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Lets Create A Good Quest
nerovergil
Member UncommonPosts: 680
Quest need a good storyline, otherwise, players can easily get bored.
Lets throw some ideas how a good quest should be
How you want it to be?
For me, i would like a new idea, an option to be the bad guy, evil. you still can choose good side, but you also can choose to be in evil side.
Evil is something you cant do in real life, fun sometimes when you can do ingame. usually quest comes with an order to kill specific ammount of bandits, help the Lion Guards, Help the Queen, even save the world.
How about a quest that made you join the bandits, kill Lion Guard, assassinate the queen/king, be the contract assassin, doing mischief at the village, and so on.
For example in guild war 2 (Dynamic Events), at specific time, some monster will attack a village, and players need to be the 'good guy' and help clear the enemy.
how about the player can choose to join the evil side, take over the village, maybe trigger a 'pvp' in a pve, its a temporary open world pvp, player that choose evil side will have monster status, meaning, any player that choose good side or not choosing side can attack them, and they can attack them too in a quest area.
the side that lose their Lords 1st will lose the quest,
the quest not only attacking village, maybe escorting, assassinate king or any others related that can make player choose good and evil side.
my second ideas is to increase the difficulty of the mobs. Make the enemy stronger, make the leveling harder.
make the leveling fun, not feel grinding, everything must have a combat aspect, not boring, not finding maze, not a quiz, but combat. i hate doing maze or quiz because my life already maze and quiz. i just want to bash out of enemy and feel good.
actually i kinda like ragnarok online style leveling, simple, every monster has their own area and level, you just go there and slash em. but exp is too big and feel grindy, maybe tone down the exp and make the leveling shorter. but this kind of leveling has no story, just a map for a player to create their own story in their mind. plus this kind of leveling has repetition value, you can repeat the map, with diffferent story on your mind, not generic developer storyline
all and all, i like something medieval and logical in a quest, the reward is logical, the mobs drop a logical items. because in archeage sometimes, the reward is weird, sometimes u get a gear without logical explaination, just by doing some quest that not even related to it.
Quest must have repetition value, since many mmorpg player have more than 1 character, if the quest has strong enemy to beat, eveytime player play it again will be fun, not just a quest that requred player to perform repetition action like take water from the basket and repeat it 5 times (like some gw2 helping villager quest, might be good in rp aspect, but has no repetition values imo)
and i want to tell that i like archeage music, it made me feel peace, make me want to pack my back and go there
Quest must have repetition value, since many mmorpg player have more than 1 character, if the quest has strong enemy to beat, eveytime player play it again will be fun, not just a quest that requred player to perform repetition action like take water from the basket and repeat it 5 times (like some gw2 helping villager quest, might be good in rp aspect, but has no repetition values imo)
and i want to tell that i like archeage music, it made me feel peace, make me want to pack my back and go there
i have more ideas, i will post it later. u guys can post here what kind of quest u like? what the storyline?
Post edited by nerovergil on
Comments
A lot of games have a lot tougher mobs at the beta and at launch then they have a while after and this includes Wow.
I like your other idea though, it would work very well in a PvP/PvE game as long as you make the right combat system to back it up. The hard part is that you need to spawn the right amount of mobs to support the side with least players on so it just wont be a matter of which side that have most players. Or you could have the mobs to toughen up instead. It certainly is possible, GW2 do have something similar when many players add a DE but with a PvP aspect you need to balance it better.
But the interesting thing is that you actually would get meaningful PvP here, you can't just jump any player at any time but in any DE you would get a PvP minibattle with 2 or more sides depending on the DE (you could for example have more than 2 sides who want to control an area, could be racial sides, religious or national ones).
The combat system would have to be rather different than most MMOs uses since players and mobs will fight side by side, if you use tanks they need to be able to use the same tactics on both players and mobs (so if you have taunts they need to work on players for example).
But I like how you are thinking, the holy grail of MMOs really is a way to implement PvP and PvE together in a working system, many games have tried this but they have all failed to some degree. This sounds like something that rightly done actually could work.
A good example would be in Dragon Quest VII where a likable character that has been traveling with your party for half the game decides to part ways and doesn't come back.
Another important aspect is to set the scene with the right atmosphere. You might have a fog that is difficult to see through because you are trying to set the mood for a certain scene. The music would play into that as well.
Getting back to relationships it's always fun to see characters relationships develop in game. A lot of JRPGs had relationships between NPCs and the player character that were kind of fun to watch play out. I find if there are any relationships in RPGs these days they are rather bland. I attribute a lot of this aspect to political correctness and companies fearing backlash for something that might be considered sexual inequality, but really isn't.
Then there are emotions like jealousy, betrayal, slavery, evil, etc. They are all good for building an interesting story as you need something meaningful to overcome.
The worst part of quests in MMOs is that they are very mechanical in nature. Click on exclamation mark, accept, follow GPS, click a few more times, follow GPS, click a few more times. You can read the story if you want, but it's not likely to have much impact when presented in a sea of quests that have a similar mechanical nature. They will start to lose their meaning over time once you have done enough. Reducing the amount of quests and increasing the quality put into quests would be a huge help IMO.
Good quests (good of course is subjective), to me, is where there is a scripted story and story events are depicted in 3D sequences in the game. One best example is the assassination of the Empress in Dishonored. It is an important event in the story ... you (the player) tried to save her but failed.
Obviously these kind of quests need to be done inside instances (or use phasing).
While at the heart of it, they are still kill x, collect x, the way they are acquired and carried out is a step forward.
I can't think of any quest system that doesn't involve killing this or collecting that and I can't think of any other way quests can be done, aside from just removing them all together and having them set up like GW2, but even that just starts to feel like just constantly killing x. All GW2 did was remove marks above NPC's heads to accept the quest.