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Double-sided quests, why not in MMOs?
Neverdyne
Member Posts: 167
Playing Skyrim tought me how fun it is to get off the beaten path and explore. One important aspect I found that Skyrim uses to incentivise open world exploration is what I like to call "double sided" quests. Basically, these are quests that you can initiate through several different ways, and not exclusively through talking with a questgiver on a "quest hub" or town. These quests are important because it lets the player simply go to wherever he wants knowing that he'll eventually get the quests.
Example:
I roamed the world exploring by my own account, and in one of the bandit hideouts I visited I found a strange sword. Upon looting it, I got a quest that said something like "This sword seems to have a family crest, you could try find out who the owner was." I didn't want to go back to town at that time, so I continued exploring a hidden cave. Near the end of that cave I found a tomb and an undead rose up from it, triggering an epic boss fight. After killing him, he droped a parchment in which he was condemned to undead because of his crimes during life. I got a quest for it, saying that "I should try and find out more about who this man used to be". After that, I returned to town and proceeded to complete both quests.
Now, I could have started the family crest sword quest by talking with the guy who lost it in town, at which point he tells me to go get it fromt he bandit hideout. That's similar to what MMOs do. But the quest can also start by you simply stumbling upon the sword while exploring.
I can't help but wonder why MMOs don't apply this quest model more often. It would give both types of players (those who prefer questgivers, and those who just want to explore freely) a way to do quests how they want to do them. As it stands right now, if you simply explore in an MMO and fight whatever you find, you'll be gimped simply because you won't be doing any quests. What do you guys think?
Comments
I've wondered this myself before, especially with quest item drops. Fight 100 bears, loot everything then get a quest to get bear gall bladders and realize, none of those 100 had gall bladders for me to loot, but now they magically will. Same with head into this area and get me a tome of holy might, when you'd just cleared that area or killed that named mob it magically didn't count.
I like how Skyrim does this in the beginning with the Golden Claw. I didn't even know there was a questgiver until my 3rd toon.
It's called dev laziness and lack of creativity. They know right now they can put forth minimal effort and still get maximum profit because the playerbase allows it.
Sure, they complain...but they are still buying the product. Sheeple....psshht!
This is the sort of thing that is addressed in GW2 with dynamic events. You can go to a scout who will point you towards an ongoing event or you can just roam around and participate when you come across one.
I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been -Wayne Gretzky
WAR said they were doing this but I don't remember it. It's a good idea.
Sent me an email if you want me to mail you some pizza rolls.
Not to avoid your question, but, I couold spend all day asking the question "why dont more MMOs do XXX like they did in Skyrim."
The fact is, the answer is simple. Lazy development.
Lazy? More like more costly.
It is like:
a) do standard quests and spend less money, and player still come
b) spend more money / time on doing more complicated quests and some of players might not like those
Accountants and sometimes CEO's that don't really care if they run game comapny or oil company make decisions, based only on finances, revenues and profit targets.
One of downsides that mmorpg's became more mainstream and that many game companies / publishers are nowadays stock corporations and or funded by VC funds, their first priority is to find way to get possibly big profits fast and in SAFE way.
That's why industry is risk averse currently, not much innovation. Sure there is some tweaks here and there, new genres like mmofps / mmorts, BUT mmorpg's are stale, cause they don't want to risk - and one of reason for this is above reasons.
Especially that innovating can backfire, which already happened few times in mmorpg market (also cause frequently this innvoation is poorly implemented and bugged, but instead of trying to provide polished innovation - safer thing is to stick to old ways and kill REAL innovation).
F.e. rifts in Rift or VO in Swtor imho are not really innovation. That's just lipstick on a pig.
This does exist to a very small degree in WoW, and in a couple places in SW:ToR. You don't collect gall bladders or anything like that, but random mobs will drop stuff that you turn into someone without actually picking up the quest first. The item itself starts the quest.
I think it would be cool if there were quest items to pick up, if they dropped whether you had the quest or not. I would expect part of the reason that doesn't happen is having double the number of quest 'chats' whether it's just text or voice overs. One set for picking the quest up without having the quest items and another set for when you already have picked up the quest items.
I can not remember winning or losing a single debate on the internet.
While this would be good for things that are truly special (and the golden claw or sword with a family crest could be), there is a really good reason why you werent getting bear gallbladders before you picked up the quest. You were not cutting them out of the corpses. I mean what real reason would you have to grab a gallbladder if there wasnt some alchemist asking you to do so for some experiment? You would be more interested in the pelt for tailoring.
This same thing can be true for bounties. Lets say the mayor of a town that has been harried by orcs gives a quest to turn in orc ears. There would be no way beforehand for your character to know to remove the ears from orcs that he killed, so you didnt get any. But once you have the quest your character knows to get that specific proof for the bounty.
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What I would like to see with regard to double-sided quests is more options in the quest itself... You get a quest to do something you consider really shady, or ANYONE would consider really shady or worse. If it is something illegal you should be able to report it to the guards instead. Whenever you are told to go after a target (assuming they arent killing everyone on sight) you should have the option of telling the target, hey person X told me to assassinate you -- that didnt seem like a good idea to me and I figured you might want to know.
There were a couple of these in skyrim but not enough of them... They rarely ever exist in an MMO.
Yes i got same experience and i love it this can happen alot many of these stumble upon quest are in Skyrim that you also can get by just talking to some guy/women who give you quest in town. Dungeons in this game are AWESOME did i tell you that already:)
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Hrmm, yeah, as mentioned - have seen this to various degrees in a couple of MMORPGs. You're out doing your thing - you loot an item, the item gives you a quest to return it to somebody. If you had not found the item, that person is usually there asking you to go find it. It's generally a means for starting a quest chain.
Could definitely see where it could be done more, though...lol. Thinking about the various mobs over the years that have been killed while out roaming aimlessly - then returning to a quest hub to find out that some NPC wants you to go kill said mob.
Tom: I need you to go forth from the village to kill the foul beast known as Oogitysmear. This heinous monster has been stealing candy from the children of our poor village.
Jerry: Oh, I killed him on the way here. You're safe now.
Tom: I need you to go forth from the village to kill the foul beast known as Oogitysmear. This heinous monster has been stealing candy from the children of our poor village.
Jerry: No, you don't get it. He's dead. He won't be stealing candy from the children again.
Tom: I need you to go forth from the village to kill the foul beast known as Oogitysmear. This heinous monster has been stealing candy from the children of our poor village.
Jerry: DUDE, HE'S DEAD.
Tom: I need you to go forth from the village to kill the foul beast known as Oogitysmear. This heinous monster has been stealing candy from the children of our poor village.
Jerry: /wonders if anybody saw him kill Tom
I miss the MMORPG genre. Will a developer ever make one again?
Explorer: 87%, Killer: 67%, Achiever: 27%, Socializer: 20%
Oh, there is another reason why this happens frequently in skyrim.
Since once you kill a monster, it is DEAD and remains dead, if it didnt start quests backwards then you would just lose questlines from exploring.
This could be really bad if you messed up a major questline and now since you killed the bandits from step 4 in say the companions quest before you even heard of the companions, wellp now you can never be a werewolf, sorry.
The game also doesnt let you get rid of some items for the same reason. Although it would be nice if it didnt flag the WHOLE STACK of items.... You only need one giants toe in theory even to put the staff back together (0 actually) -- so why questflag ALL of them? I mean they can stolen flag one toe out of a stack of giant toes. Not only couldnt I use them for potions, I ended up with 14 of them clogging up my inventory at 1lb each before I finished the questline just to get rid of them.
In an MMO the devs can be lazy with killing the orc chief that is threatening the town because even if you killed him yesterday, he is back again today. If once you killed the orc chief he was GONE then it would make more sense for the town to reward you if you found the quest soon after you completed the quest. If you waited long enough then they would figure -- oops took care of itself -- back to normal.