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What do people expect when it comes to quest variety?
ElJackyl
Member Posts: 54
A common complaint I see about a lot of different games is in regards to quest variety. A lot of people bitch about "go here and kill x number of enemies" or "go here and collect x amount of items and return them to y" My question is: What else are you supposed to do? If you were a game designer how would you create quests that are different? Even in single player RPG's most quests fall under these two categories.
Comments
Well, I'm not a game designer. I'm not getting paid, indeed, I'm the one paying money to be entertained.
But I would suggest, if nothing else, more variety in what you kill. One of the reasons I can't stand LOTRO (which I have to play, being dumb enough to get a lifetime sub) is that the Kill X is the same stuff, over and over and over. Goblins, bears, boars, orcs. Then higher level goblins, bears, boars and orcs. And so on.
I also think there are quests that can involve more than combat. For instance, and I thik Lotro has a few of these, acutally, going to a certain location, to scout. If a game had a stealth mechanic, you could have things like stealth quests.
You could also have quests where you have to talk to NPCs. Like say, how Bilbo won the ring from Gollum. But almost no MMORPGs have any sort of "contest" mechanics with NPCs other than combat.
R.I.P. City of Heroes and my 17 characters there
The most complained quests are kill quests, "Fed Ex" or "delivery" quests where you take an item from one NPC to another, and talk-to quests.
My best guess is that they want multi-stage quests that have more objectives than just any of these three.
Surprisingly, if you've ever played Runescape, those quests are different. Some are Kill X, some are Fed Ex, and some are talk-to, but most have a combination and also have things like gathering items, making items, solving puzzles, scouting areas, etc. That's about as advanced as you're gonna get with the quest system I think.
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A human and an Elf get captured by Skaven. The rat-men are getting ready to shoot the first hostage with Dwarf-made guns when he yells, "Earthquake!" The naturally nervous Skaven run and hide from the imaginary threat. He escapes. The Skaven regroup and bring out the Elf. Being very smart, the Elf has figured out what to do. When the Skaven get ready to shoot, the Elf, in order to scare them, yells, "Fire!"
Order of the White Border.
I like quests that involved scripted events....even if it's just waves of enemies attacking something and you have to ward them off.
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im to lazy too use grammar or punctuation good
It could have more choices, I guess.
Think of a quest where you can make the choices and they would affect the outcome of a quest, for example:
You're given a quest to obtain something from an NPC. There are three ways to do it.
1) Kill him and loot it.
2) Steal it from him (or hire a thief NPC to do so).
3) Initiate a conversation with him and offer something else for the item, then go off looking for it elsewhere and so forth till you get it.
4) Same as #3, except as an escort quest.
5) Instigate a bar fight that "accidentally" kills the NPC so you can loot it.
Depending on the choice you make, the quest reward could be different, or the questgiver may even turn on you for choosing a method it disapproves. Perhaps there can also be some sort of reputation penalty(or gain) for the different choices.
Alliance guide to Hallowed be Thy Name:
http://wow.magelo.com/forum/messages.jspa?topic=7306
The game creators should make quests that impact the world around you, or actually help some npcs within the game. Like for example, there was this quest in FFXI where there is a lost boy in the middle of town. When you talk to the boy he tells you that he was with his dad, and was wondering if you can assist him in bringing them back together. This was one of my favorite quests because it actually felt like, a quest! Heres another example, again in FFXi there was another quest where you have to go find the past kings tomb of the town called San d'Oria and find out who has been grave digging the tomb. Once you get to where the tomb is and analyze it, a cutscene plays and unravels a story that immerses you into the game even more. The quests in FFXI actually made me feel like a knight or a hero within the games world. Whenever I play games that have those quests that say "go kill x and retrieve y and bring it back so i can give you this piece of armor", it really destroys the immersion I had before I got that quest. Not to sound like a bias fanboy, but I honestly will say if I was designing a game and were in charge of making quests. I would do exactly what Square-enix did with the quests in FFXI.
Fed Ex quests are annoying because they seem to be the most used quest. I think in most games its like 9/10 quests are 'Kill these 5 Blehs' or 'Get me 10 bear teeth'. What makes them really annoying is the collect me 10 teeth ones, where you end up having to kill 37 bears to get 10 freaking teeth.
Once in a while you get that really neat story driven quest. These quests are what people such as myself enjoy. Seeing as many people have played WoW ill use an example from there.
The Missing Diplomat
Its a long quest chain that has you doing pretty much everything from being a detective to being a messenger. At the end there is a small epic feeling finish.
Quests should reward you with the feeling of "I did something cool", not just some useless item and a bit of gold.
There are 3 types of people in the world.
1.) Those who make things happen
2.) Those who watch things happen
3.) And those who wonder "What the %#*& just happened?!"
It requires incredible amounts of Dev time and money to create a elaborate quest, just look at any fully developed action game. Auto-Quest 'goto b, kill x, recieve $' are simply more cost effective and provide a straight forward Risk vs Reward game mechanism.
My solution to Auto Quest and to many other MMO issues is to give the Players plenty of game mechanics and user-friendly tools to create their own Quest.
Several years ago SWG had an amazing yet virtually unknown crafting quest at a place called the Aurilian Village. That quest should have been used as a template for more crafting quests in SWG, and perhaps used as an example for other games to copy.
Sadly that crafting quest was removed to make way for an "enhanced" game.
I am a strong advocate of complex quests. So far, apart from the odd instance in some MMOs, DDO to me is the only MMO that has anything approaching decent quests, each one being more or less unique.
The addition of proper stealth skills (based on both the mobs ability to see or hear), spike traps, spinning blades, floors that collapse, elemental traps, closing doors with ambushes, lock picking, trap disarming, secret doors, underwater sections, skill based voiceovers with clues, stat based runes and something as simple as NPCs that will go to summon reinforcements, all goes to adding real flavour to quests.
Of course the downside is you don't get as many of them and for some people they are not as repeatable as trivial quests. So always a price to pay.