to this person. Now, I dare you to think of a type completely unique from those three.
There are hundreds of different ways to conceive quests, i've always provided examples.
One of them would be to not spread random NPC's with random excuses for errands... one of the problems with the cloned quests-system we are stuck with atm, is that you are told where to go by some bozo you don't give a hoot about. Instead the game could concentrate all the task managing inside a building with some kind of bureau of commissions. In there there could be a map, a great chart with lots of needs... needs for protection, for water, for any resources... people who need escorting, areas that need patrolling. You could have ALL shown in the map, different spots coloured some in red some in blue some in ocra, dynamically changing and you deciding who and and what assist. There's noone that tells you "go here kill x of that", you just know there's need for something and you go there and you will see the results of your work because that area becomes thriving... this example does away with the NPC, his exclamation mark, his brief description of his bullshit... which is all stuff i hate.
Another system that's completely different from yours is what we had in anarchy online. You access a terminal, select the "mission", change the degree of difficulty, push ok, grab the instantly produced key, go to the designated "door" that leads to the instance. Then you kill everyone inside and the boss(or not, you can also skip the mob and just take care of the boss).
In one of these missions
-there's no such a thing as killing a certain amount of people
-There's no gathering a type of object
-And there's no travelling to talk
...there you go.
Methinks WoW killed everyone's imagination.
New type of quest, go here, craft item X. Was in DAOC. Next problem?
Bureau of Commisions? An NPC by any other name. That may work for AO, but not for most fantasy games. Furthermore, it still ignores the fact individual npcs will have needs that aren't registered with the bureau.(that would be silly).
Don't like the floating !, give npcs who want to talk to you a unique animation, maybe they'll all be waving you over.
They need selective waving. You just had 10 rats killed for you, why do you need another 10?
Comments
It could work very well. However, the quest parts would have to be instanced so that story elements could be used effectively.
You see, that's the thing, it's all about implementation.
Earlier in this thread someone said something along the lines of "no escort quests".
Well, it's not the escort quest it's how it is implemented.
Let me guess... all of us have had escort quests where the prisoner, kidnapped person, etc was attacked and killed in seconds or that the one you were escorting went on her/his own and started attacking everything. I certainly know that in Oblivion it was sort of like this. And in LOTRO as well. Hate their escort quests.
the with proper scripting these things could be mitigated. One thing I like about Aion's escort quests is that it's more about you making it to check point A so you really don't have to worry about the one you are escorting.
I mean, the movie "3:10 to Yuma" is all about an escort quest. And whether or not you like westerns, it's actually a good little movie.
So what if part of the epic quest chain was an escort quest except there was more to do at each part of the quest than just walking and fighting?
What about getting the your charge to check point A. then you learn that there is a group after them. They are holed up somewhere in town so you have to gather clues as to their whereabouts. Thing is you find them but overhear that they have reinforcement's coming. So you have to get them through certain areas before those reinforcements arrive.
Essentialy what I'm saying is that quests have become too generic and too throwaway.
As the individual above stated, he has jobs, kids, etc. Well, make it so that quests can be done in 30 minute stints.
Not everything has to be so epic that it takes hours. Heck, in LOTRO there was a book quest that supposedly took a very long time. Well, every time I was asked to do it I turned it down. I can't be expected to sit for 3 hours without a chance that I might have to get up and leave.
so shorter quest blocks would work just fine.
The point is that instead of making us go out for 15 minutes to kill 20 Umber Hulks maybe one can go out there, have a real story reason for doing so and in the process just kill about 20 Umber Hulks anyways.
Godfred's Tomb Trailer: https://youtu.be/-nsXGddj_4w
Original Skyrim: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/109547
Serph toze kindly has started a walk-through. https://youtu.be/UIelCK-lldo
It could work very well. However, the quest parts would have to be instanced so that story elements could be used effectively.
Sorry for cutting the majority of your post. I was just trying to reduce the size of this posting.
Anyway, I don't think we're on the same "wavelength" so to speak. You seem to be talking about highly directed, scripted, instanced quests which can be done in very short time frames.
What I'm thinking of is a game world which is very large and in which traveling around is itself a big challenge. So imagine a game world which literally takes real time weeks to cross from one side to the other. Ok, now in your home town you get a quest to go to the <Vaguely Ominous Mountian of Almost, But Not Quite Certain, Doom> and destroy the <Rather Nasty, Disgruntled Wizard>
But the mountain in question is a long ways away from your starting point. It will take you roughly fifteen hours play time to get there assuming all goes well. The game world through which you are traveling is also very dangerous and filled with all sorts of nasty creatures you might encounter along the way, perhaps physical obstacles to negotiate like cliffs and chasms, wandering mobs who's location cannot be predicted, and so on.
You still have to kill the wizard when you get there but now the REAL quest is just getting there. But the thing is; it's up to you how you go about it. You pick your own path. For example, you could head straight through the Gloomy Swamp as it's a more direct route or you could work your way around it because you deem it too dangerous. You could go over that mountain pass or through the caverns below. You could detour to reprovishing at <that> town or you could bypass it entirely.
You still have a fixed goal at the end but now 90% of the quest (which is trekking through the dangerous world) is much more open and flexible and the chances of luck and timing will make it different for you than for anyone else at least in the specific details of the things which happen to you along the way. And now we would have something which actually somewhat resembles the quests from fantasy novels.
That long travel time might sound bad to some people but remember you don't have to do it all in one sitting. You could log out anywhere along the way and pick it up again tommorow. The travel time in this scenerio is not "downtime" the traveling IS the game and the challenge or at least the majority of it.
But this sort of thing would require a game world that is specifically built for this sort of thing. Otherwise it just wouldn't be worth a damn.
It could work very well. However, the quest parts would have to be instanced so that story elements could be used effectively.
Sorry for cutting the majority of your post. I was just trying to reduce the size of this posting.
Anyway, I don't think we're on the same "wavelength" so to speak. You seem to be talking about highly directed, scripted, instanced quests which can be done in very short time frames.
What I'm thinking of is a game world which is very large and in which traveling around is itself a big challenge. So imagine a game world which literally takes real time weeks to cross from one side to the other. Ok, now in your home town you get a quest to go to the <Vaguely Ominous Mountian of Almost, But Not Quite Certain, Doom> and destroy the <Rather Nasty, Disgruntled Wizard>
But the mountain in question is a long ways away from your starting point. It will take you roughly fifteen hours play time to get there assuming all goes well. The game world through which you are traveling is also very dangerous and filled with all sorts of nasty creatures you might encounter along the way, perhaps physical obstacles to negotiate like cliffs and chasms, wandering mobs who's location cannot be predicted, and so on.
You still have to kill the wizard when you get there but now the REAL quest is just getting there. But the thing is; it's up to you how you go about it. You pick your own path. For example, you could head straight through the Gloomy Swamp as it's a more direct route or you could work your way around it because you deem it too dangerous. You could go over that mountain pass or through the caverns below. You could detour to reprovishing at <that> town or you could bypass it entirely.
You still have a fixed goal at the end but now 90% of the quest (which is trekking through the dangerous world) is much more open and flexible and the chances of luck and timing will make it different for you than for anyone else at least in the specific details of the things which happen to you along the way. And now we would have something which actually somewhat resembles the quests from fantasy novels.
That long travel time might sound bad to some people but remember you don't have to do it all in one sitting. You could log out anywhere along the way and pick it up again tommorow. The travel time in this scenerio is not "downtime" the traveling IS the game and the challenge or at least the majority of it.
But this sort of thing would require a game world that is specifically built for this sort of thing. Otherwise it just wouldn't be worth a damn.
Id love to see a game with this style of play. That said, In order to keep things fresh and not "force" players into questing you would need to run the entire character leveling system on some sort of "real-time" skill training, sort of like EVE's skill up system. Something of that sort in which your combat/questing does not necessarily = levels/stats would force users into playing for Playing sake and not for the purposes of grinding (which thus destroys "the adventure" aspect if you ask me). without that sort of system no player would choose to disregard any missions along the way (which, though i may be wrong, does sort of make the difference between linear/sandbox gameplay) because it would "gimp" their character. Thus your Mountain of doom/wizard encounter becomes just an overall quest that the player would end up seeing as a sort of "raid"/engame content thing instead of a goal to work towards. Also one would have to figure out how to scale mobs accordingly if no real-time skill progression were in place. That could make the difference between 1 person making it to said encounter after 1 year of gameplay and fighting in all those quests (if questing gave exp) and the guy who just ran straight to the mountain to fight.
Im sure what im saying is a little confusing so i apologize in advance. Hopefully you can make some sense of it though
It could work very well. However, the quest parts would have to be instanced so that story elements could be used effectively.
Sorry for cutting the majority of your post. I was just trying to reduce the size of this posting.
Anyway, I don't think we're on the same "wavelength" so to speak. You seem to be talking about highly directed, scripted, instanced quests which can be done in very short time frames.
What I'm thinking of is a game world which is very large and in which traveling around is itself a big challenge. So imagine a game world which literally takes real time weeks to cross from one side to the other. Ok, now in your home town you get a quest to go to the <Vaguely Ominous Mountian of Almost, But Not Quite Certain, Doom> and destroy the <Rather Nasty, Disgruntled Wizard>
But the mountain in question is a long ways away from your starting point. It will take you roughly fifteen hours play time to get there assuming all goes well. The game world through which you are traveling is also very dangerous and filled with all sorts of nasty creatures you might encounter along the way, perhaps physical obstacles to negotiate like cliffs and chasms, wandering mobs who's location cannot be predicted, and so on.
You still have to kill the wizard when you get there but now the REAL quest is just getting there. But the thing is; it's up to you how you go about it. You pick your own path. For example, you could head straight through the Gloomy Swamp as it's a more direct route or you could work your way around it because you deem it too dangerous. You could go over that mountain pass or through the caverns below. You could detour to reprovishing at <that> town or you could bypass it entirely.
You still have a fixed goal at the end but now 90% of the quest (which is trekking through the dangerous world) is much more open and flexible and the chances of luck and timing will make it different for you than for anyone else at least in the specific details of the things which happen to you along the way. And now we would have something which actually somewhat resembles the quests from fantasy novels.
That long travel time might sound bad to some people but remember you don't have to do it all in one sitting. You could log out anywhere along the way and pick it up again tommorow. The travel time in this scenerio is not "downtime" the traveling IS the game and the challenge or at least the majority of it.
But this sort of thing would require a game world that is specifically built for this sort of thing. Otherwise it just wouldn't be worth a damn.
This sounds very much like a single player experience. If your friends are not on the same quests you will not get to play with them. If you all go do the same big quest, you will have to schedule your playtimes to sync up since otherwise you quickly become seperated by hours of gameplay. I am a fan of non-group content in MMOs but this is pushing things too far.
I have always thought about a WH40k MMO that is RTS style. A single player has his avatar with all the whatnot that goes along with it (customization, skills, exp, ect). Each player has a resource allocation that is used to buy additional units for your squad. Those squad members you bought can be outfitted just like your own character and would level just the same with differences in what skills are available, ect. When a squad member dies, it is permanent. When your avatar dies, you would respawn with some type of penality (doesnt matter what it is).
Player avatars can use those resource points to buy wargear and squad mates. Your resource points increase dependent on how helpful you are to your races goals. When someone mentioned phasing, I could easily see this as entire worlds using phasing. Here is an example:
The Imperium of Man has been fighting off the Tyranids in Kalriva XI. Initially when the MMO first opens, the world is phased where the Tyranids only hold a small portion of the world (essentially the location where they began their invasion). Each side has quests that a Space Marine Sargeant or Tyranid Hive Tyrant would need players to do to progress their invasion. The current objective for the Imperium of Man would be to defend a firebase located near the Tyranid invasion point. Also, as a side objective, do not allow any Tyranids to enter any other zones around the area (basically just keep them back). The objectives for Tyranids is to destroy the firebase located near the invasion point or take smaller objectives around the invasion point. Like maybe destroy a local wildlife dense area to be biomorphed to sustain the Hive Fleet above. If the Imperium of Man destroys the main invasion point, it phases over into the Tyranids are now eliminated from the world and do not attack for some random number of time. If the Tyranids win, they continue deeper into Kalriva XI until they consume the entire world.
Basically, each step has a certain number of NPC waves that spawn. Generally, the NPC waves should be evenly matched (except maybe for a small number of certain objectives). This forces players to fight back the NPC waves to met the objectives. This also allows players to defend objectives needed to while others attack.
I have many, many other thoughts about how this could play out. But this is just a start. Maybe?
MMOs Played: I can no longer list them all in the 500 character limit.
This sounds very much like a single player experience. If your friends are not on the same quests you will not get to play with them. If you all go do the same big quest, you will have to schedule your playtimes to sync up since otherwise you quickly become seperated by hours of gameplay. I am a fan of non-group content in MMOs but this is pushing things too far.
You bring up a very good point about the difficulties in keeping a group together. That could be solved pretty easily though by linking members of a group to each other so that when you log back in tommorow it will put you back with your group.
So let's say five people are grouped for this long journey. They set out on Thursday evening and after playing for three hours Bob says he has to quit for the night. The other four go on for a hour and then Sam, Marry, and Alex drop out. Jim keeps going alone for another twenty minutes and then he logs out.
The next day Bob is the first one to log in so what happens? Log him in at the last place a member of his group was when that person logged out. So Bob will log in at the position Jim was at when Jim logged out. Now that one member of the group is in the game any subsequent members who log in will simply appear next to him when they log in. So Bob starts out alone and then as the other group members start logging in they appear next to him and they go on together.
This prevents the need to carefully schedule playtimes and the problems which would inevitably arise when someone has to quit early or start late. You can see that it would also create the possibility for one person in the group to end up being "dead weight"; in other words not logging in much so the rest of the group is basically carrying him/her without the benefit of his/her help along the way. But that's up to groups to sort out for themselves. If someone is getting a free ride from you while offline it's up to you to decide if you want to stay grouped with that person.
It also creates some possibilities for exploiting. For example, you see a group of nasty mobs ahead, instead of fighting them you have everyone log out except the guy who can sneak past them. Once he is past everyone else logs back in and appears beside the stealthy guy. This sort of thing could probably be mostly avoided by putting a time requierment on how long a person has to be logged out before the game will shift their log-in position. If that didn't work there are other things which could be done.
Id love to see a game with this style of play. That said, In order to keep things fresh and not "force" players into questing you would need to run the entire character leveling system on some sort of "real-time" skill training, sort of like EVE's skill up system. Something of that sort in which your combat/questing does not necessarily = levels/stats would force users into playing for Playing sake and not for the purposes of grinding (which thus destroys "the adventure" aspect if you ask me). without that sort of system no player would choose to disregard any missions along the way (which, though i may be wrong, does sort of make the difference between linear/sandbox gameplay) because it would "gimp" their character. Thus your Mountain of doom/wizard encounter becomes just an overall quest that the player would end up seeing as a sort of "raid"/engame content thing instead of a goal to work towards. Also one would have to figure out how to scale mobs accordingly if no real-time skill progression were in place. That could make the difference between 1 person making it to said encounter after 1 year of gameplay and fighting in all those quests (if questing gave exp) and the guy who just ran straight to the mountain to fight.
Im sure what im saying is a little confusing so i apologize in advance. Hopefully you can make some sense of it though
I'll admit I'm a little unclear on what you were saying.
But I'll add that for this sort of thing to work (and this is where everyone will probably turn against me) I don't think the game could be level based. In fact, I don't think you could have a huge increases in character's overall power and toughness at all. Because for this sort of thing to work you would need a reletively consistant game world.
In other words it would make a total mess of it if the world were broken up into different level areas. If the Gloomy Swamp is a level 15 area and the Ominous Mountain is a level 40 area it would completely screw up the whole idea. If traveling from any point A to point B would send you through areas of various level ranges it just wouldn't work. You would either be too low level to get very far or you would be too high level for most of the trek to be interesting and challenging.
"I'll admit I'm a little unclear on what you were saying.
But I'll add that for this sort of thing to work (and this is where everyone will probably turn against me) I don't think the game could be level based. In fact, I don't think you could have a huge increases in character's overall power and toughness at all. Because for this sort of thing to work you would need a reletively consistant game world.
In other words it would make a total mess of it if the world were broken up into different level areas. If the Gloomy Swamp is a level 15 area and the Ominous Mountain is a level 40 area it would completely screw up the whole idea. If traveling from any point A to point B would send you through areas of various level ranges it just wouldn't work. You would either be too low level to get very far or you would be too high level for most of the trek to be interesting and challenging."
Using quotes to cut out some of the excess Quoting
It seems you pretty much hit my point dead on. I dont agree that the entire world would have to be consistent however. You could very easily have the swamp at level 15 and the ominous mountain at 40 (using the experience leveling system as an example), provided that the ending of said quest (kill the wizard) ended with a manageable battle (perhaps he's level 20...somehow..this being the hard part to figure out how to employ). Frankly, having some areas of the game that your "required" to pass through, or at least able to pass through, containing enemies of much higher level than your party, would mean that you would be forced to rely on tactics other than combat to traversse it. this could open the game up to Rogues, wizards, etc as a means of having a reason (other than DPS and combat related skills) to be part of your party. Maybe the rogue can allow the party to pass by the mob undetected, or the wizard can cast invisibility on the group etc etc.
Im all for an MMO thats actually using spells and special abilities for things other than combat. I think games now adays focus far to much on combat, buffs, etc and very litle on "puzzles". Ive had tons of memorable times fighting in various MMO groups, but I really remember some of the times Ive spent an hour or so trying to "solve" an MMO puzzle like the ones i mention above.
This sounds very much like a single player experience. If your friends are not on the same quests you will not get to play with them. If you all go do the same big quest, you will have to schedule your playtimes to sync up since otherwise you quickly become seperated by hours of gameplay. I am a fan of non-group content in MMOs but this is pushing things too far.
You bring up a very good point about the difficulties in keeping a group together. That could be solved pretty easily though by linking members of a group to each other so that when you log back in tommorow it will put you back with your group.
So let's say five people are grouped for this long journey. They set out on Thursday evening and after playing for three hours Bob says he has to quit for the night. The other four go on for a hour and then Sam, Marry, and Alex drop out. Jim keeps going alone for another twenty minutes and then he logs out.
The next day Bob is the first one to log in so what happens? Log him in at the last place a member of his group was when that person logged out. So Bob will log in at the position Jim was at when Jim logged out. Now that one member of the group is in the game any subsequent members who log in will simply appear next to him when they log in. So Bob starts out alone and then as the other group members start logging in they appear next to him and they go on together.
This prevents the need to carefully schedule playtimes and the problems which would inevitably arise when someone has to quit early or start late. You can see that it would also create the possibility for one person in the group to end up being "dead weight"; in other words not logging in much so the rest of the group is basically carrying him/her without the benefit of his/her help along the way. But that's up to groups to sort out for themselves. If someone is getting a free ride from you while offline it's up to you to decide if you want to stay grouped with that person.
It also creates some possibilities for exploiting. For example, you see a group of nasty mobs ahead, instead of fighting them you have everyone log out except the guy who can sneak past them. Once he is past everyone else logs back in and appears beside the stealthy guy. This sort of thing could probably be mostly avoided by putting a time requierment on how long a person has to be logged out before the game will shift their log-in position. If that didn't work there are other things which could be done.
This system still locks you into a group for a long time. If you are part of this kind of 'fellowship' then you become very limited in what other things you can do. Say one night you log in but are tired and really do not want to continue with the quest but rather do some crafting or fishing. So the group can move on without you or not continue with the quest for a while. Alternatively they could continue on their way and then you would be teleported to them by the game when you next log in. No matter how you set it up you have to trade flexibility for immersion/dificulty. The less flexible the system becomes, the more 'hardcore' it becomes and fewer people will be willing to put up with it.
There's a reason why 99% of people playing Runescape are immature, pre-pubescent 10 year-old kids. Funny, eh?
Yeah, it's called Jagex marketed to the younger market before realizing their mistake and easing up a bit. Do you really think more complex quests attract stupider kids?
The reason we have "go there and kill 10 of x" type quests is because we have allowed level based MMORPG titles to dominate, and as such they need these quest forms as rails to get us to max level. On the other extreme we have allowed sandbox MMO developers to believe that the only good sandbox is one built exclusively for hardcore players.
The next breakthrough in MMO gaming will come when a company understands how to build story based quest lines as optional components in a sandbox world that is designed to be either casual or hardcore. Sandbox does not have to equal hardcore time intensive. When this happens the next gen MMORPG will be born.
There's a reason why 99% of people playing Runescape are immature, pre-pubescent 10 year-old kids. Funny, eh?
Yeah, it's called Jagex marketed to the younger market before realizing their mistake and easing up a bit. Do you really think more complex quests attract stupider kids?
LOL i do believe he just tried to use "stupider" in a sentence....that speaks wonders about your post...
Quests are as diverse as much as the designers are given time to come up with and realize ideas, and even more important, as much as the game allows. If a game is to 99% about fighting, then quests that are not about fighting will be rare. A game about crafting will have a lot of "craft X for me" type quests". A game that allows terraforming might have "dig a hole", "pile up a mountain" or "build a stable mine shaft"-quests. A game where you could build stuff by actually piling objects on each other and such could have quests like "build a stable tower as high as X" or "build a hall with enough space for X people". And so on and so on. Current MMORPGs are simply to 90% about combat, so 90% of all quests are about killing something.
Let's play Fallen Earth (blind, 300 episodes)
Let's play Guild Wars 2 (blind, 45 episodes)
Yeah, it's called Jagex marketed to the younger market before realizing their mistake and easing up a bit. Do you really think more complex quests attract stupider kids?
LOL i do believe he just tried to use "stupider" in a sentence....that speaks wonders about your post...
That was the stupiderest thing I've heard! :P
It won't solve a thing, people will just go to websites to find out who is giving what quests and what they have to do, every step of the way, to get through them. It won't even slow people down.
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This system still locks you into a group for a long time. If you are part of this kind of 'fellowship' then you become very limited in what other things you can do. Say one night you log in but are tired and really do not want to continue with the quest but rather do some crafting or fishing. So the group can move on without you or not continue with the quest for a while. Alternatively they could continue on their way and then you would be teleported to them by the game when you next log in. No matter how you set it up you have to trade flexibility for immersion/dificulty. The less flexible the system becomes, the more 'hardcore' it becomes and fewer people will be willing to put up with it.
I see what you're saying but..I don't know. Would it be that big of a problem? Would people really find it so terrible to commit themselves to one group for four or five sessions? Would groups be ruthlessly unforgiving if one person missed a night? I really can't answer those questions I guess.
As for the immersion breaking thing of having group members pop in beside you; I can see that too. But without it the idea wouldn't work at all. And I don't think it would really be all that much more immersion breaking than the fact that our characters vanish when we log out of a game but people accept that readily enough.
I could expand on this idea a bit more but, ah, maybe tommorow. I know it's pointless to discuss this stuff here and it isn't going to make any difference what-so-ever so it just depends on if I feel like prattling on.
Lord_Seru,
you dont want an MMO you want a virtual world. go play second life, or Blue Mars.
Isn't "you don't want an MMO, you want a virtual world" a bit of an oxymoron?
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Tattlers are narcs, and have an atomic wedgie waiting for them at some point in time.
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They were dumbed down in DAOC as well. The jump from EQ to DAOC questwise was huge. Of course, back in the day, everyone said DAOC was a clone of EQ, much like today everyone says every MMORPG is a clone of WOW.
But the non-dumbed down quests of EQ were ALSO stupid/meaningless. A large number of quests, and the only way you'd find them is to talk to every NPC (basically another grind) and even if you got a hint of a quest, it was incredibly obscure. Very few of the supposed hardcore players actually did those quests.
DOAC gave you this clean, go here do X quest. With 2-3 paragraphs of explanation laying it out very simply.
Intelligent players are far too varied to be pidgeon holed the way you claim. As long as their are npcs, there will be quests, as long as the game is remotely realistic.
First of all, calling the "Go here, kill x" system "questing" is retarded, it is merely a TASK. Secondly, the way i'd like to see a quest system would be player-made quests. IE, in every city there is a bulletin board where a player has put up his task, something like "That guy killed me and stole my gear! If you get me my gear back i will craft x high quality item for you and give you a discount whenever you buy things from me.". This would increase player-interaction and actually be a wonderful change from the current ridiculous threadmill-systems.
There are hundreds of different ways to conceive quests, i've always provided examples.
One of them would be to not spread random NPC's with random excuses for errands... one of the problems with the cloned quests-system we are stuck with atm, is that you are told where to go by some bozo you don't give a hoot about. Instead the game could concentrate all the task managing inside a building with some kind of bureau of commissions. In there there could be a map, a great chart with lots of needs... needs for protection, for water, for any resources... people who need escorting, areas that need patrolling. You could have ALL shown in the map, different spots coloured some in red some in blue some in ocra, dynamically changing and you deciding who and and what assist. There's noone that tells you "go here kill x of that", you just know there's need for something and you go there and you will see the results of your work because that area becomes thriving... this example does away with the NPC, his exclamation mark, his brief description of his bullshit... which is all stuff i hate.
Another system that's completely different from yours is what we had in anarchy online. You access a terminal, select the "mission", change the degree of difficulty, push ok, grab the instantly produced key, go to the designated "door" that leads to the instance. Then you kill everyone inside and the boss(or not, you can also skip the mob and just take care of the boss).
In one of these missions
-there's no such a thing as killing a certain amount of people
-There's no gathering a type of object
-And there's no travelling to talk
...there you go.
Methinks WoW killed everyone's imagination.
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I personally prefer to "go kill the boss and loot my reward" than "going to town activate the reward-drop from an NPC with an exclamaiton mark on his head then go kill the boss then come back to recieve my reward and XP."
One example of avoiding a "Quest Driven" design of MMORPG is to make enough interesting Dungeon Crawling content where the fun part is tackling challenging in these dungeons rather than running back and forth collecting items and doing errands. I explained here why Quest Driven MMORPGs are bad.
Quests are fine but they shouldn't be the rail-road of the game and us being a train. They should be something we can do whenever we feel to. It shouldn't be mandatory and it shouldn't be overwhelming (30/30 quests and more that you can not accept).
I've written a Developers Guide to the MMO here and Devs must think outside the box.
There are hundreds of different ways to conceive quests, i've always provided examples.
One of them would be to not spread random NPC's with random excuses for errands... one of the problems with the cloned quests-system we are stuck with atm, is that you are told where to go by some bozo you don't give a hoot about. Instead the game could concentrate all the task managing inside a building with some kind of bureau of commissions. In there there could be a map, a great chart with lots of needs... needs for protection, for water, for any resources... people who need escorting, areas that need patrolling. You could have ALL shown in the map, different spots coloured some in red some in blue some in ocra, dynamically changing and you deciding who and and what assist. There's noone that tells you "go here kill x of that", you just know there's need for something and you go there and you will see the results of your work because that area becomes thriving... this example does away with the NPC, his exclamation mark, his brief description of his bullshit... which is all stuff i hate.
Another system that's completely different from yours is what we had in anarchy online. You access a terminal, select the "mission", change the degree of difficulty, push ok, grab the instantly produced key, go to the designated "door" that leads to the instance. Then you kill everyone inside and the boss(or not, you can also skip the mob and just take care of the boss).
In one of these missions
-there's no such a thing as killing a certain amount of people
-There's no gathering a type of object
-And there's no travelling to talk
...there you go.
Methinks WoW killed everyone's imagination.
New type of quest, go here, craft item X. Was in DAOC. Next problem?
Bureau of Commisions? An NPC by any other name. That may work for AO, but not for most fantasy games. Furthermore, it still ignores the fact individual npcs will have needs that aren't registered with the bureau.(that would be silly).
Don't like the floating !, give npcs who want to talk to you a unique animation, maybe they'll all be waving you over.
There are hundreds of different ways to conceive quests, i've always provided examples.
One of them would be to not spread random NPC's with random excuses for errands... one of the problems with the cloned quests-system we are stuck with atm, is that you are told where to go by some bozo you don't give a hoot about. Instead the game could concentrate all the task managing inside a building with some kind of bureau of commissions. In there there could be a map, a great chart with lots of needs... needs for protection, for water, for any resources... people who need escorting, areas that need patrolling. You could have ALL shown in the map, different spots coloured some in red some in blue some in ocra, dynamically changing and you deciding who and and what assist. There's noone that tells you "go here kill x of that", you just know there's need for something and you go there and you will see the results of your work because that area becomes thriving... this example does away with the NPC, his exclamation mark, his brief description of his bullshit... which is all stuff i hate.
Another system that's completely different from yours is what we had in anarchy online. You access a terminal, select the "mission", change the degree of difficulty, push ok, grab the instantly produced key, go to the designated "door" that leads to the instance. Then you kill everyone inside and the boss(or not, you can also skip the mob and just take care of the boss).
In one of these missions
-there's no such a thing as killing a certain amount of people
-There's no gathering a type of object
-And there's no travelling to talk
...there you go.
Methinks WoW killed everyone's imagination.
New type of quest, go here, craft item X. Was in DAOC. Next problem?
Bureau of Commisions? An NPC by any other name. That may work for AO, but not for most fantasy games. Furthermore, it still ignores the fact individual npcs will have needs that aren't registered with the bureau.(that would be silly).
Don't like the floating !, give npcs who want to talk to you a unique animation, maybe they'll all be waving you over.
They need selective waving. You just had 10 rats killed for you, why do you need another 10?