MMOs should be about the players, not telling a scripted linear story.
Quests as they are today just do not fit well in a virtual world. They're all mechanically the same when it comes down to it, the story they tell is NOT reflected in the world, and nothing makes more more fatigued by a new MMO than doing quests.
If anything, the idea of GW2 and Vanguard should be developed more. Or, revert quests to what they were in DAoC early days. They existed as an immersive part of the world, a break from mob grinding. They told a significant story. There were no !!! over NPC heads. You just talked to NPCs and got a sense of the world flavor from them. Now and then, you might stumble across a quest. A SERIOUS quest that would take you all over the place. One worthy of a hero.
In Vanguard, all NPCs iived in houses you could enter, and had dialogue you can interact with, whether quest or not. There was also the diplomacy system, turning deeper conversations into a trading card game battle. You could even diplo an NPC into killing another.
And
GW2's events feel like quests should. They happen whether you're there or not. And they impact the world for EVERYONE. They just aren't done right yet.
Quests should require some thought as to how to complete them; they should not be one-clickable tasks with a compass indicator, and the rewards for them should not be overly generous as they are now. Quests should be something done once in a while, not several times a day.
To say that as a generalization flies in the face of common knowledge and hard data points which indicate the opposite is true.
To say that games should additionally include some thought-provoking quest content and that perhaps players should be empowered to engage in that high-difficulty content at all times, that would be fine. But that content would be in addition to the existing low-tier questing which provides filler content for players to experience.
The same kill 10 rats quest done 200 different times is not "content". It's a chore, one that makes me bored of a game IMMEDIATELY. When you have a handful of good quests in an ocean of garbage, how do you find the good content?
The same kill 10 rats quest done 200 different times is not "content". It's a chore, one that makes me bored of a game IMMEDIATELY. When you have a handful of good quests in an ocean of garbage, how do you find the good content?
Instead, they should ONLY HAVE GOOD CONTENT.
What game only has "kill x" quests though? None. (No good one, at least.)
A good game will have quests as varied as WOW's where you're rarely doing exactly the same thing two times in a row, even though combat is usually a central theme to most questing.
The only significant failing of a quest implementation like WOW's is the lack of a difficulty slider so that I can challenge myself if I want to (it's my choice) and earn more powerful rewards if I choose a harder setting.
Maybe some other games do it badly, like how SWTOR has varied quest content but every single PVE mob is basically identical (apart from looks) which causes combat to become repetitive much quicker than it otherwise would. But those are just bad examples of questing, not examples of why questing itself is bad.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
I hear you and totally agree. Sad that most MMORPG players have never played an MMORPG before 2004 and cannot imagine gamplay that is not hand-holding or directed by NPC's from levels 1 to 90. They just have not experienced anything else.
This will change. This year.
It's not NPC direction that players seek from quest, but a break from the endless monotony that pre-2004 MMORPGs were because they were the Endless Mob Grind.
Pre-MMORPG gamers could've said something similar, that early MMORPGers had apparently never played a game as densely entertaining as non-MMORPGs, and instead accepted games spaced out with significant empty timesinks (travel in early MMORPGs) and significant repetition (endless mob grind.)
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
Stinging death penalty + encouraged grouping + small chance of decent loot drops + trains all do their part to keep away the monotony. (i.e., I was never bored in Unrest or Lower Guk).
Now, I agree that some quests are fine for variety in a game, but most recent MMORPG's are overloaded with trivial quests that feel much like chores, with little reward other than the fastest (and most boring) way to level.
Stinging DP didn't add to the game for most players. Most players seek games for entertainment, not to experience punishment.
You've listed ways early MMORPGs weren't entirely tedious. But complete tedium (or even moderate tedium) isn't the bar to which they're being measured against. We're comparing them to pre-MMORPG gaming and games of the same era, which were in the best cases completely devoid of tedium, and only rarely were moderately tedious.
It was at that time that the term "timesink" came into heavy use by gamers, because these were the first games to involve very long or tedious experiences with no gameplay (and amusingly the wikipedia entry for "timesink" links to a 2002 slashdot post where he recounts melee characters AFKing to watch TV during boss fights while their characters attacked. Not exactly the game's early beginnings, but similar posts appeared all over the other gaming forums I frequented at the time.) But we don't need one player's isolated opinion from 2002 to realize that compared with mainstream gaming at the time, early MMORPGs were heavy on timesink and lighter on gameplay -- a more diluted gaming experience than other games of the same era and prior.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
The first thing I would do is eliminate all xp rewards for any quests. That alone would change the entire dynamic for questing and gameplay in general. Keep the money rewards, the ocassional item/weapon/armor, perhaps have faction increases/decreases etc.
I think the general idea behind GW2 questing is sound, it just needs additional development and needs to be taken to the next level.
The biggest issue with current questing mechanics is that it completely fractures the playerbase and turns the majority of gaming into tiny 5 minute bites with no cohesiveness.
Originally posted by AlBQuirky For me, mini-games are not that fun. I have trouble making sense of why my character is playing a mini-game.
But all that quest content you listed in your post is just a collection of minigames.The quests are just a trail of breadcrumbs providing motive to move from one to another. That isn't a game, it's a story. I'm not saying that's bad or being critical of you as a player focusing your attention on it, I'm just saying that from a game design point of view, focusing on the story and then filling in the gameplay to fit the episodes to the story feels backwards to me.
I think of mini-games like what WoW offered with plants vs zombies where you were taken out of the game to play another game. Actual games separated from the MMO.
I guess for me, questing IS the game
- Al
Personally the only modern MMORPG trend that annoys me is the idea that MMOs need to be designed in a way to attract people who don't actually like MMOs. Which to me makes about as much sense as someone trying to figure out a way to get vegetarians to eat at their steakhouse. - FARGIN_WAR
Originally posted by Rusque Someone mentioned dishonored, and I think it's the freedom that really makes the quests fun.If the quest said, "Go to the tower, kill 20 guards and the regent and then come back to the boatman" it probably wouldn't be such a good game.But what they do say is, "The regent is in the tower, find him and kill him." Then they put a bunch of guards in your way and you have to find your own way through. Use the rooftops, go in guns blazing and kill everyone, use the sewers, stealth kill everyone, do the whole thing without getting noticed at all, swim through the water, mix n match.That's really the primary difference between fun quests and usual MMO style quests. Options and variety.Now the real trick is . . . how do you implement that type of freedom onto an open world full of other players doing the same quest as you? And that's why MMO's have what they have. It's a tall order to ask for freedom when they have to provide it to everyone simultaneously.Let's take that dishonored example and put it in an MMO. 10 people get the quest to kill the regent. You decide you want to go in guns blazing and have fun. Well, you just ruined everyone else's fun - the person who was trying to ghost through the level without getting noticed doesn't have any amount of challenge laid out in front of him anymore - you're killing the guards and he can just walk past.Same goes for the people who were trying to sneak through the sewers and over the rooftops, there's no puzzle work for them to solve if all the guards have left their guard posts. No threat, no need to sneak by. Then you get to the regent and guess what? There's a line of people waiting to kill him so you have to wait your turn until he respawns.many people playing simultaneously + quests = shallow quests.Unless you're going to phase or use instances - which people will also complain about because they want it seamless - it's a very difficult thing to do.
City of Heroes (CoH) used instances for their "Missions." I was fine with the way they did that. A player could adjust the difficulty with that and could solo or group, as the mission adjusted for the number of players who entered it. Another benefit of instanced quest areas.
There were some hardcore players that would max out the difficulty, ask for people to join a group to increase the number of opponents, and then everyone else would leave the group and they would try to solo it set at a full group at max difficulty.
Where they failed, in my opinion, was that there was still only one way to get through it: Kill everything. I do wish there was a way to implement multiple ways to accomplish a quests goal besides kill everything in sight in a massively mulit-player setting.
CoH's missions were all "indoor" missions, though. It was set in a city and almost every mission was in a building. There was the usual "Kill X" street missions (outdoors with everyone else), but the majority of them were in warehouses, offices, and the like. A player could not enter a building unless they had a mission there. It worked in that setting.
I like the idea of the Dishonored way and wonder about how fun that would be in a MMORPG
PS: After reading through my post, it occurs to me that as long as XP is given per kill, most players will not pass up the chance for more XP. In the Dishonored example, the players who chose stealth and avoidance would get significantly less XP than those who chose guns blazin'. I can feel safe saying that the guns blazin' method would be more popular
- Al
Personally the only modern MMORPG trend that annoys me is the idea that MMOs need to be designed in a way to attract people who don't actually like MMOs. Which to me makes about as much sense as someone trying to figure out a way to get vegetarians to eat at their steakhouse. - FARGIN_WAR
The same kill 10 rats quest done 200 different times is not "content". It's a chore, one that makes me bored of a game IMMEDIATELY. When you have a handful of good quests in an ocean of garbage, how do you find the good content?
Instead, they should ONLY HAVE GOOD CONTENT.
What game only has "kill x" quests though? None. (No good one, at least.)
A good game will have quests as varied as WOW's where you're rarely doing exactly the same thing two times in a row
Had to stop reading there. Killing 10 bunnies instead of 10 rats IS doing the same thing over again. It gets old fast. Since questing is the only real way to level, there HAS to be a sea of garbage filler quests, as well as the once in a mile good ones.
Originally posted by Axehilt It's not NPC direction that players seek from quest, but a break from the endless monotony that pre-2004 MMORPGs were because they were the Endless Mob Grind.
Mob grinds were a blast. Spend one day here, another day there. Meet new freinds who take you to place you haven't been, and vice versa. Explore. Very different than today's quest grind where you spend all day looking at your journal and compass indicator, never looking at the scenery that the devs spent so much $ rendering.
Originally posted by Axehilt Stinging DP didn't add to the game for most players. Most players seek games for entertainment, not to experience punishment...
If players dislike punishment, then why not make all characters invulnerable?
Originally posted by Maelkor ...The biggest issue with current questing mechanics is that it completely fractures the playerbase and turns the majority of gaming into tiny 5 minute bites with no cohesiveness.
Precisely.
Luckily, i don't need you to like me to enjoy video games. -nariusseldon. In F2P I think it's more a case of the game's trying to play the player's. -laserit
Had to stop reading there. Killing 10 bunnies instead of 10 rats IS doing the same thing over again. It gets old fast. Since questing is the only real way to level, there HAS to be a sea of garbage filler quests, as well as the once in a mile good ones.
Are you joking? Which of these is more repetitive?
Killing mobs endlessly, which involves:
Killing mobs
Questing, which involves:
Killing mobs
Collecting things
Delivering things
Bombing things
Playing Plants vs. Zombies
Playing Farmville
Sneaking past enemies to bomb an entrance
Rescuing people
Putting out fires
...etc.
And this glosses over the significant variety of mobs you end up killing when quests send you to kill that horde of zerg-like enemies vs. solitary regular enemies vs. a boss with unique abilities, and everything in between.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
Mob grinds were a blast. Spend one day here, another day there. Meet new freinds who take you to place you haven't been, and vice versa. Explore. Very different than today's quest grind where you spend all day looking at your journal and compass indicator, never looking at the scenery that the devs spent so much $ rendering.
If players dislike punishment, then why not make all characters invulnerable?
Spending an entire day kililng the same 1-3 mob types was ultra boring. I meet new friends in games even without the Endless Mob Grind, and in games where I haven't played 5+ years they take me new places there too :P
Players dislike excessive punishment. Having a fight instantly reset is the bare minimum which is absolutely required to have failure be failure. And in most cases that bare minimum is the maximum death penalty you should implement, because games are about unraveling the pattern behind why you lost the fight and didn't get rewarded; they're not about getting kicked in the groin each time you fail.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
The same kill 10 rats quest done 200 different times is not "content". It's a chore, one that makes me bored of a game IMMEDIATELY. When you have a handful of good quests in an ocean of garbage, how do you find the good content?
Instead, they should ONLY HAVE GOOD CONTENT.
What game only has "kill x" quests though? None. (No good one, at least.)
A good game will have quests as varied as WOW's where you're rarely doing exactly the same thing two times in a row
Had to stop reading there. Killing 10 bunnies instead of 10 rats IS doing the same thing over again. It gets old fast. Since questing is the only real way to level, there HAS to be a sea of garbage filler quests, as well as the once in a mile good ones.
You kill multiple mobs in ANY RPG.
Heck, back in the old EQ, you kill way more than 10 rats. The only difference is that there is no counter, except your experience.
Had to stop reading there. Killing 10 bunnies instead of 10 rats IS doing the same thing over again. It gets old fast. Since questing is the only real way to level, there HAS to be a sea of garbage filler quests, as well as the once in a mile good ones.
Are you joking? Which of these is more repetitive?
Killing mobs endlessly, which involves:
Killing mobs
Questing, which involves:
Killing mobs
Collecting things
Delivering things
Bombing things
Playing Plants vs. Zombies
Playing Farmville
Sneaking past enemies to bomb an entrance
Rescuing people
Putting out fires
...etc.
All of that breaks down into "Run to the glowing point on your map, click one button". There's no thought behind it, no actually different mechanics. They're just chores. And they're all the same and always will be the same.
When killing mobs in DAoC, I could choose where to go, make my own difficulty, explore where I wanted, fight different mobs with different tactics. Different players would make each experience unique. The grind lasted too long, that's for sure, but the game didn't try to insult your intelligence by pretending you were doing some noble quest for an NPC (that in reality is just a boring chore). It was an honest grind. I'd rather have the freedom to group with other players and go where I want (with the option of taking a break by finding a quest, doing bounty missions, or kill tasks) than by being forced to solo grind chores for a layabout NPC with no change for 70 levels.
Mob grinds were a blast. Spend one day here, another day there. Meet new freinds who take you to place you haven't been, and vice versa. Explore. Very different than today's quest grind where you spend all day looking at your journal and compass indicator, never looking at the scenery that the devs spent so much $ rendering.
If players dislike punishment, then why not make all characters invulnerable?
Spending an entire day kililng the same 1-3 mob types was ultra boring.
MMOs should be about the players, not telling a scripted linear story.
Quests as they are today just do not fit well in a virtual world. They're all mechanically the same when it comes down to it, the story they tell is NOT reflected in the world, and nothing makes more more fatigued by a new MMO than doing quests.
If anything, the idea of GW2 and Vanguard should be developed more. Or, revert quests to what they were in DAoC early days. They existed as an immersive part of the world, a break from mob grinding. They told a significant story. There were no !!! over NPC heads. You just talked to NPCs and got a sense of the world flavor from them. Now and then, you might stumble across a quest. A SERIOUS quest that would take you all over the place. One worthy of a hero.
In Vanguard, all NPCs iived in houses you could enter, and had dialogue you can interact with, whether quest or not. There was also the diplomacy system, turning deeper conversations into a trading card game battle. You could even diplo an NPC into killing another.
And
GW2's events feel like quests should. They happen whether you're there or not. And they impact the world for EVERYONE. They just aren't done right yet.
Anyway, bumping my actual answer before the thread got derailed.
Mob grinds were a blast. Spend one day here, another day there. Meet new freinds who take you to place you haven't been, and vice versa. Explore. Very different than today's quest grind where you spend all day looking at your journal and compass indicator, never looking at the scenery that the devs spent so much $ rendering.
If players dislike punishment, then why not make all characters invulnerable?
Spending an entire day kililng the same 1-3 mob types was ultra boring.
All of that breaks down into "Run to the glowing point on your map, click one button". There's no thought behind it, no actually different mechanics. They're just chores. And they're all the same and always will be the same.
When killing mobs in DAoC, I could choose where to go, make my own difficulty, explore where I wanted, fight different mobs with different tactics. Different players would make each experience unique. The grind lasted too long, that's for sure, but the game didn't try to insult your intelligence by pretending you were doing some noble quest for an NPC (that in reality is just a boring chore). It was an honest grind. I'd rather have the freedom to group with other players and go where I want (with the option of taking a break by finding a quest, doing bounty missions, or kill tasks) than by being forced to solo grind chores for a layabout NPC with no change for 70 levels.
You don't really get to address a list of varied activities and claim they involve "no thought" when your side of the fence requires less thought and fewer activities.
Literally just today before your post happened I switched quest zones in WOW. So none of what you're describing isn't present in a quest game.
It's clear you don't like quests and that's not going to change, but can you concede that reality is reality?
Both methods require some thought.
A game with significant activity variety clearly requires more thought than one where you can fight the same 1-3 mob types for 5 levels in a row.
You can still say you hate questing because of what you've described, but let's not lie. Let's discuss the truth.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
If you're going to discuss the truth, you need to establish what is the truth.
What was described previously was not quests, but a list of activities. Such things can exist entirely without a questing framework, and indeed does in regards already. It's not as prolific or obvious as when it's done as a quest where it outlines exactly what you need to do to get a reward, but it can viably exist without it.
The general complaint I'd have about how quests are largely handled right now is that they are not reducing the grind, they are migrating it into a different package. As long as games have a distinctly finite set of actions with which you can interact with the world, that will always be the case.
And that aspect is not about to change in a rush. The variety of content is something that competes with the depth of content and ultimately the larger a game is starting off, the more thin the content is going to be any ways.
So the question of how to revamp a questing system really just kind of comes down to 'how do we package the things people are going to do'.
The reason questing might feel like less of a grind that some is because it railroads them to a degree into dabbling in the games alternate elements a bit. If one steps back and realizes it's still running a chain of throwaway tasks repeatedly to obtain xp/loot that illusion can quickly break and you realize it's just a different treadmill.
As far as trying to present this dilemma in a different way to freshen it up, my approach would be to combine some ideas on procedural content with the use of pre-scripted quest events.
So breaking it down, there'd be four main types of quests similar to how they're often handled now. Minor, Major, and Overarching, and World Events.
Minor Quests - This would be what we'd want out of a procedural system. It has bits of quests built into blocks that the game can cobble together and throw at players. These quests are more or less ambient activities, they provide a minimal amount of context and no real impact on the game beyond personal progress.
These types of quests would be auto-generated and fed to the player in simple snippets provided by NPC's in a town, a random event while traveling about, or via some spawned interactive object they might spot or pick up.
Such quests basically just go into their own tab. They aren't things you have to actively pick up, instead they are just fed to you so that you have a constant stable of actions that can reward you with some extra XP and an item or two.
Major Quests - These quests would be different mainly in that they are treated more like the quests we experience usually in games. The difference is largely in the delivery and the means of execution. In this type of quest the progress is all scripted by the devs, but they contain variables in where the quest's goals will spawn and contain 'filler' segments in them to include entirely random minor elements.
Obtaining these quests would operate via some rather traditional methods of post-boards (this potentially also being a means for players to commission quests and offer up rewards to one another) and criers/announcers as quest givers.
These quests basically exist as the ones you'd play elsewhere in that each character can do them once. The main goal is making it so that the redundancy of the quest is mitigated by the randomization of a set of it's elements, so that each player might be achieving the same fundamental goals, but they are in differing manners.
To solve any grouping issues it can generally just be taken that if multiple people are doing the same core quest, as long as the goals of one is achieved, then it shares completion with the others, essentially replacing the other player's quests with that of the one being completed so they get uniform reward for time spent.
Overarching Quests - These are basically toned down world events. Big quest lines that are designed to be one-off activities driven by a large chunk of narrative. The questing for these events is handled somewhat like a pyramid, with a central quest goal being driven by players completing seeded Major events and contributing towards supporting and optional goals via minor ambient quests.
The central quests are more or less exclusive activities, and they exist in specific locations. Once they are done, they're done. No killing the same dark lord or demon multiple times. The rewards are somewhat contextual and finite as well, so you don't have a ton of people running around with the same named loot. The way this gets balanced is by introducing these rewards and elements in a consistent manner. The dark lord dies, next quest chain pops up for those vying to take over or capitalize on the power vacuum.
World Events - More or less this is what you've always experienced out of some of the classic titles as well as a few recent ones. Dev created and scripted activities that are meant to introduce some major event or aspect to the game world. These are much like Overarching quests, but generally have a larger encompassing factor where the quests are not ultimately exclusive in reward for contribution, but they are exclusive for the time frame in which they happen.
This all goes along with other elements, such as how items in the game gets handled, but that'd be an equally long post.
"The knowledge of the theory of logic has no tendency whatever to make men good reasoners." - Thomas B. Macaulay
"The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge." - Daniel J. Boorstin
I think of mini-games like what WoW offered with plants vs zombies where you were taken out of the game to play another game. Actual games separated from the MMO.
Ah-ha! This is where we've been getting crossed up - when I say "minigame", I just mean an activity or block of mechanics. For example: to me, fishing is a minigame, even though it doesn't phase you of the world. I look at everything about a quest between the question between the exclamation mark and a question mark as being it's own little minigame.
When I look at the way the last few themepark games I've sampled have been designed, that gameplay between the start and the end of a quest seems to be starting to take a back seat to the attempt to tell a story and I just don't think that works. If the activities of the quest are just filler between text boxes or cut scenes, then I start to wonder why you are making an MMO and not a movie or a comic book.
So my argument is that in order to improve quests, you have ignore the quests, ignore the story, ignore the lore and simply ask: if there were no exclaimation marks and no question marks, is this something that I would have fun doing for a few hours?
Quests are SOOOOOO 2012, all games should have missions from here on out.
Just saying >.>
Let's not play games with the interpretation of a word when it's clear what the individuals are referring too, it doesn't actually add to the discussion.
Before you criticize someone, walk a mile in their shoes. That way, if they get angry, they'll be a mile away... and barefoot.
Let's not play games with the interpretation of a word when it's clear what the individuals are referring too, it doesn't actually add to the discussion.
Is it clear?
Admittedly, I've not been as helpful or insightful as I had hoped I was going to be, but I feel like there are at least two fundamentally different views of quests in this thread: one focused on where the exclamation marks in a story should be placed and one focused on the gameplay between those exclamation marks.
Traditionally, quests have been the main way for developers to provide stepping stones to players to grind on, so they can progress in the game.
The problem is not in how these quests are implemented but rather the fact that they are NPCs giving you specific tasks that have already been completed before by another.
As far as I know, the only way to abandon quests all-together is to have a fully player-driven MMO, where players create their own requests for players of a lower caliber to complete. This would work well in a sandbox.
The problem is that with today's resources as they are for the industry, and the preference of today's resources being put into more mainstream types of MMOs that follow a proven system there is no way to create an 'ideal' sandbox game or MMO without quests. MUDs have come close to achieving this, with player-run main factions as a part of the themepark, though nearly all still have quests. It would also have things players could achieve without grinding, such as having your character work at a task while you are offline, to simulate the time spent in the real world and possibly achieve better immersion if done properly.
An MMO of this caliber would require a very large team, with a plethora of intelligent designers thinking of every aspect of the game. An ideal physics system would be nice, as well as control of the world's terrain and cities much like WURM online if it were a sandbox, but with the pace of Minecraft to a certain extent depending on what items your character was using to accomplish the task.
As a freelance designer with little experience, I still have time to think over the major plague of the MMO 'Treadmill' though I have never taken the thought into detail until now.
If you're going to discuss the truth, you need to establish what is the truth.
What was described previously was not quests, but a list of activities. Such things can exist entirely without a questing framework, and indeed does in regards already. It's not as prolific or obvious as when it's done as a quest where it outlines exactly what you need to do to get a reward, but it can viably exist without it.
The general complaint I'd have about how quests are largely handled right now is that they are not reducing the grind, they are migrating it into a different package. As long as games have a distinctly finite set of actions with which you can interact with the world, that will always be the case.
Well without a quest system even if a game had the same activity variety, the player will essentially be penalized for switching between them -- much like how in archaic Endless Mob Grind MMORPGs you were penalized for fighting a variety of mob types (because it takes time to travel between different mob types, and that time is completely unrewarded without a quest system.) At least not unless we're talking about an MMORPG with every activity and mob in the same place, or where you can teleport anywhere instantly.
Eventually everything seems like a grind. But it's fairly well-understood that by being dramatically less repetitive, quests were a significant reduction in grind.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
Comments
MMOs should be about the players, not telling a scripted linear story.
Quests as they are today just do not fit well in a virtual world. They're all mechanically the same when it comes down to it, the story they tell is NOT reflected in the world, and nothing makes more more fatigued by a new MMO than doing quests.
If anything, the idea of GW2 and Vanguard should be developed more. Or, revert quests to what they were in DAoC early days. They existed as an immersive part of the world, a break from mob grinding. They told a significant story. There were no !!! over NPC heads. You just talked to NPCs and got a sense of the world flavor from them. Now and then, you might stumble across a quest. A SERIOUS quest that would take you all over the place. One worthy of a hero.
In Vanguard, all NPCs iived in houses you could enter, and had dialogue you can interact with, whether quest or not. There was also the diplomacy system, turning deeper conversations into a trading card game battle. You could even diplo an NPC into killing another.
And
GW2's events feel like quests should. They happen whether you're there or not. And they impact the world for EVERYONE. They just aren't done right yet.
The same kill 10 rats quest done 200 different times is not "content". It's a chore, one that makes me bored of a game IMMEDIATELY. When you have a handful of good quests in an ocean of garbage, how do you find the good content?
Instead, they should ONLY HAVE GOOD CONTENT.
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
What game only has "kill x" quests though? None. (No good one, at least.)
A good game will have quests as varied as WOW's where you're rarely doing exactly the same thing two times in a row, even though combat is usually a central theme to most questing.
The only significant failing of a quest implementation like WOW's is the lack of a difficulty slider so that I can challenge myself if I want to (it's my choice) and earn more powerful rewards if I choose a harder setting.
Maybe some other games do it badly, like how SWTOR has varied quest content but every single PVE mob is basically identical (apart from looks) which causes combat to become repetitive much quicker than it otherwise would. But those are just bad examples of questing, not examples of why questing itself is bad.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
It's not NPC direction that players seek from quest, but a break from the endless monotony that pre-2004 MMORPGs were because they were the Endless Mob Grind.
Pre-MMORPG gamers could've said something similar, that early MMORPGers had apparently never played a game as densely entertaining as non-MMORPGs, and instead accepted games spaced out with significant empty timesinks (travel in early MMORPGs) and significant repetition (endless mob grind.)
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
Stinging DP didn't add to the game for most players. Most players seek games for entertainment, not to experience punishment.
You've listed ways early MMORPGs weren't entirely tedious. But complete tedium (or even moderate tedium) isn't the bar to which they're being measured against. We're comparing them to pre-MMORPG gaming and games of the same era, which were in the best cases completely devoid of tedium, and only rarely were moderately tedious.
It was at that time that the term "timesink" came into heavy use by gamers, because these were the first games to involve very long or tedious experiences with no gameplay (and amusingly the wikipedia entry for "timesink" links to a 2002 slashdot post where he recounts melee characters AFKing to watch TV during boss fights while their characters attacked. Not exactly the game's early beginnings, but similar posts appeared all over the other gaming forums I frequented at the time.) But we don't need one player's isolated opinion from 2002 to realize that compared with mainstream gaming at the time, early MMORPGs were heavy on timesink and lighter on gameplay -- a more diluted gaming experience than other games of the same era and prior.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
The first thing I would do is eliminate all xp rewards for any quests. That alone would change the entire dynamic for questing and gameplay in general. Keep the money rewards, the ocassional item/weapon/armor, perhaps have faction increases/decreases etc.
I think the general idea behind GW2 questing is sound, it just needs additional development and needs to be taken to the next level.
The biggest issue with current questing mechanics is that it completely fractures the playerbase and turns the majority of gaming into tiny 5 minute bites with no cohesiveness.
I guess for me, questing IS the game
- Al
Personally the only modern MMORPG trend that annoys me is the idea that MMOs need to be designed in a way to attract people who don't actually like MMOs. Which to me makes about as much sense as someone trying to figure out a way to get vegetarians to eat at their steakhouse.- FARGIN_WAR
There were some hardcore players that would max out the difficulty, ask for people to join a group to increase the number of opponents, and then everyone else would leave the group and they would try to solo it set at a full group at max difficulty.
Where they failed, in my opinion, was that there was still only one way to get through it: Kill everything. I do wish there was a way to implement multiple ways to accomplish a quests goal besides kill everything in sight in a massively mulit-player setting.
CoH's missions were all "indoor" missions, though. It was set in a city and almost every mission was in a building. There was the usual "Kill X" street missions (outdoors with everyone else), but the majority of them were in warehouses, offices, and the like. A player could not enter a building unless they had a mission there. It worked in that setting.
I like the idea of the Dishonored way and wonder about how fun that would be in a MMORPG
PS: After reading through my post, it occurs to me that as long as XP is given per kill, most players will not pass up the chance for more XP. In the Dishonored example, the players who chose stealth and avoidance would get significantly less XP than those who chose guns blazin'. I can feel safe saying that the guns blazin' method would be more popular
- Al
Personally the only modern MMORPG trend that annoys me is the idea that MMOs need to be designed in a way to attract people who don't actually like MMOs. Which to me makes about as much sense as someone trying to figure out a way to get vegetarians to eat at their steakhouse.- FARGIN_WAR
Had to stop reading there. Killing 10 bunnies instead of 10 rats IS doing the same thing over again. It gets old fast. Since questing is the only real way to level, there HAS to be a sea of garbage filler quests, as well as the once in a mile good ones.
Mob grinds were a blast. Spend one day here, another day there. Meet new freinds who take you to place you haven't been, and vice versa. Explore. Very different than today's quest grind where you spend all day looking at your journal and compass indicator, never looking at the scenery that the devs spent so much $ rendering.
If players dislike punishment, then why not make all characters invulnerable?
Precisely.
Luckily, i don't need you to like me to enjoy video games. -nariusseldon.
In F2P I think it's more a case of the game's trying to play the player's. -laserit
Are you joking? Which of these is more repetitive?
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
Spending an entire day kililng the same 1-3 mob types was ultra boring. I meet new friends in games even without the Endless Mob Grind, and in games where I haven't played 5+ years they take me new places there too :P
Players dislike excessive punishment. Having a fight instantly reset is the bare minimum which is absolutely required to have failure be failure. And in most cases that bare minimum is the maximum death penalty you should implement, because games are about unraveling the pattern behind why you lost the fight and didn't get rewarded; they're not about getting kicked in the groin each time you fail.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
You kill multiple mobs in ANY RPG.
Heck, back in the old EQ, you kill way more than 10 rats. The only difference is that there is no counter, except your experience.
Should have gone to a different mob spawn then...
Anyway, bumping my actual answer before the thread got derailed.
It depends on the combat gameplay.
Farming in D3 is fun because combat is great.
Farming in EQ is boring because combat is boring.
You don't really get to address a list of varied activities and claim they involve "no thought" when your side of the fence requires less thought and fewer activities.
Literally just today before your post happened I switched quest zones in WOW. So none of what you're describing isn't present in a quest game.
It's clear you don't like quests and that's not going to change, but can you concede that reality is reality?
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
If you're going to discuss the truth, you need to establish what is the truth.
What was described previously was not quests, but a list of activities. Such things can exist entirely without a questing framework, and indeed does in regards already. It's not as prolific or obvious as when it's done as a quest where it outlines exactly what you need to do to get a reward, but it can viably exist without it.
The general complaint I'd have about how quests are largely handled right now is that they are not reducing the grind, they are migrating it into a different package. As long as games have a distinctly finite set of actions with which you can interact with the world, that will always be the case.
And that aspect is not about to change in a rush. The variety of content is something that competes with the depth of content and ultimately the larger a game is starting off, the more thin the content is going to be any ways.
So the question of how to revamp a questing system really just kind of comes down to 'how do we package the things people are going to do'.
The reason questing might feel like less of a grind that some is because it railroads them to a degree into dabbling in the games alternate elements a bit. If one steps back and realizes it's still running a chain of throwaway tasks repeatedly to obtain xp/loot that illusion can quickly break and you realize it's just a different treadmill.
As far as trying to present this dilemma in a different way to freshen it up, my approach would be to combine some ideas on procedural content with the use of pre-scripted quest events.
So breaking it down, there'd be four main types of quests similar to how they're often handled now. Minor, Major, and Overarching, and World Events.
Minor Quests - This would be what we'd want out of a procedural system. It has bits of quests built into blocks that the game can cobble together and throw at players. These quests are more or less ambient activities, they provide a minimal amount of context and no real impact on the game beyond personal progress.
These types of quests would be auto-generated and fed to the player in simple snippets provided by NPC's in a town, a random event while traveling about, or via some spawned interactive object they might spot or pick up.
Such quests basically just go into their own tab. They aren't things you have to actively pick up, instead they are just fed to you so that you have a constant stable of actions that can reward you with some extra XP and an item or two.
Major Quests - These quests would be different mainly in that they are treated more like the quests we experience usually in games. The difference is largely in the delivery and the means of execution. In this type of quest the progress is all scripted by the devs, but they contain variables in where the quest's goals will spawn and contain 'filler' segments in them to include entirely random minor elements.
Obtaining these quests would operate via some rather traditional methods of post-boards (this potentially also being a means for players to commission quests and offer up rewards to one another) and criers/announcers as quest givers.
These quests basically exist as the ones you'd play elsewhere in that each character can do them once. The main goal is making it so that the redundancy of the quest is mitigated by the randomization of a set of it's elements, so that each player might be achieving the same fundamental goals, but they are in differing manners.
To solve any grouping issues it can generally just be taken that if multiple people are doing the same core quest, as long as the goals of one is achieved, then it shares completion with the others, essentially replacing the other player's quests with that of the one being completed so they get uniform reward for time spent.
Overarching Quests - These are basically toned down world events. Big quest lines that are designed to be one-off activities driven by a large chunk of narrative. The questing for these events is handled somewhat like a pyramid, with a central quest goal being driven by players completing seeded Major events and contributing towards supporting and optional goals via minor ambient quests.
The central quests are more or less exclusive activities, and they exist in specific locations. Once they are done, they're done. No killing the same dark lord or demon multiple times. The rewards are somewhat contextual and finite as well, so you don't have a ton of people running around with the same named loot. The way this gets balanced is by introducing these rewards and elements in a consistent manner. The dark lord dies, next quest chain pops up for those vying to take over or capitalize on the power vacuum.
World Events - More or less this is what you've always experienced out of some of the classic titles as well as a few recent ones. Dev created and scripted activities that are meant to introduce some major event or aspect to the game world. These are much like Overarching quests, but generally have a larger encompassing factor where the quests are not ultimately exclusive in reward for contribution, but they are exclusive for the time frame in which they happen.
This all goes along with other elements, such as how items in the game gets handled, but that'd be an equally long post.
"The knowledge of the theory of logic has no tendency whatever to make men good reasoners." - Thomas B. Macaulay
"The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge." - Daniel J. Boorstin
Ah-ha! This is where we've been getting crossed up - when I say "minigame", I just mean an activity or block of mechanics. For example: to me, fishing is a minigame, even though it doesn't phase you of the world. I look at everything about a quest between the question between the exclamation mark and a question mark as being it's own little minigame.
When I look at the way the last few themepark games I've sampled have been designed, that gameplay between the start and the end of a quest seems to be starting to take a back seat to the attempt to tell a story and I just don't think that works. If the activities of the quest are just filler between text boxes or cut scenes, then I start to wonder why you are making an MMO and not a movie or a comic book.
So my argument is that in order to improve quests, you have ignore the quests, ignore the story, ignore the lore and simply ask: if there were no exclaimation marks and no question marks, is this something that I would have fun doing for a few hours?
Quests are SOOOOOO 2012, all games should have missions from here on out.
Just saying >.>
Let's not play games with the interpretation of a word when it's clear what the individuals are referring too, it doesn't actually add to the discussion.
Before you criticize someone, walk a mile in their shoes.
That way, if they get angry, they'll be a mile away... and barefoot.
Is it clear?
Admittedly, I've not been as helpful or insightful as I had hoped I was going to be, but I feel like there are at least two fundamentally different views of quests in this thread: one focused on where the exclamation marks in a story should be placed and one focused on the gameplay between those exclamation marks.
Traditionally, quests have been the main way for developers to provide stepping stones to players to grind on, so they can progress in the game.
The problem is not in how these quests are implemented but rather the fact that they are NPCs giving you specific tasks that have already been completed before by another.
As far as I know, the only way to abandon quests all-together is to have a fully player-driven MMO, where players create their own requests for players of a lower caliber to complete. This would work well in a sandbox.
The problem is that with today's resources as they are for the industry, and the preference of today's resources being put into more mainstream types of MMOs that follow a proven system there is no way to create an 'ideal' sandbox game or MMO without quests. MUDs have come close to achieving this, with player-run main factions as a part of the themepark, though nearly all still have quests. It would also have things players could achieve without grinding, such as having your character work at a task while you are offline, to simulate the time spent in the real world and possibly achieve better immersion if done properly.
An MMO of this caliber would require a very large team, with a plethora of intelligent designers thinking of every aspect of the game. An ideal physics system would be nice, as well as control of the world's terrain and cities much like WURM online if it were a sandbox, but with the pace of Minecraft to a certain extent depending on what items your character was using to accomplish the task.
As a freelance designer with little experience, I still have time to think over the major plague of the MMO 'Treadmill' though I have never taken the thought into detail until now.
Well without a quest system even if a game had the same activity variety, the player will essentially be penalized for switching between them -- much like how in archaic Endless Mob Grind MMORPGs you were penalized for fighting a variety of mob types (because it takes time to travel between different mob types, and that time is completely unrewarded without a quest system.) At least not unless we're talking about an MMORPG with every activity and mob in the same place, or where you can teleport anywhere instantly.
Eventually everything seems like a grind. But it's fairly well-understood that by being dramatically less repetitive, quests were a significant reduction in grind.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver