Even in TSW most quests was "go and kill x monsters" or "go, follow an arrow and then click highlighted stuff".
Main problem in MMORPGs is that their quests are not quests. They are tasks.
What in the hell do you think a quest is? A quest is literally a series of tasks taken to meet some end goal.
First of all take a chill pill, seem you need one.
Second of all - Quest consist of series of interesting tasks with underlying interesting story and varying result. Quest often allows for diffrent outcomes and can change itself during quest itself depending on player actions.
Go kill stuff and bring me 10 boar livers is not a quest, even if there is some text or voice over attached to that.
Originally posted by Sulaa No.Even in TSW most quests was "go and kill x monsters" or "go, follow an arrow and then click highlighted stuff".Main problem in MMORPGs is that their quests are not quests. They are tasks.
What in the hell do you think a quest is? A quest is literally a series of tasks taken to meet some end goal.
Wife called. Needs milk. Guess I'll go on a "quest" after work.
Neighbor said the lawn needs mowing. Guess I'll have a "quest" this weekend.
There is a vast difference between "quest" and "chores." Jason went on Quests. Frodo did a "quests." MMOs are basically chores that NPCs are too lazy to do themselves. "Please! Pick some apples for me!" That is NOT a quest. That is a chore.
- 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
For it's time EQ2 amazed me, but only in the city and the zones surrounding it. Once you got past Antonica and CL the game went to crap....
WoW, SWTOR, TESO, WAR etc etc... all just boring fetch or kill 10 rats quests.
You know what? I don't remeber killing 10 rats in WOW/SWTOR/TESO. However, I do remember the FIRST THING that EQ presented to me. The first freaking thing I did in EQ was kill RATS.
So your point is moot!
Mission in life: Vanquish all MMORPG.com trolls - especially TESO, WOW and GW2 trolls.
A Task is an activity in isolation. A Quest is story/part of a story that has activities associated with it. For a quest to be enjoyable it has to be well written, and just as importantly the player has to enjoy the story type and style. For e.g some people are turned off by quests laden with in-jokes, other love em, if you hate a quest you likely to see the associated activities as a task or chore, if you engage with the story, you are more likely to enjoy the activity.
Now if you cant be arsed reading quests or immersing in the story or don't see the point in stories and lore then everything will look like a task/chore. Many people are in this category it seem and all games must look the same to them is all i can say!
rpg/mmorg history: Dun Darach>Bloodwych>Bards Tale 1-3>Eye of the beholder > Might and Magic 2,3,5 > FFVII> Baldur's Gate 1, 2 > Planescape Torment >Morrowind > WOW > oblivion > LOTR > Guild Wars (1900hrs elementalist) Vanguard. > GW2(1000 elementalist), Wildstar
Even in TSW most quests was "go and kill x monsters" or "go, follow an arrow and then click highlighted stuff".
Main problem in MMORPGs is that their quests are not quests. They are tasks.
What in the hell do you think a quest is? A quest is literally a series of tasks taken to meet some end goal.
Wife called. Needs milk. Guess I'll go on a "quest" after work.
Neighbor said the lawn needs mowing. Guess I'll have a "quest" this weekend.
There is a vast difference between "quest" and "chores." Jason went on Quests. Frodo did a "quests." MMOs are basically chores that NPCs are too lazy to do themselves. "Please! Pick some apples for me!" That is NOT a quest. That is a chore.
The word quest is way overloaded and I never liked that. I think back to the early years of dnd where a Quest was a big deal and rare even though there were constant adventures going on. We need to approach this different labeling-wise. Call a job a job. We could have other types like missions, tasks, and yes quests. Make quests something arduous and a long journey involved with them for some major event/issue. Jobs would be a major way for players to earn money from say traditional quests like bring me 20 bear paws for X cash (going rate depending on population). Missions have more of a military feeling to them (go capture that flag... I mean keep). Tasks might be guild related (harvest X number of trees and/or make us 20 high quality oak planks). Have adventures instead of quests for normally non-task non-job non-mission non-quest events.
Kyleran: "Now there's the real trick, learning to accept and enjoy a game for what
it offers rather than pass on what might be a great playing experience
because it lacks a few features you prefer."
John Henry Newman: "A man would do nothing if he waited until he could do it so well that no one could find fault."
FreddyNoNose: "A good game needs no defense; a bad game has no defense." "Easily digested content is just as easily forgotten."
LacedOpium: "So the question that begs to be asked is, if you are not interested in
the game mechanics that define the MMORPG genre, then why are you
playing an MMORPG?"
Even in TSW most quests was "go and kill x monsters" or "go, follow an arrow and then click highlighted stuff".
Main problem in MMORPGs is that their quests are not quests. They are tasks.
What in the hell do you think a quest is? A quest is literally a series of tasks taken to meet some end goal.
First of all take a chill pill, seem you need one.
Second of all - Quest consist of series of interesting tasks with underlying interesting story and varying result. Quest often allows for diffrent outcomes and can change itself during quest itself depending on player actions.
Go kill stuff and bring me 10 boar livers is not a quest, even if there is some text or voice over attached to that.
Describe a game with interesting tasks that doesn't boil down to the same mechanics that you just described as "not a quest". The story, presentation, and environment are what make quests... not the mechanics of the task attached to it.
The two MMORPG games that I have played with interesting quests would have to be TSW and Runescape. Honestly TSW is just fun because the missions are so unique. Runescapes questing is completely optional and I think that is why it is so great. They range from just going and collecting an item to solving a puzzle in a mansion, and every one feels different.
Yes, SWTOR. Well.... the first time around anyway.
Guild Wars 2 were ALL group quests and you autojoined in any given area you were in, which was annoying. You didn't even have to actually talk to any npc or player to complete most of them. Every other game has all been very boring because they are all the same and mostly consist of "fetch me this" because most of the npc population in these games seem completely incapable of doing anything other than tying their own shoes.
RuneScape has the best quests I've ever seen ( and I have seen a lot). Very unique and fun quests, never includes the 'kill 10 rats' tasks. Have you ever been a captain of a submarine built by penguin spies ? If not, had over to RuneScape
Thing about quests... Yes, TSW is good, AO was good in that it was random dungeons you could solo or group, and you chose the quest reward yourself. With patience, you could get exactly the items you wanted or needed. But interesting? Not really. The thing is, as repetitive as quests are, they are still better than old school grinding the same mobs for a level or two, often for hours on end, and nothing else to do. Early DaoC, at lvl 10-11, you left the first island, then found a group of mobs your level. then killed them for an hour until you hit next level.... then on to the next group your level... and stand there.. killing. not moving an inch. I still think grinding mobs should be a possible way to level, but... no quests, 100% mob xp... I hope that never comes back.
Many years have passed, and to this day, I still think UO was the pinnacle of character progression. 100% skill based progression depending on what you did with your character.
"This is not a game to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force"
FFXI had some good chain quests, as well as the traditional kill x quests. By good I mean that they were a mystery. After you received the mission you weren't sure where to go or exactly what you needed to do. You just knew someone was in trouble. It was up to you to figure out what they were talking about. This usually equated to finding a website to tell you what to do, but there was still a bit of thought you had to put into it.
I always thought vague quests like that were odd. If i know someone was in trouble than i also know either where they are or where they were going or dragged off to. Even if it was something like drag marks on the ground led south.
Just because you don't like it doesn't mean it is bad.
Even in TSW most quests was "go and kill x monsters" or "go, follow an arrow and then click highlighted stuff".
Main problem in MMORPGs is that their quests are not quests. They are tasks.
What in the hell do you think a quest is? A quest is literally a series of tasks taken to meet some end goal.
First of all take a chill pill, seem you need one.
Second of all - Quest consist of series of interesting tasks with underlying interesting story and varying result. Quest often allows for diffrent outcomes and can change itself during quest itself depending on player actions.
Go kill stuff and bring me 10 boar livers is not a quest, even if there is some text or voice over attached to that.
Describe a game with interesting tasks that doesn't boil down to the same mechanics that you just described as "not a quest". The story, presentation, and environment are what make quests... not the mechanics of the task attached to it.
Proportions and making decisions. Those two things aside of presentation, story and enviroment are what differ task from quest.
Proportion. "Kill 5 deers and come back to me" is a task. Task that could be incorporated in a quest and be a small part of it, but by itself it is a task only.
Making decisions. "go bring me 10 berries" - there is no real decisions to be made. You just go, get 10 berries and come back. In a proper quest you have at least 1 situation in which you can make a decision that will have actual impact.
"Impact" = failing or succeding and/or diffrent outcome ("Outcome" can be a LOT of things and to be more precise - getting 50 gold or 30 gold depending on how much shit you gather is not a diffrent outcome) or other alteration to a game depending on player or players decision.
Describing actual example of a quest, would be work as proper quest would need several dialogue trees, few hundreads lines of code (in case of long epic quests even thousands) and few pages long of description for mechanics and story.
Unless you want me to pay for this, I cannot describe it in more detail as even making rough sketch of proper quest would take few hours of work.
I can give you some examples though.
Example of simple mechanicaly (from player point of view, since from developer point of view it was a lot of work), but with top-notch presentation and good stor quest is "Investigate Circus Tent" side-quest in Baldur's Gate 2.
Example of nice proper long quest is i.e. Mafia quest-chains in New Reno or "assasination in NCR" both in Fallout 2.
I will be perfectly honest ,i think Wow is a very average game but i did play it and i did actually find exactly three quests that were pretty good.Here is the problem ,those 3 quests,the ONLY ones i found to be really good were all glitched/bugged so i could not finish ANY of the three.
Here is the other sad part,in the game chat everyone was talking about them and many said they were bugged even during the beta testing,which shows and proves just how bad Blizzard really is.
There have also been many other simple quests that were what i would call interesting ,in that you have to think but most of that was in FFXI where there is no hand holding at all,you had to figure out everything for yourself.Using those 3 examples from WOW,in that game it loses a LOT of interest when everything is spelled out for you with markers.
We are obviously not going to see any major changes in quest design,devs are simply too cheap and lazy,however they could at least make them repeatable.By that i mean have a system designed that changes that same quest up so it is not always 100% identical making for no replay value.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
Even in TSW most quests was "go and kill x monsters" or "go, follow an arrow and then click highlighted stuff".
Main problem in MMORPGs is that their quests are not quests. They are tasks.
What in the hell do you think a quest is? A quest is literally a series of tasks taken to meet some end goal.
He's referring to quests in these games being more like "run down the hill, kill, collect, etc, x things and come back = quest over" as opposed to more prolonged story elements/themes, plots, subplots, climaxes, resolutions, characterization, etc.
Like Skyrim? Need more content? Try my Skyrim mod "Godfred's Tomb."
I know a lot of quests are kill xx or delivery, but if it's wrapped around a good story and/or storyline it does stand out and I find myself interested in knowing the out come.
SWTOR, TSW, L2, SWG, GW2, NWO, STO, ESO, FFXIV,WoW, all had some good stories to tell. NWO ans STO has some pretty good player created stories and I'm surprised more MMO's don't let players create quests. I must admit I have become spoiled by stories that are completely voiced.
"We all do the best we can based on life experience, point of view, and our ability to believe in ourselves." - Naropa "We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are." SR Covey
Comments
First of all take a chill pill, seem you need one.
Second of all - Quest consist of series of interesting tasks with underlying interesting story and varying result. Quest often allows for diffrent outcomes and can change itself during quest itself depending on player actions.
Go kill stuff and bring me 10 boar livers is not a quest, even if there is some text or voice over attached to that.
1999 Everquest 1 , Cleric Epic Quest was super fun and meaningful.
I wonder why there are no Epic quest for Iconic Weapons in games out there.
Yeh .. just make combat fun, and frame these as bounties/tasks with appropriate reward and be done with.
Quests should be scripted, with stories, and NPC characters, and no text, like in single player games.
Neighbor said the lawn needs mowing. Guess I'll have a "quest" this weekend.
There is a vast difference between "quest" and "chores." Jason went on Quests. Frodo did a "quests." MMOs are basically chores that NPCs are too lazy to do themselves. "Please! Pick some apples for me!" That is NOT a quest. That is a chore.
- 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
You know what? I don't remeber killing 10 rats in WOW/SWTOR/TESO. However, I do remember the FIRST THING that EQ presented to me. The first freaking thing I did in EQ was kill RATS.
So your point is moot!
Mission in life: Vanquish all MMORPG.com trolls - especially TESO, WOW and GW2 trolls.
A Task is an activity in isolation. A Quest is story/part of a story that has activities associated with it. For a quest to be enjoyable it has to be well written, and just as importantly the player has to enjoy the story type and style. For e.g some people are turned off by quests laden with in-jokes, other love em, if you hate a quest you likely to see the associated activities as a task or chore, if you engage with the story, you are more likely to enjoy the activity.
Now if you cant be arsed reading quests or immersing in the story or don't see the point in stories and lore then everything will look like a task/chore. Many people are in this category it seem and all games must look the same to them is all i can say!
rpg/mmorg history: Dun Darach>Bloodwych>Bards Tale 1-3>Eye of the beholder > Might and Magic 2,3,5 > FFVII> Baldur's Gate 1, 2 > Planescape Torment >Morrowind > WOW > oblivion > LOTR > Guild Wars (1900hrs elementalist) Vanguard. > GW2(1000 elementalist), Wildstar
Now playing GW2, AOW 3, ESO, LOTR, Elite D
The word quest is way overloaded and I never liked that. I think back to the early years of dnd where a Quest was a big deal and rare even though there were constant adventures going on. We need to approach this different labeling-wise. Call a job a job. We could have other types like missions, tasks, and yes quests. Make quests something arduous and a long journey involved with them for some major event/issue. Jobs would be a major way for players to earn money from say traditional quests like bring me 20 bear paws for X cash (going rate depending on population). Missions have more of a military feeling to them (go capture that flag... I mean keep). Tasks might be guild related (harvest X number of trees and/or make us 20 high quality oak planks). Have adventures instead of quests for normally non-task non-job non-mission non-quest events.
Chores is a nice edition.
Epic Music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vAigCvelkhQ&list=PLo9FRw1AkDuQLEz7Gvvaz3ideB2NpFtT1
https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_msdos?&sort=-downloads&page=1
Kyleran: "Now there's the real trick, learning to accept and enjoy a game for what it offers rather than pass on what might be a great playing experience because it lacks a few features you prefer."
John Henry Newman: "A man would do nothing if he waited until he could do it so well that no one could find fault."
FreddyNoNose: "A good game needs no defense; a bad game has no defense." "Easily digested content is just as easily forgotten."
LacedOpium: "So the question that begs to be asked is, if you are not interested in the game mechanics that define the MMORPG genre, then why are you playing an MMORPG?"
Describe a game with interesting tasks that doesn't boil down to the same mechanics that you just described as "not a quest". The story, presentation, and environment are what make quests... not the mechanics of the task attached to it.
Yes, SWTOR. Well.... the first time around anyway.
Guild Wars 2 were ALL group quests and you autojoined in any given area you were in, which was annoying. You didn't even have to actually talk to any npc or player to complete most of them. Every other game has all been very boring because they are all the same and mostly consist of "fetch me this" because most of the npc population in these games seem completely incapable of doing anything other than tying their own shoes.
I have played many where quests were interesting....argument over?
Didn't think so.
So what's the point of this thread?
"This may hurt a little, but it's something you'll get used to. Relax....."
Quantity: Hands down ESO. Elder Scrolls Online wins this by a big margin. Sadly TSW is lacking in quests.
Runescape. 'kill 10 rats...' is called skilling (combat skill grind, and slayer) in RS; quests are something else entirely.
TSW has investigations that are far from 'kill 10 rats...'
DDO integrates questing with dungeon crawling, so obviously are much more than 'kill 10 rats...'
The Secret World - There is not a mmorpg on the market that even comes close to the quality of quests in The Secret World.
Thing about quests... Yes, TSW is good, AO was good in that it was random dungeons you could solo or group, and you chose the quest reward yourself. With patience, you could get exactly the items you wanted or needed. But interesting? Not really. The thing is, as repetitive as quests are, they are still better than old school grinding the same mobs for a level or two, often for hours on end, and nothing else to do. Early DaoC, at lvl 10-11, you left the first island, then found a group of mobs your level. then killed them for an hour until you hit next level.... then on to the next group your level... and stand there.. killing. not moving an inch. I still think grinding mobs should be a possible way to level, but... no quests, 100% mob xp... I hope that never comes back.
Many years have passed, and to this day, I still think UO was the pinnacle of character progression. 100% skill based progression depending on what you did with your character.
"This is not a game to be tossed aside lightly.
It should be thrown with great force"
Proportions and making decisions. Those two things aside of presentation, story and enviroment are what differ task from quest.
Proportion. "Kill 5 deers and come back to me" is a task. Task that could be incorporated in a quest and be a small part of it, but by itself it is a task only.
Making decisions. "go bring me 10 berries" - there is no real decisions to be made. You just go, get 10 berries and come back. In a proper quest you have at least 1 situation in which you can make a decision that will have actual impact.
"Impact" = failing or succeding and/or diffrent outcome ("Outcome" can be a LOT of things and to be more precise - getting 50 gold or 30 gold depending on how much shit you gather is not a diffrent outcome) or other alteration to a game depending on player or players decision.
Describing actual example of a quest, would be work as proper quest would need several dialogue trees, few hundreads lines of code (in case of long epic quests even thousands) and few pages long of description for mechanics and story.
Unless you want me to pay for this, I cannot describe it in more detail as even making rough sketch of proper quest would take few hours of work.
I can give you some examples though.
Example of simple mechanicaly (from player point of view, since from developer point of view it was a lot of work), but with top-notch presentation and good stor quest is "Investigate Circus Tent" side-quest in Baldur's Gate 2.
Example of nice proper long quest is i.e. Mafia quest-chains in New Reno or "assasination in NCR" both in Fallout 2.
I will be perfectly honest ,i think Wow is a very average game but i did play it and i did actually find exactly three quests that were pretty good.Here is the problem ,those 3 quests,the ONLY ones i found to be really good were all glitched/bugged so i could not finish ANY of the three.
Here is the other sad part,in the game chat everyone was talking about them and many said they were bugged even during the beta testing,which shows and proves just how bad Blizzard really is.
There have also been many other simple quests that were what i would call interesting ,in that you have to think but most of that was in FFXI where there is no hand holding at all,you had to figure out everything for yourself.Using those 3 examples from WOW,in that game it loses a LOT of interest when everything is spelled out for you with markers.
We are obviously not going to see any major changes in quest design,devs are simply too cheap and lazy,however they could at least make them repeatable.By that i mean have a system designed that changes that same quest up so it is not always 100% identical making for no replay value.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
He's referring to quests in these games being more like "run down the hill, kill, collect, etc, x things and come back = quest over" as opposed to more prolonged story elements/themes, plots, subplots, climaxes, resolutions, characterization, etc.
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
I know a lot of quests are kill xx or delivery, but if it's wrapped around a good story and/or storyline it does stand out and I find myself interested in knowing the out come.
SWTOR, TSW, L2, SWG, GW2, NWO, STO, ESO, FFXIV,WoW, all had some good stories to tell. NWO ans STO has some pretty good player created stories and I'm surprised more MMO's don't let players create quests. I must admit I have become spoiled by stories that are completely voiced.
"We all do the best we can based on life experience, point of view, and our ability to believe in ourselves." - Naropa "We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are." SR Covey