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Quest to change quest.
Vermillion_Raventhal
Member EpicPosts: 4,198
How do you feel the best way to change the way quest done or do you feel the quest hub method is fine? First of all, one change that would help the genre is to unbind quest to progression. Seems this is the cause of a quest that more like filler task just to get our exp bars going.
I'd like to see story lines that are built a competent AI to fill in developer content vs. having a ton of straight kill 10 quest. I played a game called Covert Action back in the day. You essentially had AI driving plots that were basically never the same. It seemed to pull from a pool of scenarios and made a plot with some factors determined with how you acted.
So essentially, you talk to a NPC A. Based on your and NPC bio your given a random scenario say 1 of 100 different ones. The AI then generates players in the plot from a pool of compatible NPCs. Say you are told to talk to NPC B or C depending on which one you pick and how you interact with them will determine the next branch in the quest. For example you went to NPC C and taunted him into a battle and win you get note off NPC C's body that leads you to NPC F which leads to direct combat resolution with the remaining plot NPCs . If you are friendly NPC F he tells you how to poison the enemies and kill the leader of plot while he's sleep. If you went to NPC B you'd get different plots generated. Seems like a lot to develop but once you do you can pump out scenarios.
I would like to see doing away with quest hubs. Let quest givers do day to day crap vs. sitting around with (!) (?) over there heads. Look at Skyrim your quest givers aren't all always at the same point. They sleep/eat/sit on throne etc.
I would also like to see quest spawn points where NPCs quest givers may appear from entering random zones. For example you run past the same spot ever play session but this time you hit a quest spawn point. A NPC comes running up to you telling you his wife's been kidnapped and he needs your help. Kind of like what happens in Red Dead Redemption sometimes.
Those are few things I would like to see that would change quest up some.
Comments
Make it so that quests aren't the primary way of leveling. Bam, you've solved 75% of the quest problem. Now when you find the quests, they're more meaningful, because they are fewer in number.
Also, somehow incorporate a living world like GW2 with the quests, so that everything you do changes the game world, and you have yourself a winning formula.
There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to play, if you want to use a screwdriver to put nails into wood, have at it, simply don't complain when the guy next to you with the hammer is doing it much better and easier. - Allein
"Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre
While I think that something similar to this would be great, it really would come down to what I'd like to call "quest phasing". Essentially you and I would talk to the same NPC, get a different quest then information on said quest/scenario/whatever is seeded among a bunch of NPCs. The problem with this is that you and I couldn't work together on a common goal because when we talk to said NPCs they would be referring to the "quest" that I'm holding and when you talk to them they'll refer to the quest you're holding. This further fractures the community, which seems to be a huge deal to everyone around here.
Granted you could have dialog to choose from asking about this or that, maybe have a common theme that runs between all scenarios and having different aligned players have a slightly different quest each time that plays in the scenario differently but then you only ask about the specific keywords to find your goal.
There are quite a few ways to hash it out and make it work, unfortunately outside of a MUD I don't see it happening. (I ran a MUD a LONG time ago where I had a quest system very similar to this that I coded in).
Just because every car has similar features doesn't mean that Ferraris are copies of Model Ts. Progress requires failure and refining.
Not sure I'd like to see MMORPGs revert back to grinding mobs as the chief advancement activity. What are you replacing questing with in such a system?
For every minute you are angry , you lose 60 seconds of happiness."-Emerson
I've said it before, but a 'retroactive' quest system that builds a narrative around and passively rewards you for your own achievements I think would go a long way in making players feel both more unique and more important.
Basically it being the notion that rather than players tracking a quest log, they simply interact with the prompts provided them in the game world, and when they reach a resolution state for any activity they have been participating in, knowingly or not, they obtain a reward for it and an assembled update to their personal quest log chronicling their achievement.
So rather than following a pre-scripted central story line that's the same for every single player, or hopping from one hub to the next, players can essentially just meander through the game world doing whatever tickles their fancy and they very well will stumble their way into building their own history/narrative and will freely progress as they do so.
"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
To me, I would break down quests into three seperate concepts; the story, the web of suggested activities and the actual gameplay. I would look at all three seperately.
The story is a list of characters, objects and locations that are going to irrevocably change over time (and this is going to create the largest differenence between world-focused games and player-focused games, static stories vs simulations)
The web of suggested activities is a collection of roads that forms an abstract graph the player navigates. Each road starts with a pointer and goves a reward at the end. It is an entity of its own with it's own feel - from straight skinner box to invisible maze. A chain of tasks is, on this abstract level, no different than the corridors of a dungeon - just different ways of presenting the web connecting different encounters.
Finally (or perhaps I should say firstly) you have the gameplay. "kill 10 $monster" is a fine task to offer ... until players start getting tired of simply killing monsters. If players would not enjoy grinding the gameplay without the presence of a quest offering a carrot, that's a warning sign that your gameplay might not be compelling enough. If you have gameplay unique to a particular quest, that tends to be wasteful.
So putting it together: have good gameplay that stands on its own without any quests. Have an interesting web of gameplay options that offers suggestions for gameplay (without spamming the player with suggestions or gates to gameplay they don't enjoy). And decide whether the state of the world is a unique to each character or whether it exists objectively outside of any character., whether the outcomes are static and pre-ordained by a writer or whether the state of the world is the result of a simulation influenced by player actions.
How valuable is it to you to have content in the game you haven't played? With manually created content, every choice the game offers that spawns a road not taken represents developer time being invested in something you never actually see. Is having a real choice vs having just the illusion of choice, worth having only 1/4 the amount of content you actually end up playing through?
Now, if you have procedurally generated tasks and plotlines, the scaling can change dramatically. If instead of hand-crafting each kill 10 rats quest, the game can autogenerate a quest with a couple of randomtwists (buffed rat spawns, NPC to rescue, loot to recover, etc) and sends you hopping from hub to hub, then you can generate on-demand plotlines to create harmless "filler" content.
Hubs are not about what the NPCs want, they are about what the player wants. As much as enjoy finding nooks and crannies, rare spawns and loot that sends me off in a new direction, when I go to a hub, I'm looking for motivation, for something to do other than wander randomly.
Doing bounty hunts, turning in trophies, killing overland boss mobs, xp from PvP, xp from exploration, group exp bonuses and monster camp bonuses encouraging you to roam around. Quests were best when they were something to do now and then.
And mob grinding with friends wherever you want to explore is much preferable to following a pre scripted quest path by yourself with your brain turned off.
Some existing alternatives:
There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to play, if you want to use a screwdriver to put nails into wood, have at it, simply don't complain when the guy next to you with the hammer is doing it much better and easier. - Allein
"Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre
Doing bounty hunts, turning in trophies, killing overland boss mobs, xp from PvP, xp from exploration, group exp bonuses and monster camp bonuses encouraging you to roam around. Quests were best when they were something to do now and then.
And mob grinding with friends wherever you want to explore is much preferable to following a pre scripted quest path by yourself with your brain turned off.
Translation: nothing.
Giving bonus experience for mob grinding isnt a viable replacement for questing.
Also, and mob grinding is turning your brain on? Killing the same mob over and over and over again for hours is mentally engaging to you?
And what if your are not online? Slog through the boring mob grinding by yourself?
Yeah, real fun.
1) Does not work in MMO environment.
2) Does not remove "kill 10 wolfs" quests itself, just changes the context.
3) It is very inefficient design.
1. Only if you're talking about a WoW clone is what you say true.
2. Nothing to do with quest type. Its about atmospheric qualities.
3. Its only inefficient if your playing a game thats quest grinding to progres. In a game were quest are optional and its not a big deal.
Well, my point of view is that you're not really missing content because it's generated scenarios that your making choices about. I don't see how its an illusion is your making choices about what happens in the story by your actions.
Only reason your looking for quest hubs is because you're conditioned to look for them. Outside of post WoW MMORPGs they really didn't exist. I mean we all have played Skyrim like RPGs where NPCs have a small semblance of having a life vs. being basically bums with (?) begging for help.
I would like to get rid of the quest system in the traditional sense altogether. Instead, I would like to have activities/events that occur out in the open world that change the nature of the surrounding environment and which the players can choose to get involved with or not....and that involvement can also change the nature of the surrounding involvement. This could partialy be proceduraly driven and partialy be pulled from pre-made scripts which the GM's place into a "hopper" to be pulled from and which can easly be added to, removed or changed by GM's.
A simple example is a peice of empty wilderness where one day a group of orcs come in and setup a camp. The orc camp, if not dealt with, get's progressively bigger and attracts more powerfull creatures and starts spawning mobs that roam the surrounding wilderness interfering with travel, if still left undealt with it starts generating raids on a nearby human settlement which can eventualy end up destroying the settlement. If the Orcs are dealt with then it might attract Giant Rats or Wolves for awhile to feed on the vermin. If those are dealt with then it lies fallow for a time and a week or so later it might be home to a gypsy encampment for awhile where the players can buy rare goods.
The key here is the world is constantly changing and it changes in response to the players actions (allowing dynamism). It shouldn't change in a SPECIFIC rotation just in terms of general TYPE of node represented...(i.e. wilderness, monster camp, vermin site, civilized site, etc) ....and the specifics are pulled randomly from a hopper for the right TYPE which can be filled, changed, tweaked etc. by the Dev's....and you have tons of these nodes scattered across the world. It should also change SLOWLY....maybe a full days worth of time/effort or more to enact some sort of change, making the change significant and making the world more coherent.
Players aren't interacting with these because thay want to follow some set linear "progession" path for the individual but because they want to enact a postive change in that part of the environment or because dealing with that type of threat meets some personal goal of that character (e.g. "Orc Hunter"). Combine that with a few sprinkled Live GM events and player generated content (e.g. territory fights) and you've got an interesting situation.
To do personal character progression, you could do a combination of simple time the character exists (e.g. EvE model), rewards based on degree the characters assisted thier chosen faction or specific selected goals ( get involved with a territory based faction you get rewards for making that territory and surrounding areas safe from monsters, get involved with a faction that's all about hunting orcs and get rewards for slaying orc type creatures regardless of where they are).... and you cap the amount of reward that can be earned in any given day/week/month so the character doesn't progress overly quick....although that may not even be neccesary with level caps and not too steep a progression curve.
1) World persistance and (multi)player interaction(essential parts of MMO) is an issue for such concept, it does not go well together.
2) Just your personal qualifiers, nothing solid to make a point.
3) If your quest at one point branches out into 3 ways, you are essentially making lots of content player will not experience. It's nice idea but very expensive to make.
Before proposing changes or improvement, it is mandatory to understand why are MMOs designed the way they are. They are not build randomely, or just because the idea was cool, they are solutions to issues you seem not realizing or outright ignore.
I think it's futile to discuss this without narrowing down the scope and defining a target audience.
Otherwise you can go back and forth between different approaches eternally, and they will all be kinda right (for a certain gameplay-style) and kinda wrong (for others)
Or we treat it as a collection of ideas without trying to force our preferences onto others. (yeah, not going to happen)
Gdemami,
Respectfully, just because something is done a particular way does not mean it is the only or best way of approaching that issue. The horse and buggy makers could easly say (did in fact) that there were reasons why people used horse drawn as opposed self-propeled conveyances and they were absolutely correct at the time but they didn't take into account that horse drawn conveyances had thier downsides too and that humans in thier ingenuity were constantly seeking new ways to address old problems.
For a specific portion of the gaming audience the standard quest driven, hub based MMO experience simply isn't working anymore. For those that it is working well....great. Not much innovation is required there, there are a plenthora of MMO choices that are working there. If any MMO's want to capture any portion of the audience that is not ALREADY captured by the 100's of other MMO's already out there....then it's going to have to find different ways of doing things that might appeal to that audience which are not already entirely satisfied by the standard conventions.
Never implied anything like that.
What I say is that proposing ideas without actually addressing the cause, the root issue, is pointless.
OP is trying to strap single player mechanics of ancient game onto a modern MMO. That simply does nto work nor it is constructive.
Questing is not much different from grinding mobs. Instead of me grinding the mobs I want, the computer tells me which mobs to grind.
The rest of the non-combat quests are just tedious tasks used as poor excuses to give out XP, gold and gear.
Keep the quests in the game but they should not be worth anything. The players who enjoy questing can keep doing them but they get no benefit over the players who don't.
There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes this whole universe for a vast practical joke, though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns, and more than suspects that the joke is at nobody's expense but his own.
-- Herman Melville
Well I really think this is more an excersize in brainstorming or thinking about different approaches that COULD be done. This is an online gaming board not a design session for a specific MMO and we aren't discussing this in the context of being Developers for a specific game but more players of these types of games in general.
I think it's an interesting intellectual excersize in thinking about the different approaches one could possibly take and thier pluses and minuses.
Clearly some things will work for some peoples preferences (and type of games) and not at all others. For some folks (not me so much) the standard way MMO's do quests today works perfectly well....but obviously there is not very much fruit in discussing that because it's well understood how those work.
I think my preference for questing would be for each character class/race or whatever to have a single long term quest. In achieving this quest they'd do a lot of normal sized quests, but in general they'd be following a single thread throughout the game. Kind of like SWToR's story content for each class, except where the story content was all the questing content. Any world quests or side quests would just be bonuses. I suppose this would be more like playing through Bioshock Infinite or something like that rather than a many quested RPG, but still, that would be my preference for questing.
In general for open world content, I'd try to do away with the whole quest chain thing. In Fallout 3 there was a lot of world content to play through, but it was all quest chains as stories that played out with a beginning, a middle and an end. Quest hubs just weren't there.
Beyond that, I'm not too picky. I'm fine with killing stuff giving "XP", time based skill progression, skill progression in general and class based progression. None of it is off limits as long as the developer does something new with their game rather than copying verbatim what another developer has already done.
I can not remember winning or losing a single debate on the internet.
Ok, so lets examine those assumptions because I don't think they are neccesarly accurate.....
1) Does not work in MMO environment.
What specificaly doesn't work? Is it decoupiling Questing from progression? because we already have a reasonably successfull MMO (EvE) that does that. Is it that NPC B is in one state for one player and another for a different player? Because many modern MMO's are already heavly instanced with NPC's you don't encounter outside of instances an even feature "personal" storylines...I'm not seeing a large departure from that paradigm in what was described. It can't possibly because an NPC quest giver might offer different quests to players based upon thier relationship to them....that shouldn't create any problems from a game logic/coding standpoint....so what is it, specificaly?
2) Does not remove "kill 10 wolfs" quests itself, just changes the context.
Potentialy true.....but it does make the content path less predictable to the player......so it increases replay value.
3) It is very inefficient design.
Depends upon how it's done. All design is a compromise between efficiency and functionality/features. The most efficient design would be to login to a blank game world and big ascii letters that said "Hello World" but no one would pay to play it. If a Dev were handcrafting every single aspect of every single branch manualy then it's true the work increases exponentionaly with each branch. However, I see nothing in the OP's suggestion that explicitly requires that. If, instead, you use a modular design approach where you are simply changing the inputs and outputs as well as tweaking some of the properties of each unit.....well that's a very efficient way of handling modern application development.....you get alot of reusability while still providing a high degree of customization and variety....far more so then is currently offered in the standard MMO questing system.
So I'm not seeing the specifics of where it's not working....perhaps you could elaborate more explicity?
1. Again you're thinking in a themepark mode where progression is tied to leveling and you're forcing people in scenarios of a single player game. Besides 90% of all MMORPG content these days is single player. Not what I am promoting but its there.
2. Its not personal qualifier. Most RPGs do not have quest hubs. Themepark MMORPGs do because again because progression is based around quest grinding. Again do you automatically complain in a game like Skyrim that NPCs work as a smith, go to the tavern and sleep at night.
3. The content is consumed. Since AI or algorithm is putting together random scenarios from pools of content based on you're character and the npc. Its not a designer making branching stories. They just make the story branches and the algorithm puts the stories together. The issue is getting the AI consistently put together enjoyable stories that make sense.
I probably know more about MMORPGs than you do and many of my ideas are pulled from developers and other games. I doubt quest generation is much more expensive than crwating, and VO the hundreds of task and quest a typical MMORPG.