Phase the world so that quest outcomes can change the world (for the player who completed).
To some extent, quests are just excuses to kill lots of stuff. Make combat fun. I have been playing Borderland 2 lately, and the tasks in each quests is very little different than those in MMOs .. find x, kill y, click on the stone, .... the only difference is a) presentation (with full voice acting, cut scenes and scripting), and b) the world changed afterwards. In fact, in BL2, the world does not change that much either.
There are some negative comments from any game that may be due to a repetitive quest system that feels more like a chore list rather than something "immersive" or whatever word is used in place of "immersive".
But, besides for changing the lore, is there a way to actually make a quest more fun and immersive at all to please some people? From what I've seen from posts they tend to be:
- Kill a creature, creatures, or objects defended by creatures
- Round up items to give, from killing creatures or picking them somewhere near creatures
- Escort someone to somewhere, defending them from creature ambushes.
- Activate a series of objects, usually accompanied by creature or spawns a creature itself.
- Talk to someone, either right next to you or somewhere else near some creatures.
- Unlikely related, but deliver something, go through roads full of creatures or to next questhub.
- Rough up someone with the strength of a creature until they get to low health.
- Enter some dungeon, cave, or lair and complete it, usually by ridding it of all creatures.
Perhaps it's because the quests are all seperate and gives its own form of XP that people don't like to see. What if there was a game that could let you do all of that but in a series that makes sense and then rewards you with something more then levels, more then items. Some sort of "trait" or "talent" or "skill" point or whatever it's called nowadays.
Would there be anything else devs could do to spice up quests without it getting stale, or is it set in stone as of this age?
If different classes did different quests then the quests could be tailored to those classes e.g. a thief quest might involve successfully running, jumping and climbing over city rooftops or successfully slipping from one patch of shadow to another when wandering guards were looking the other way.
In the end quests WILL be the same. How its presented is what will change. Guildwars 2 tries to do this and its 'nice' at first, but after the first few it quickly becomes stale and often times more tedious, requiring lots of work to complete one quest that feels over-redundant, specailly if your skipping the 'lame' parts of a quest and going with more fun parts like killing stuff. Events which have been around for some time now have been a good way to change up the pace but they typically follow a format similiar to a quest though more 'flashy'.
Quests can't really be changed, they will always be basically the same. How they are presented though and handled can be adjusted. A shift from quests to things like events or other delivery methods are probably the best solution for players to handle questing.
GW2's active events and TSW's investigation/sabatage additions have already shown ways to make "questing" better. I'll speak on the static, icon based questing that is left:
Show a difference between "task" and "quest". A farmer needing gophers killed is a task. Frodo getting kicked around over three movies to get a ring to a volcano is a quest. A real quest should be multi-tiered and span a few areas.
Agreed with this. Having static pve type tasks to do is perfectly fine, even in a sandbox. But they need to feel like that. A quests is an epic storyline adventure.
I have not problem with halping farmers do their job if it's just a side activitty or, that those jobs end up connecting to something very epic and important for the general are. Just collecting fish, rats, rabbits, cows, etc, etc all by itself is not what i call questing.
I actually like those kind of chore quests early on but i want them to fade out as i level up. I'd also like them to be flagged for things like class and morality choices so an apprentice wizard gets different chores than a new village militia recruit and paladins aren't asked to randomly murder people for some spare cash.
First make them actually quests again, like they were before WoW systemized them and made them the primary way to level up.
Make them fewer, but far more important, with some actual puzzle solving and exploration involved. Make them more about the world than exp grinding. Basically, how Dark Age of Camelot to have them.
And actually make the quests branch and have an impact on the world, like in GW2.
Done.
The more quests you have the worse they are. Don't make leveling depend on them, don't systemize them, and you're all set.
How were they like "before WoW systemized them"? Just a curiosity cause the only game I've played before Warcraft was Runescape. I have to admit I enjoy the questing there because they feel well-made, sparse, and involve a plethora of tasks with good rewards for a great of them.
Quests weren't the main source of exp so the rewards tended to be cash, faction or gear and as most of the good gear quests required minimum levels of faction before you could get the gear quest you'd only do the ones where you particularly wanted the reward which automatically made completing them feel better.
LESS number of quests (like 30% of current number) but more complex, longer and with randomized locations so it is less possible to use information databases.
Also totally not existing quest gps / 98% of current markers including ones over NPC heads.
Current situaiton though is not working for sizeable part of players. Insane amount of short 'quests' when you follow arrow or markers is NOT A GAME.
When i do quests - PLAYING is figuring out what to do, looking for something, making decisions and sometimes fighting.
When you follow an arrow or marker on map or highlight on the ground - then I am not making any decisions, not using my brain, not look for anything - ergo I am NOT PLAYING. Just making some time consuming chore in order to get "XP".
================================
Above won't work in many mmorpg's because:
a) some players like to follow an arrow and don't want to find / figure out by themself
b) some players don't like to do quests or even levelling and then just want to do end game instances since first minute of gameplay
Thing is it is propably not possible anymore to create one game for all types of players.
GW2 try to mitage that dividing game into 3 sub-games: Arenas PvP which is TOTALLY separated from rest of the game, WvWvW and PVE which are partially separated from themself and totally separated from sPvP / arenas.
This design works but I DOUBT it will work if majority of mmorpg's would copy it or even go further with it.
Like I said countless times - mmorpg playerbase IS fragmented, those 'fragments' of playerbase want sometimes totally DIFFRENT things from an mmorpg and it is no more possible to make universal design that will work for huge majority of mmorpg playerbase like WoW once did for long years.
That's also why adding cinematics nad voice-overs did not help. Because it did not change a game.
So @OP question is: what audience you want to make mmorpg for? what are your sales targets? what business model? what is your vision for an mmorpg and what should be main gameplay? ,etc
There is no universal best questing system anymore. I would say that sizeable percentage of what we call mmorpg today don't even need any questing or open world.
and that way is not to make thousands of the same quest where the crux of the quest is to open your map, follow the glowing x, click on something, kill x of something and then return and then do it again thousands more times.
Every quest you find in mythology, fantasy/sci-fi/western books, movies, etc all follow the same goals.
What is different about them is that the journey to complete the quest has many different segments and sub adventures that help shape the hero and his/her parfy.
To use a somewhat cliched example, the Lord of the Rings is essentially leaving point A, going to point B, right clicking on the mountain, spawning golum, fighting him (mini-boss) cue a cut scene and then spawnign back at Elrond's place for your reward.
But obviously, everyone who has read the books or seen the movies know that it's much more than this.
Fun has NOTHING to do the the quest. It has to do with the gameplay interaction like combat.
Killing 10 rats is not fun in a MMO where you take them one by one, with very little challenge.
Killing 100 rats is fun in Diablo when you can blow up 10 at a time, but can die to an elite rat.
Killing 100 rats is fun in borderland 2 when you can use terrain to snipe them first, and then blow them up with grenades.
It is really about the combat gameplay. Quests are just excuses to kill stuff.
and that way is not to make thousands of the same quest where the crux of the quest is to open your map, follow the glowing x, click on something, kill x of something and then return and then do it again thousands more times.
Every quest you find in mythology, fantasy/sci-fi/western books, movies, etc all follow the same goals.
What is different about them is that the journey to complete the quest has many different segments and sub adventures that help shape the hero and his/her parfy.
To use a somewhat cliched example, the Lord of the Rings is essentially leaving point A, going to point B, right clicking on the mountain, spawning golum, fighting him (mini-boss) cue a cut scene and then spawnign back at Elrond's place for your reward.
But obviously, everyone who has read the books or seen the movies know that it's much more than this.
Fun has NOTHING to do the the quest. It has to do with the gameplay interaction like combat.
Killing 10 rats is not fun in a MMO where you take them one by one, with very little challenge.
Killing 100 rats is fun in Diablo when you can blow up 10 at a time, but can die to an elite rat.
Killing 100 rats is fun in borderland 2 when you can use terrain to snipe them first, and then blow them up with grenades.
It is really about the combat gameplay. Quests are just excuses to kill stuff.
And what about the people who don't care about the "killing" and care more about the story or situation?
This was a large thread in LOTRO closed beta, where some players thought the combat was lacking but others didn't really care because to them the game wasn't about the combat.
Now is the time where you own up and say that you are one of the players who don't read the quests and just hit "ok". Or spacebar through the animated dialogue.
I could be wrong and will eat those words if I am, but I suspect, given your answer, that I'm not too far off the mark.
Like Skyrim? Need more content? Try my Skyrim mod "Godfred's Tomb."
Comments
Phase the world so that quest outcomes can change the world (for the player who completed).
To some extent, quests are just excuses to kill lots of stuff. Make combat fun. I have been playing Borderland 2 lately, and the tasks in each quests is very little different than those in MMOs .. find x, kill y, click on the stone, .... the only difference is a) presentation (with full voice acting, cut scenes and scripting), and b) the world changed afterwards. In fact, in BL2, the world does not change that much either.
If different classes did different quests then the quests could be tailored to those classes e.g. a thief quest might involve successfully running, jumping and climbing over city rooftops or successfully slipping from one patch of shadow to another when wandering guards were looking the other way.
In the end quests WILL be the same. How its presented is what will change. Guildwars 2 tries to do this and its 'nice' at first, but after the first few it quickly becomes stale and often times more tedious, requiring lots of work to complete one quest that feels over-redundant, specailly if your skipping the 'lame' parts of a quest and going with more fun parts like killing stuff. Events which have been around for some time now have been a good way to change up the pace but they typically follow a format similiar to a quest though more 'flashy'.
Quests can't really be changed, they will always be basically the same. How they are presented though and handled can be adjusted. A shift from quests to things like events or other delivery methods are probably the best solution for players to handle questing.
I actually like those kind of chore quests early on but i want them to fade out as i level up. I'd also like them to be flagged for things like class and morality choices so an apprentice wizard gets different chores than a new village militia recruit and paladins aren't asked to randomly murder people for some spare cash.
Quests weren't the main source of exp so the rewards tended to be cash, faction or gear and as most of the good gear quests required minimum levels of faction before you could get the gear quest you'd only do the ones where you particularly wanted the reward which automatically made completing them feel better.
LESS number of quests (like 30% of current number) but more complex, longer and with randomized locations so it is less possible to use information databases.
Also totally not existing quest gps / 98% of current markers including ones over NPC heads.
Current situaiton though is not working for sizeable part of players. Insane amount of short 'quests' when you follow arrow or markers is NOT A GAME.
When i do quests - PLAYING is figuring out what to do, looking for something, making decisions and sometimes fighting.
When you follow an arrow or marker on map or highlight on the ground - then I am not making any decisions, not using my brain, not look for anything - ergo I am NOT PLAYING. Just making some time consuming chore in order to get "XP".
================================
Above won't work in many mmorpg's because:
a) some players like to follow an arrow and don't want to find / figure out by themself
b) some players don't like to do quests or even levelling and then just want to do end game instances since first minute of gameplay
Thing is it is propably not possible anymore to create one game for all types of players.
===================================================================
GW2 try to mitage that dividing game into 3 sub-games: Arenas PvP which is TOTALLY separated from rest of the game, WvWvW and PVE which are partially separated from themself and totally separated from sPvP / arenas.
This design works but I DOUBT it will work if majority of mmorpg's would copy it or even go further with it.
Like I said countless times - mmorpg playerbase IS fragmented, those 'fragments' of playerbase want sometimes totally DIFFRENT things from an mmorpg and it is no more possible to make universal design that will work for huge majority of mmorpg playerbase like WoW once did for long years.
That's also why adding cinematics nad voice-overs did not help. Because it did not change a game.
So @OP question is: what audience you want to make mmorpg for? what are your sales targets? what business model? what is your vision for an mmorpg and what should be main gameplay? ,etc
There is no universal best questing system anymore. I would say that sizeable percentage of what we call mmorpg today don't even need any questing or open world.
Fun has NOTHING to do the the quest. It has to do with the gameplay interaction like combat.
Killing 10 rats is not fun in a MMO where you take them one by one, with very little challenge.
Killing 100 rats is fun in Diablo when you can blow up 10 at a time, but can die to an elite rat.
Killing 100 rats is fun in borderland 2 when you can use terrain to snipe them first, and then blow them up with grenades.
It is really about the combat gameplay. Quests are just excuses to kill stuff.
And what about the people who don't care about the "killing" and care more about the story or situation?
This was a large thread in LOTRO closed beta, where some players thought the combat was lacking but others didn't really care because to them the game wasn't about the combat.
Now is the time where you own up and say that you are one of the players who don't read the quests and just hit "ok". Or spacebar through the animated dialogue.
I could be wrong and will eat those words if I am, but I suspect, given your answer, that I'm not too far off the mark.
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