1. I am giving the most common quest. You can't just claim the few above and beyond quest are near the norm. Talking about MMORPG in general and even WoW/SWTOR is littered with them.
2. Minus AI all scenarios for a procedural done quest are hand done. The quality would depend on the developer just like a regular game. How well the scenarios are written. How many there are. How well they can chain them together.
Your derpy text ("blahblah") and that simplest-possible goal was nowhere close to "the most common quest",
Your arbitrary derision aside, that's also incorrect. If we are to break down the most common format of quests, they only really fall into a few primary categories. More than that, the narrative you attach to them is often very piecemeal and a lot of quests are throwaway in their nature (something to fill the progression gap with).
That's main point of the "blablabla" part because ultimately the narrative of most any of those activities doesn't even matter, it's so finite and trivial in it's nature and disconnected from the rest of the lore that it's often skipped right past.
That is the most common type of quest. A fundamentally forgettable experience written to deliver you from point A to point B to fulfil task 1-5, turn in a reward, and then repeat the process over and over without any of that dialogue sticking as anything novel.
Your dialogue is wrapped around very heavily scripted quests that constitutes a minority of the overall user's experience when doing authored quests. What's worse is that these heavily scripted scenarios are also the most direct contributor to the "everyone is the chosen one" flaw of so many themepark oriented narratives. How many clones of an ancient artifact end up existing in the world? How many heads does Onyxia have that she can lose it millions of times? How many people are/were standing at the top of the frozen throne to watch the end of Arthas?
At least with a procedural system that can take an overarching plot and plug-n play the quest activities in-between you can experience a journey that will be unique to the character.
"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
1. I am giving the most common quest. You can't just claim the few above and beyond quest are near the norm. Talking about MMORPG in general and even WoW/SWTOR is littered with them.
2. Minus AI all scenarios for a procedural done quest are hand done. The quality would depend on the developer just like a regular game. How well the scenarios are written. How many there are. How well they can chain them together.
Your derpy text ("blahblah") and that simplest-possible goal was nowhere close to "the most common quest", nor would a reasonable person use a Pinto as their evidence that Cars are Worse Than [Some Other Transportation]. You don't cherry-pick the worst possible example to actually know the truth of which one is better -- not unless you're an emotional, irrational fool anyway. Instead, you pick either the best or the average example and compare both things fairly.
So if you want to fairly compare the average quest (which is better than "blahblah" and 25 wolves) against the average procedural experience, go for it.
Procedural elements are all hand-done, but because they're churned through a procedure the actual experience is consistently below the quality of content that's been hand-crafted straight through. Turns out designing a robot to tell a story is harder than telling a story; who knew!
Randomized quest selection mostly just introduces the risk of repeating the same quest. Or if you eliminate random quests then it's just a story whose order makes no sense (and really dang close to typical questing.) Branching quests just dramatically cut down on the total amount of content a game offers (just a single branching point for each quest will literally cut a game's quest count in half!)
The average MMORPG quest I have played in every MMORPG is bad. Not even average the vast majority were just poor task that don't even qualify as quest. I am not sure how procedurally generated can be worst than such a low ceiling.
Blah blah blah is because essentially the narrative is trivial to anyone with common sense. You don't need to know the narrative. The narrative is usually bad and clichéd. The narrative also give no information to solve the quest because there is nothing to solve generic task and literally autorun to at the worst.
And no the quality of scenarios depends on the quality of the creator no different than pure hand done quest. You can't say one will be well written and the other not. But again you can because you usually do.
Instead of saying you don't like something and like how WOW is done you go the roundabout way of framing the argument like this. Of course, WoW has all high quality quest right? What percentage of WoW quest aren't super generic kill X of Y, kill X of Y + collect Z, click X, pick up X, deliver X, guard X, Kill X? Not a very high percentage.
1. I am giving the most common quest. You can't just claim the few above and beyond quest are near the norm. Talking about MMORPG in general and even WoW/SWTOR is littered with them.
2. Minus AI all scenarios for a procedural done quest are hand done. The quality would depend on the developer just like a regular game. How well the scenarios are written. How many there are. How well they can chain them together.
Your derpy text ("blahblah") and that simplest-possible goal was nowhere close to "the most common quest",
Your arbitrary derision aside, that's also incorrect. If we are to break down the most common format of quests, they only really fall into a few primary categories. More than that, the narrative you attach to them is often very piecemeal and a lot of quests are throwaway in their nature (something to fill the progression gap with).
That's main point of the "blablabla" part because ultimately the narrative of most any of those activities doesn't even matter, it's so finite and trivial in it's nature and disconnected from the rest of the lore that it's often skipped right past.
That is the most common type of quest. A fundamentally forgettable experience written to deliver you from point A to point B to fulfil task 1-5, turn in a reward, and then repeat the process over and over without any of that dialogue sticking as anything novel.
Your dialogue is wrapped around very heavily scripted quests that constitutes a minority of the overall user's experience when doing authored quests. What's worse is that these heavily scripted scenarios are also the most direct contributor to the "everyone is the chosen one" flaw of so many themepark oriented narratives. How many clones of an ancient artifact end up existing in the world? How many heads does Onyxia have that she can lose it millions of times? How many people are/were standing at the top of the frozen throne to watch the end of Arthas?
At least with a procedural system that can take an overarching plot and plug-n play the quest activities in-between you can experience a journey that will be unique to the character.
How is it unique when its quests selected from a pool of premade quests? Even with changing parameters people will see through your system fairly quickly. Instead of saving NPC 145, you have to save NPC 532. Quests become a gray mass. A grind. There is no story, there is no emotional investment.
There is no chance for emotional investment when you know the character you're saving was determined through a diceroll!
Elder Scrolls 2: Daggerfall had such quests. Getting a quest was like going to a vending machine! Procedural quests don't solve any of the problems you might have with quest content.
It would be a nightmare of a job to make procedural quests as good as hand-made ones. Bethesda has since Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind went with hand-made quests with level scaling. They add in minor random encounters to create this illusion that something is happening even when the player isn't there. Its a sensible design decision. Many people are content with it.
I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been-Wayne Gretzky
1. I am giving the most common quest. You can't just claim the few above and beyond quest are near the norm. Talking about MMORPG in general and even WoW/SWTOR is littered with them.
2. Minus AI all scenarios for a procedural done quest are hand done. The quality would depend on the developer just like a regular game. How well the scenarios are written. How many there are. How well they can chain them together.
Your derpy text ("blahblah") and that simplest-possible goal was nowhere close to "the most common quest",
Your arbitrary derision aside, that's also incorrect. If we are to break down the most common format of quests, they only really fall into a few primary categories. More than that, the narrative you attach to them is often very piecemeal and a lot of quests are throwaway in their nature (something to fill the progression gap with).
That's main point of the "blablabla" part because ultimately the narrative of most any of those activities doesn't even matter, it's so finite and trivial in it's nature and disconnected from the rest of the lore that it's often skipped right past.
That is the most common type of quest. A fundamentally forgettable experience written to deliver you from point A to point B to fulfil task 1-5, turn in a reward, and then repeat the process over and over without any of that dialogue sticking as anything novel.
Your dialogue is wrapped around very heavily scripted quests that constitutes a minority of the overall user's experience when doing authored quests. What's worse is that these heavily scripted scenarios are also the most direct contributor to the "everyone is the chosen one" flaw of so many themepark oriented narratives. How many clones of an ancient artifact end up existing in the world? How many heads does Onyxia have that she can lose it millions of times? How many people are/were standing at the top of the frozen throne to watch the end of Arthas?
At least with a procedural system that can take an overarching plot and plug-n play the quest activities in-between you can experience a journey that will be unique to the character.
How is it unique when its quests selected from a pool of premade quests? Even with changing parameters people will see through your system fairly quickly. Instead of saving NPC 145, you have to save NPC 532. Quests become a gray mass. A grind. There is no story, there is no emotional investment.
There is no chance for emotional investment when you know the character you're saving was determined through a diceroll!
Elder Scrolls 2: Daggerfall had such quests. Getting a quest was like going to a vending machine! Procedural quests don't solve any of the problems you might have with quest content.
It would be a nightmare of a job to make procedural quests as good as hand-made ones. Bethesda has since Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind went with hand-made quests with level scaling. They add in minor random encounters to create this illusion that something is happening even when the player isn't there. Its a sensible design decision. Many people are content with it.
Unique user experiences does not mandate that the content is assembled from wholly unique factors.
Much like reality, you can experience any variety of things. Something like a near-death experience for example may stand out as a unique experience for you, or meeting your favorite celebrity.
And yet, neither of those things are "unique" if regarded in any greater spectrum than your finite experience. They are only unique because certain interchangeable elements exist different another person's experience. Replace bumping into a celeb on a bus or nearly getting hit by a but with meeting them in an elevator or surviving an elevator drop, and suddenly the event while semantically the same as so many others, has happened for you in a unique non-repeated place and interval in time that isn't exceptionally likely to be repeated in the exact same manner.
You also made the usual mistake of opinion and perspective inserts. Like in your head the concept doesn't work because everything is random. However, that problem is as easily solved as providing a few discreet fixed values such as pulling NPCs from the local area to fill roles in a procedural event. Suddenly they aren't prefab no-names, but people that will continue to persist in the world to which you have a quest experience that no one else has quite the same experience with.
Hence the part of my post (that you even quoted) which you apparently forgot or didn't read; " a procedural system that can take an overarching plot and plug-n play the quest activities" "Overarching plot" isn't a part of that sentence without meaning.
And everything else you just said applies to scripted quests. More-so when you realize that those people you're saving are NPCs that are quite literally going to reset or pop up in millions of the same instance to re-enact the exact same events for millions of other players.
Your argument only works in single player games as a consequence. That's why you have to turn to the likes of Skyrim as an example, because it at least isolates you from witnessing the rigid nature of the user-experience using those mechanics. As soon as you start seeing multiple people interacting with the same quest chains and experiencing the same tragic event of that NPC dying for the nth time, the revelation that "NPC 145" in this scripted quest has absolutely zero emotional attachment to your user experience.
In the litany of scripted quests you treadmill, can you honestly say you remember a majority of the NPCs you interacted with? Anyone that's not a liar will likely admit that "no", pretty much all the NPCs they have interacted with and "saved" have been a nameless mass of pixels that they only paid attention to long enough to get a reward from them.
Coming from someone who tried to decry the same issues exist across techniques for nonlinear skill progression vs linear skills, you should have known this similarly applies to story-building. Perhaps you weren't seeking rationality though with this argument.
1. I am giving the most common quest. You can't just claim the few above and beyond quest are near the norm. Talking about MMORPG in general and even WoW/SWTOR is littered with them.
2. Minus AI all scenarios for a procedural done quest are hand done. The quality would depend on the developer just like a regular game. How well the scenarios are written. How many there are. How well they can chain them together.
Your derpy text ("blahblah") and that simplest-possible goal was nowhere close to "the most common quest",
Your arbitrary derision aside, that's also incorrect. If we are to break down the most common format of quests, they only really fall into a few primary categories. More than that, the narrative you attach to them is often very piecemeal and a lot of quests are throwaway in their nature (something to fill the progression gap with).
That's main point of the "blablabla" part because ultimately the narrative of most any of those activities doesn't even matter, it's so finite and trivial in it's nature and disconnected from the rest of the lore that it's often skipped right past.
That is the most common type of quest. A fundamentally forgettable experience written to deliver you from point A to point B to fulfil task 1-5, turn in a reward, and then repeat the process over and over without any of that dialogue sticking as anything novel.
Your dialogue is wrapped around very heavily scripted quests that constitutes a minority of the overall user's experience when doing authored quests. What's worse is that these heavily scripted scenarios are also the most direct contributor to the "everyone is the chosen one" flaw of so many themepark oriented narratives. How many clones of an ancient artifact end up existing in the world? How many heads does Onyxia have that she can lose it millions of times? How many people are/were standing at the top of the frozen throne to watch the end of Arthas?
At least with a procedural system that can take an overarching plot and plug-n play the quest activities in-between you can experience a journey that will be unique to the character.
How is it unique when its quests selected from a pool of premade quests? Even with changing parameters people will see through your system fairly quickly. Instead of saving NPC 145, you have to save NPC 532. Quests become a gray mass. A grind. There is no story, there is no emotional investment.
There is no chance for emotional investment when you know the character you're saving was determined through a diceroll!
Elder Scrolls 2: Daggerfall had such quests. Getting a quest was like going to a vending machine! Procedural quests don't solve any of the problems you might have with quest content.
It would be a nightmare of a job to make procedural quests as good as hand-made ones. Bethesda has since Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind went with hand-made quests with level scaling. They add in minor random encounters to create this illusion that something is happening even when the player isn't there. Its a sensible design decision. Many people are content with it.
But that's part of it that there is no emotional involvement in MMORPG quest. You're not changing anything because you don't get the attachment of solving problems for the locals. Even the games you phase you know others are running around doing the same thing.
Most MMORPG quest start off in a bad place of being a time sink and experience filler in a unchanging world. It alters how you play the game. Instead saving the farmer from a wolf pack and that's it, you are killing 20 wolves in an endless spawn with a pack of other players. Instead of having to solve problems in narrative you are guided in glowy trails and just click and kill things.
With procedural the quest while not likely to be better or worst than what most developers put out can be personal and finite to you and others. Stories can evolve based on your actions and others using simple flags.
For example you help farmer Joe and his family are now has flagged you help them. Another player comes along does a quest with farmer Joe and and his wife die to save daughter though choices. Now the Daughter grows up and married with kids. She offers you a revenge quest since you are flagged as family helper to get revenge for her parents death from Red Gang Captain Bob. Bob spawns in ruins when you get near and you kill him. Next time you come you see all new NPCS at farm because of Orc raid a month later.
Those aren't overall complex things but they allow the world to evolve and make the story more personal to you and only you.
How is it unique when its quests selected from a pool of premade quests? Even with changing parameters people will see through your system fairly quickly. Instead of saving NPC 145, you have to save NPC 532. Quests become a gray mass. A grind. There is no story, there is no emotional investment.
There is no chance for emotional investment when you know the character you're saving was determined through a diceroll!
Elder Scrolls 2: Daggerfall had such quests. Getting a quest was like going to a vending machine! Procedural quests don't solve any of the problems you might have with quest content.
It would be a nightmare of a job to make procedural quests as good as hand-made ones. Bethesda has since Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind went with hand-made quests with level scaling. They add in minor random encounters to create this illusion that something is happening even when the player isn't there. Its a sensible design decision. Many people are content with it.
Unique user experiences does not mandate that the content is assembled from wholly unique factors.
Much like reality, you can experience any variety of things. Something like a near-death experience for example may stand out as a unique experience for you, or meeting your favorite celebrity.
And yet, neither of those things are "unique" if regarded in any greater spectrum than your finite experience. They are only unique because certain interchangeable elements exist different another person's experience. Replace bumping into a celeb on a bus or nearly getting hit by a but with meeting them in an elevator or surviving an elevator drop, and suddenly the event while semantically the same as so many others, has happened for you in a unique non-repeated place and interval in time that isn't exceptionally likely to be repeated in the exact same manner.
You also made the usual mistake of opinion and perspective inserts. Like in your head the concept doesn't work because everything is random. However, that problem is as easily solved as providing a few discreet fixed values such as pulling NPCs from the local area to fill roles in a procedural event. Suddenly they aren't prefab no-names, but people that will continue to persist in the world to which you have a quest experience that no one else has quite the same experience with.
Hence the part of my post (that you even quoted) which you apparently forgot or didn't read; " a procedural system that can take an overarching plot and plug-n play the quest activities" "Overarching plot" isn't a part of that sentence without meaning.
And everything else you just said applies to scripted quests. More-so when you realize that those people you're saving are NPCs that are quite literally going to reset or pop up in millions of the same instance to re-enact the exact same events for millions of other players.
Your argument only works in single player games as a consequence. That's why you have to turn to the likes of Skyrim as an example, because it at least isolates you from witnessing the rigid nature of the user-experience using those mechanics. As soon as you start seeing multiple people interacting with the same quest chains and experiencing the same tragic event of that NPC dying for the nth time, the revelation that "NPC 145" in this scripted quest has absolutely zero emotional attachment to your user experience.
In the litany of scripted quests you treadmill, can you honestly say you remember a majority of the NPCs you interacted with? Anyone that's not a liar will likely admit that "no", pretty much all the NPCs they have interacted with and "saved" have been a nameless mass of pixels that they only paid attention to long enough to get a reward from them.
Coming from someone who tried to decry the same issues exist across techniques for nonlinear skill progression vs linear skills, you should have known this similarly applies to story-building. Perhaps you weren't seeking rationality though with this argument.
Daggerfall worked exactly the way you proposed. The NPC wasn't spawned for the quest but picked among all the NPCs in a random area (as far as I know). It didn't change anything.
Instead you get these weird instances where a farmer is supposed to be a vampire you have to hunt down. -Ok... Well, to make this more than just a kill quest, few other NPC's should have information regarding to who is the farmer. How do you generate that? Are the relationships among the NPCs persistent? Are they dynamic? How do you spawn more NPCs when you kill them off?
Are the objectives going to be something like: Talk to 1-3 NPCs to find out who is the vampire, kill vampire. The dialogue must be generic. Obviously. To have personality among the NPCs you talk to would mean you'd have to track their personality and you'd have to have multiple variations of responses from NPCs based on that personality ... It gets stupidly complicated very quickly. And if the target is a werewolf is it then a whole different quest? And this is just for one procedural kill quest!
The quests would repeat quickly, the personalities would repeat quickly, you might even run out of NPCs from the gameworld. Or you might just spawn them back and you're exactly where you are with handmade quests.
Do you see how, when you start thinking about how to make something like that, the problems start to pile up. I get the feeling you are little too fixated on this "non-linear" concept. You need to take a step back and look at it again from a more practical standpoint.
From a guy who seemingly hates quests you want to make worse ones? Come on...
I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been-Wayne Gretzky
Instead you get these weird instances where a farmer is supposed to be a vampire you have to hunt down. -Ok... Well, to make this more than just a kill quest, few other NPC's should have information regarding to who is the farmer. How do you generate that? Are the relationships among the NPCs persistent? Are they dynamic? How do you spawn more NPCs when you kill them off?
Are the objectives going to be something like: Talk to 1-3 NPCs to find out who is the vampire, kill vampire. The dialogue must be generic. Obviously. To have personality among the NPCs you talk to would mean you'd have to track their personality and you'd have to have multiple variations of responses from NPCs based on that personality ... It gets stupidly complicated very quickly. And if the target is a werewolf is it then a whole different quest? And this is just for one procedural kill quest!
The quests would repeat quickly, the personalities would repeat quickly, you might even run out of NPCs from the gameworld. Or you might just spawn them back and you're exactly where you are with handmade quests.
I think the point of procedural quest generation is that is process is repeatable and somewhat intelligent.
So, yes, whilst it would be very complicated to develop a system that offered different NPC responses based on their personality, where they are in the world, the quest objectives etc, the code that sits behind it would be applicable to all procedurally generated quests. The developers wouldn't need to hand craft every possible response for every possible personality for every type of request, they'd create a system that would procedurally generate these responses.
It is still very complicated and very difficult to do which is why we basically never see such a thing and when we do, we end up with the problems you've pointed out: procedurally generated quests are just as boring and generic as hand-crafted quests. But, at least with procedurally generated quests, each playthrough is different. The content may still be boring, but its not the exact same boring content as the last time you went to that zone.
However, procedurally generated or hand-made doesn't really address the issue of linear vs non-linear, both approaches can achieve both results, just depends on the implementation and creative wishes of the developers.
Currently Playing: WAR RoR - Spitt rr7X Black Orc | Scrotling rr6X Squig Herder | Scabrous rr4X Shaman
See, you commit the same mistake of opinion and perspective inserts yet again. You look to make up a problem that's solved with as simple of a thought as "Why don't we separate essential and non-essential NPCs?"
Or, since you seem fixated on the Elder Scrolls series we can look at their later games that offers the AI solution of Radiant AI as they implemented it in Skyrim, which has a tracking and delegation system for NPCs which shifts quest objectives between targets dynamically depending on player behavior and if certain NPCs die. Couple that with the lifecycle mechanics that actually existed in that game too and develop it a bit more, or just turn to a simplified version of AI the likes of a Sims game for the ability for AI to actually repopulate themselves dynamically and within the context of the game world and every fragile argument you've tried to make breaks.
And none of this is for "one procedural kill quest". That's the reason procedural systems like this have quite a lot of potential, since these mechanics, while complex, are also in turn something that propagates itself once operating. That "one quest" is a hallmark of the millions it is capable of producing.'
Personalities are actually relatively easy to fib alongside custom dialogue by breaking sentences out into segments and then having a few word filter libraries that essentially swap in colloquial, expressive, and accented dialogue.
Similarly your whole "the quests would repeat, etc" diatribe is pure conjecture based again on your own notions and unsupported by any external logic. The variety on offer and frequency of repetition is subject to the breadth of the asset library created for the system alongside the potential combinations resulting from it.
Do you see how, when you start thinking, the problems aren't the convoluted mess you try to make them out to be? I know as someone who doesn't understand the technology it might be hard for you, but if you're going to have the gumption to talk about the subject then it should be fair to assume that you are going to learn about this stuff eventually. I've already linked multiple iterations of non-linear storytelling mechanics, tools, and AI in this thread that addresses the very notions and problems you've tried to make up. In the post you just responded to I linked an entire essay on the matter that you very obviously didn't even read.
If you had you'd understand that much of this is under an interactive narrative directed by an AI. You don't just dump content into a game and expect it to work through magic. We're talking about MMOs which are games that run on servers and already have to track a lot of the data in question, creating a server-side AI that reads segments of that data and calculates the best scenario parameters for a player based on their play habits and then subbing the content into the procedural generators and seeding it into the game world is well within the scope of that platform.
From a guy that wants to act like he knows what he's talking about you want to say such blatantly nonsensical bunk? Improving quests is goal here, you not understanding how things work does not help the conversation.
If you ever feel like catching up on the technology and concepts behind all this. I'd suggest ponying up the money to get this. It may be ten years old, but it covers content that you seem to be struggling with and I can't really talk about much beyond that if it flies overhead.
Or look into these guys if you wanna try actually catching up.
Post edited by Deivos on
"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 don't care for developer written "stories" in MMO. I'm a bit more tolerant of stories forced down my throat in single player games, but I don't play those anymore. Some lore on the side with optional quests, would be fine. Ultimately MMO's should be a dangerous virtual world that I get thrown into.
I really really don't like forced linear stories/questing in MMO's.
I do not think stories belong in games and I have an essay worth of detailed information as to why I think they should not be in games and why they (the stories) will always be better if they are not in the game but instead as stand alone content
That is how strongly I feel about it
I think you want a game that is not an mmoRPG.
wait what?
people go to MMORPG for the stories but not single player for the story's?
are you just screwing with me or are you serious?
Please do not respond to me, even if I ask you a question, its rhetorical.
The average MMORPG quest I have played in every MMORPG is bad. Not even average the vast majority were just poor task that don't even qualify as quest. I am not sure how procedurally generated can be worst than such a low ceiling.
Blah blah blah is because essentially the narrative is trivial to anyone with common sense. You don't need to know the narrative. The narrative is usually bad and clichéd. The narrative also give no information to solve the quest because there is nothing to solve generic task and literally autorun to at the worst.
And no the quality of scenarios depends on the quality of the creator no different than pure hand done quest. You can't say one will be well written and the other not. But again you can because you usually do.
Instead of saying you don't like something and like how WOW is done you go the roundabout way of framing the argument like this. Of course, WoW has all high quality quest right? What percentage of WoW quest aren't super generic kill X of Y, kill X of Y + collect Z, click X, pick up X, deliver X, guard X, Kill X? Not a very high percentage.
Again:
This is a comparative discussion. We're not asking how much you individually enjoy hand-made quests. That's irrelevant. We're asking whether hand-made quests are better or worse than procedural ones.
No evidence = no argument. Without evidence you're just the Donald Trump of the forums, slinging around meaningless rhetoric with no basis in reality.
The evidence I've provided is typical of a lot of questing in WOW nowadays. (In fact during my beta play of Legion every single quest I experienced was like those monk quests shown. I'm sure the quality tapers back a little later on, but it's a significant part of the experience.) Just like Pintos don't prove cars are a bad form of transportation, all those other companies who have shitty quests are basically meaningless in terms of the actual viability of hand-made quests in RPGs. It's like using a child's crayon drawing to insist artwork can't be enjoyable.
I'm not saying one type of quest will be well-written and the other not. I'm saying both will be identically written but a function of implementing them in a procedural style will result in the quests being less compelling content.
The percentage of quests that involve those goals are irrelevant unless you're incapable of a higher level of understanding of what constitutes quest quality.
In that Legion video one of the scenes I saw was [Legion Spoilers] a demon busting in on a discussion amongst the monks in their temple, charging across the room to slam the Monks' master against the wall, injuring him. The monks (and the player-monk) then rally together to defeat the large demon (and I think some smaller ones too?) to save their master and expel the threat. This didn't happen in a text-box, but instead was all portrayed in real-time. But essentially it was a "kill x" quest. Unless you're capable of discerning the clear and obvious quality difference between that Legion questing experience and a text-box "kill x" quest, then you're simply incapable of discussing the topic. If your measure of quest quality is so shallow and underdeveloped that you can't tell the difference between high and low quality quests, then why even bother arguing the topic?
Your favorite all-time game can also be recklessly oversimplified as kill/collect/click/pickup/deliver/guard X. The oversimplification completely ignores the quality of the experience. It's ignorant.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
We're not asking how much you individually enjoy hand-made quests. That's irrelevant. We're asking whether hand-made questsare better or worse than procedural ones.
Lol so it's not about my opinion if they are better or worst it's about your opinion if they are better or worst. Got it lol.
Lol so it's not about my opinion if they are better or worst it's about your opinion if they are better or worst. Got it lol.
Please work on your reading and comprehension skills.
Essentially I said 10 is greater than 2 and you responded "10 isn't a very high number".
Actually I said hand-made quests are higher quality content than procedural, and you responded that you dislike hand-made quests. So you weren't providing an comparison-based opinion of which was better, backed by evidence. Instead you were just making a derpy unrelated statement, just like "10 isn't a very high number".
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
Lol so it's not about my opinion if they are better or worst it's about your opinion if they are better or worst. Got it lol.
Please work on your reading and comprehension skills.
Essentially I said 10 is greater than 2 and you responded "10 isn't a very high number".
Actually I said hand-made quests are higher quality content than procedural, and you responded that you dislike hand-made quests. So you weren't providing an comparison-based opinion of which was better, backed by evidence. Instead you were just making a derpy unrelated statement, just like "10 isn't a very high number".
Its your opinion that procedural quest are worst.
I stated the quality of either depends on the quality of the maker.
the quality of scenarios depends on the quality of the creator no different than pure hand done quest
You can't quantify someone's taste into numbers that favor your opinion and be taken serious.
Linear would be a single player game and non linear would be an open MMO.
You don't have online with thousands of players just have everyone follow the exact same linear path.I should say yeah they are doing exactly that and funny rare do i hear anyone that knows why.
They add in the internet login because it allows them to have dlc's and cash shops for added profits.To actually make a true MMO world and with true ROLE playing,takes a heck of a lot of work,but MUCH easier to add login screen and cash shops lmao.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
In that Legion video one of the scenes I saw was [Legion Spoilers] a demon busting in on a discussion amongst the monks in their temple, charging across the room to slam the Monks' master against the wall, injuring him. The monks (and the player-monk) then rally together to defeat the large demon (and I think some smaller ones too?) to save their master and expel the threat. This didn't happen in a text-box, but instead was all portrayed in real-time.
So your most outstanding argument is that you can put heavily scripted sequences into a quest (which increases the cost of development greatly for each quest you build in such a manner as compared to the fluff-text progression quests due to the additional animations, cutscene work, sometimes unique assets, voice acting, etc).
Which isn't even to say that's not compatible with a procedural system that can draw from listings of groups/factions a character is associated with and sub NPCs from that faction into the roles and effectively assemble the same sequence of events.
But extending rationality that far to realize creating assets for a game and implementing them into a game library can include such things as event sequences probably runs counter to your opinion.
"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
A bit of both for me. "Linear content" does not scare me like it seems to do for other players. I don't mind questing. I also enjoy enjoying exploring and finding "paths less traveled."
I stated the quality of either depends on the quality of the maker.
the quality of scenarios depends on the quality of the creator no different than pure hand done quest
You can't quantify someone's taste into numbers that favor your opinion and be taken serious.
My opinion is based on logic and evidence: hand-made quest systems are almost universally better than procedural quest systems. There is strong evidence of hand-made quests being the best quests on the market, while procedural quests are consistently less excellent.
Your opinion is based on nothing. You've cited zero evidence of a procedural quest system being better than WOW's. Zero evidence. Not a single game with procedural quests has been mentioned by you. None. No evidence, no argument.
Your "quality of the creator" nonsense is pure gibberish. It exemplifies your lack of logic that you even think it matters to bring it up. When I compare things, I compare them fairly. I've always been assuming a fair comparison where the quality of the creator is factored out of the equation. Logically if Blizzard did procedural quests, they would be worse than Blizzard's hand-made quests.
The reason why is that time spent making something procedural is less time spent making it work in the well-paced manner of a well-told story. With hand-made questing everything is paced out correctly, while in procedural questing the story beats offer inferior pacing, potentially inferior ordering, while suffering inferior quality or quantity or both (because either you have a low-quality grinding pool of unrelated quests OR you have quests that procedurally fit together well but are fewer in number (because of the extra dev time dedicated to making them procedural) and sometimes you end up with both penalties (you spend the extra dev time and still end up with a low-quality experience that doesn't flow well.))
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
We really can just skip to pointing this out about your own conjecture too.
Like that entire diatribe on procedural content. You very carefully tiptoed around the fact that you can make intelligent AI management for procedural content that addresses many of the problems you are making up.
Is there AI sufficiently advanced in all aspects to make it a perfect solution? Not yet, but development has to happen somewhere for progress to be made, and neglecting options that can offer better long-term solutions because there is a different option you're familiar with is horrible for offering anything better than the mundane.
"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 stated the quality of either depends on the quality of the maker.
the quality of scenarios depends on the quality of the creator no different than pure hand done quest
You can't quantify someone's taste into numbers that favor your opinion and be taken serious.
My opinion is based on logic and evidence: hand-made quest systems are almost universally better than procedural quest systems. There is strong evidence of hand-made quests being the best quests on the market, while procedural quests are consistently less excellent.
Your opinion is based on nothing. You've cited zero evidence of a procedural quest system being better than WOW's. Zero evidence. Not a single game with procedural quests has been mentioned by you. None. No evidence, no argument.
Your "quality of the creator" nonsense is pure gibberish. It exemplifies your lack of logic that you even think it matters to bring it up. When I compare things, I compare them fairly. I've always been assuming a fair comparison where the quality of the creator is factored out of the equation. Logically if Blizzard did procedural quests, they would be worse than Blizzard's hand-made quests.
The reason why is that time spent making something procedural is less time spent making it work in the well-paced manner of a well-told story. With hand-made questing everything is paced out correctly, while in procedural questing the story beats offer inferior pacing, potentially inferior ordering, while suffering inferior quality or quantity or both (because either you have a low-quality grinding pool of unrelated quests OR you have quests that procedurally fit together well but are fewer in number (because of the extra dev time dedicated to making them procedural) and sometimes you end up with both penalties (you spend the extra dev time and still end up with a low-quality experience that doesn't flow well.))
Lol, do you really believe what you are writing or do you back yourself into a corner bark like an old ladies chihuahua? What evidence would I provide? I have an opinion that procedural content is as good in quality as the system and content? Its freakin obvious.
Again pacing of the story or whatever what makes a good story in Axehilt's world/opinion depends on the system created to deliver procedural content. And you do realize even what you think is a good story is an opinion of your's as inconceivable as it must sound.
Procedural content is basically in its infancy and largely under utilized. But what you are saying is akin to asking why would a master shoe maker use a factory than make master shoes by hand. Yes, creating the first factories would be tough and the quality less. But over time the techniques improve. And you can produce them in mass and in flexible ways not tied to hard permanency developer content requires.
But to the meat. Vast majority of MMORPG quest are of a technical quality that could be done procedurally outside of the theatrics of voice over and cut scenes.
Kill X of Y: You have to defeat a certain number of the same opponent.
Kill [Named] Y: Some mob has gotten tough enough to earn itself a name.
Delivery (aka Fedex): The quest giver wants something delivered to someone else.
Collect X of Y: A character is tasked with finding a certain number of objects of a certain type to continue the quest.
Escort: Lead another NPC from point A to point B.
Locate: A particular individual, item or location needs to be found.
Defend: Defend an NPC, item or place for a fixed period of time against waves of attackers.
Interact: Slightly different to Locate in that the specified NPC / item needs to be activated by the player as part of the mission requirement.
These are basically mechanic behind almost all basic MMORPG quest/task. MMORPG are filled with filler quest that don't add anything to the narrative. They are the majority. They are time sink content designed to give players something to do and pace exp. These quest are far more common than the quest you are talking about. They could be done automated.
Your argument is that essentially machines fully automated creating a Toyota Camry are bad because there are handmade super cars of better quality(which I fanboy secretly). Yes, we know WoW makes the best of the best in your eyes. But the vast majority of their quest and the vast majority in the genre are still basic filler quest.
Comments
That's main point of the "blablabla" part because ultimately the narrative of most any of those activities doesn't even matter, it's so finite and trivial in it's nature and disconnected from the rest of the lore that it's often skipped right past.
That is the most common type of quest. A fundamentally forgettable experience written to deliver you from point A to point B to fulfil task 1-5, turn in a reward, and then repeat the process over and over without any of that dialogue sticking as anything novel.
Your dialogue is wrapped around very heavily scripted quests that constitutes a minority of the overall user's experience when doing authored quests. What's worse is that these heavily scripted scenarios are also the most direct contributor to the "everyone is the chosen one" flaw of so many themepark oriented narratives. How many clones of an ancient artifact end up existing in the world? How many heads does Onyxia have that she can lose it millions of times? How many people are/were standing at the top of the frozen throne to watch the end of Arthas?
At least with a procedural system that can take an overarching plot and plug-n play the quest activities in-between you can experience a journey that will be unique to the character.
"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
Blah blah blah is because essentially the narrative is trivial to anyone with common sense. You don't need to know the narrative. The narrative is usually bad and clichéd. The narrative also give no information to solve the quest because there is nothing to solve generic task and literally autorun to at the worst.
And no the quality of scenarios depends on the quality of the creator no different than pure hand done quest. You can't say one will be well written and the other not. But again you can because you usually do.
Instead of saying you don't like something and like how WOW is done you go the roundabout way of framing the argument like this. Of course, WoW has all high quality quest right? What percentage of WoW quest aren't super generic kill X of Y, kill X of Y + collect Z, click X, pick up X, deliver X, guard X, Kill X? Not a very high percentage.
There is no chance for emotional investment when you know the character you're saving was determined through a diceroll!
Elder Scrolls 2: Daggerfall had such quests. Getting a quest was like going to a vending machine! Procedural quests don't solve any of the problems you might have with quest content.
It would be a nightmare of a job to make procedural quests as good as hand-made ones. Bethesda has since Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind went with hand-made quests with level scaling. They add in minor random encounters to create this illusion that something is happening even when the player isn't there. Its a sensible design decision. Many people are content with it.
I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been -Wayne Gretzky
Much like reality, you can experience any variety of things. Something like a near-death experience for example may stand out as a unique experience for you, or meeting your favorite celebrity.
And yet, neither of those things are "unique" if regarded in any greater spectrum than your finite experience. They are only unique because certain interchangeable elements exist different another person's experience. Replace bumping into a celeb on a bus or nearly getting hit by a but with meeting them in an elevator or surviving an elevator drop, and suddenly the event while semantically the same as so many others, has happened for you in a unique non-repeated place and interval in time that isn't exceptionally likely to be repeated in the exact same manner.
You also made the usual mistake of opinion and perspective inserts. Like in your head the concept doesn't work because everything is random. However, that problem is as easily solved as providing a few discreet fixed values such as pulling NPCs from the local area to fill roles in a procedural event. Suddenly they aren't prefab no-names, but people that will continue to persist in the world to which you have a quest experience that no one else has quite the same experience with.
Hence the part of my post (that you even quoted) which you apparently forgot or didn't read;
" a procedural system that can take an overarching plot and plug-n play the quest activities"
"Overarching plot" isn't a part of that sentence without meaning.
And everything else you just said applies to scripted quests. More-so when you realize that those people you're saving are NPCs that are quite literally going to reset or pop up in millions of the same instance to re-enact the exact same events for millions of other players.
Your argument only works in single player games as a consequence. That's why you have to turn to the likes of Skyrim as an example, because it at least isolates you from witnessing the rigid nature of the user-experience using those mechanics. As soon as you start seeing multiple people interacting with the same quest chains and experiencing the same tragic event of that NPC dying for the nth time, the revelation that "NPC 145" in this scripted quest has absolutely zero emotional attachment to your user experience.
In the litany of scripted quests you treadmill, can you honestly say you remember a majority of the NPCs you interacted with? Anyone that's not a liar will likely admit that "no", pretty much all the NPCs they have interacted with and "saved" have been a nameless mass of pixels that they only paid attention to long enough to get a reward from them.
Coming from someone who tried to decry the same issues exist across techniques for nonlinear skill progression vs linear skills, you should have known this similarly applies to story-building. Perhaps you weren't seeking rationality though with this argument.
EDIT: As an extended point, procedural quest assembly is one aspect of a much larger non-linear storytelling system.
"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
Most MMORPG quest start off in a bad place of being a time sink and experience filler in a unchanging world. It alters how you play the game. Instead saving the farmer from a wolf pack and that's it, you are killing 20 wolves in an endless spawn with a pack of other players. Instead of having to solve problems in narrative you are guided in glowy trails and just click and kill things.
With procedural the quest while not likely to be better or worst than what most developers put out can be personal and finite to you and others. Stories can evolve based on your actions and others using simple flags.
For example you help farmer Joe and his family are now has flagged you help them. Another player comes along does a quest with farmer Joe and and his wife die to save daughter though choices. Now the Daughter grows up and married with kids. She offers you a revenge quest since you are flagged as family helper to get revenge for her parents death from Red Gang Captain Bob. Bob spawns in ruins when you get near and you kill him. Next time you come you see all new NPCS at farm because of Orc raid a month later.
Those aren't overall complex things but they allow the world to evolve and make the story more personal to you and only you.
Instead you get these weird instances where a farmer is supposed to be a vampire you have to hunt down. -Ok... Well, to make this more than just a kill quest, few other NPC's should have information regarding to who is the farmer. How do you generate that? Are the relationships among the NPCs persistent? Are they dynamic? How do you spawn more NPCs when you kill them off?
Are the objectives going to be something like: Talk to 1-3 NPCs to find out who is the vampire, kill vampire. The dialogue must be generic. Obviously. To have personality among the NPCs you talk to would mean you'd have to track their personality and you'd have to have multiple variations of responses from NPCs based on that personality ... It gets stupidly complicated very quickly. And if the target is a werewolf is it then a whole different quest? And this is just for one procedural kill quest!
The quests would repeat quickly, the personalities would repeat quickly, you might even run out of NPCs from the gameworld. Or you might just spawn them back and you're exactly where you are with handmade quests.
Do you see how, when you start thinking about how to make something like that, the problems start to pile up. I get the feeling you are little too fixated on this "non-linear" concept. You need to take a step back and look at it again from a more practical standpoint.
From a guy who seemingly hates quests you want to make worse ones? Come on...
I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been -Wayne Gretzky
So, yes, whilst it would be very complicated to develop a system that offered different NPC responses based on their personality, where they are in the world, the quest objectives etc, the code that sits behind it would be applicable to all procedurally generated quests. The developers wouldn't need to hand craft every possible response for every possible personality for every type of request, they'd create a system that would procedurally generate these responses.
It is still very complicated and very difficult to do which is why we basically never see such a thing and when we do, we end up with the problems you've pointed out: procedurally generated quests are just as boring and generic as hand-crafted quests. But, at least with procedurally generated quests, each playthrough is different. The content may still be boring, but its not the exact same boring content as the last time you went to that zone.
However, procedurally generated or hand-made doesn't really address the issue of linear vs non-linear, both approaches can achieve both results, just depends on the implementation and creative wishes of the developers.
Or, since you seem fixated on the Elder Scrolls series we can look at their later games that offers the AI solution of Radiant AI as they implemented it in Skyrim, which has a tracking and delegation system for NPCs which shifts quest objectives between targets dynamically depending on player behavior and if certain NPCs die. Couple that with the lifecycle mechanics that actually existed in that game too and develop it a bit more, or just turn to a simplified version of AI the likes of a Sims game for the ability for AI to actually repopulate themselves dynamically and within the context of the game world and every fragile argument you've tried to make breaks.
And none of this is for "one procedural kill quest". That's the reason procedural systems like this have quite a lot of potential, since these mechanics, while complex, are also in turn something that propagates itself once operating. That "one quest" is a hallmark of the millions it is capable of producing.'
Personalities are actually relatively easy to fib alongside custom dialogue by breaking sentences out into segments and then having a few word filter libraries that essentially swap in colloquial, expressive, and accented dialogue.
Similarly your whole "the quests would repeat, etc" diatribe is pure conjecture based again on your own notions and unsupported by any external logic. The variety on offer and frequency of repetition is subject to the breadth of the asset library created for the system alongside the potential combinations resulting from it.
Do you see how, when you start thinking, the problems aren't the convoluted mess you try to make them out to be? I know as someone who doesn't understand the technology it might be hard for you, but if you're going to have the gumption to talk about the subject then it should be fair to assume that you are going to learn about this stuff eventually. I've already linked multiple iterations of non-linear storytelling mechanics, tools, and AI in this thread that addresses the very notions and problems you've tried to make up. In the post you just responded to I linked an entire essay on the matter that you very obviously didn't even read.
If you had you'd understand that much of this is under an interactive narrative directed by an AI. You don't just dump content into a game and expect it to work through magic. We're talking about MMOs which are games that run on servers and already have to track a lot of the data in question, creating a server-side AI that reads segments of that data and calculates the best scenario parameters for a player based on their play habits and then subbing the content into the procedural generators and seeding it into the game world is well within the scope of that platform.
From a guy that wants to act like he knows what he's talking about you want to say such blatantly nonsensical bunk? Improving quests is goal here, you not understanding how things work does not help the conversation.
If you ever feel like catching up on the technology and concepts behind all this. I'd suggest ponying up the money to get this. It may be ten years old, but it covers content that you seem to be struggling with and I can't really talk about much beyond that if it flies overhead.
Or look into these guys if you wanna try actually catching up.
"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
people go to MMORPG for the stories but not single player for the story's?
are you just screwing with me or are you serious?
Please do not respond to me, even if I ask you a question, its rhetorical.
Please do not respond to me
- This is a comparative discussion. We're not asking how much you individually enjoy hand-made quests. That's irrelevant. We're asking whether hand-made quests are better or worse than procedural ones.
- No evidence = no argument. Without evidence you're just the Donald Trump of the forums, slinging around meaningless rhetoric with no basis in reality.
- The evidence I've provided is typical of a lot of questing in WOW nowadays. (In fact during my beta play of Legion every single quest I experienced was like those monk quests shown. I'm sure the quality tapers back a little later on, but it's a significant part of the experience.) Just like Pintos don't prove cars are a bad form of transportation, all those other companies who have shitty quests are basically meaningless in terms of the actual viability of hand-made quests in RPGs. It's like using a child's crayon drawing to insist artwork can't be enjoyable.
I'm not saying one type of quest will be well-written and the other not. I'm saying both will be identically written but a function of implementing them in a procedural style will result in the quests being less compelling content.The percentage of quests that involve those goals are irrelevant unless you're incapable of a higher level of understanding of what constitutes quest quality.
In that Legion video one of the scenes I saw was [Legion Spoilers] a demon busting in on a discussion amongst the monks in their temple, charging across the room to slam the Monks' master against the wall, injuring him. The monks (and the player-monk) then rally together to defeat the large demon (and I think some smaller ones too?) to save their master and expel the threat. This didn't happen in a text-box, but instead was all portrayed in real-time.
But essentially it was a "kill x" quest. Unless you're capable of discerning the clear and obvious quality difference between that Legion questing experience and a text-box "kill x" quest, then you're simply incapable of discussing the topic. If your measure of quest quality is so shallow and underdeveloped that you can't tell the difference between high and low quality quests, then why even bother arguing the topic?
Your favorite all-time game can also be recklessly oversimplified as kill/collect/click/pickup/deliver/guard X. The oversimplification completely ignores the quality of the experience. It's ignorant.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
Lol so it's not about my opinion if they are better or worst it's about your opinion if they are better or worst. Got it lol.
Essentially I said 10 is greater than 2 and you responded "10 isn't a very high number".
Actually I said hand-made quests are higher quality content than procedural, and you responded that you dislike hand-made quests. So you weren't providing an comparison-based opinion of which was better, backed by evidence. Instead you were just making a derpy unrelated statement, just like "10 isn't a very high number".
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
I stated the quality of either depends on the quality of the maker.
You can't quantify someone's taste into numbers that favor your opinion and be taken serious.
You don't have online with thousands of players just have everyone follow the exact same linear path.I should say yeah they are doing exactly that and funny rare do i hear anyone that knows why.
They add in the internet login because it allows them to have dlc's and cash shops for added profits.To actually make a true MMO world and with true ROLE playing,takes a heck of a lot of work,but MUCH easier to add login screen and cash shops lmao.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
Which isn't even to say that's not compatible with a procedural system that can draw from listings of groups/factions a character is associated with and sub NPCs from that faction into the roles and effectively assemble the same sequence of events.
But extending rationality that far to realize creating assets for a game and implementing them into a game library can include such things as event sequences probably runs counter to your opinion.
"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
A good mix for my enjoyment is good.
VG
Your opinion is based on nothing. You've cited zero evidence of a procedural quest system being better than WOW's. Zero evidence. Not a single game with procedural quests has been mentioned by you. None. No evidence, no argument.
Your "quality of the creator" nonsense is pure gibberish. It exemplifies your lack of logic that you even think it matters to bring it up. When I compare things, I compare them fairly. I've always been assuming a fair comparison where the quality of the creator is factored out of the equation. Logically if Blizzard did procedural quests, they would be worse than Blizzard's hand-made quests.
The reason why is that time spent making something procedural is less time spent making it work in the well-paced manner of a well-told story. With hand-made questing everything is paced out correctly, while in procedural questing the story beats offer inferior pacing, potentially inferior ordering, while suffering inferior quality or quantity or both (because either you have a low-quality grinding pool of unrelated quests OR you have quests that procedurally fit together well but are fewer in number (because of the extra dev time dedicated to making them procedural) and sometimes you end up with both penalties (you spend the extra dev time and still end up with a low-quality experience that doesn't flow well.))
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
Like that entire diatribe on procedural content. You very carefully tiptoed around the fact that you can make intelligent AI management for procedural content that addresses many of the problems you are making up.
Is there AI sufficiently advanced in all aspects to make it a perfect solution? Not yet, but development has to happen somewhere for progress to be made, and neglecting options that can offer better long-term solutions because there is a different option you're familiar with is horrible for offering anything better than the mundane.
"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
Please do not respond to me, even if I ask you a question, its rhetorical.
Please do not respond to me
Again pacing of the story or whatever what makes a good story in Axehilt's world/opinion depends on the system created to deliver procedural content. And you do realize even what you think is a good story is an opinion of your's as inconceivable as it must sound.
Procedural content is basically in its infancy and largely under utilized. But what you are saying is akin to asking why would a master shoe maker use a factory than make master shoes by hand. Yes, creating the first factories would be tough and the quality less. But over time the techniques improve. And you can produce them in mass and in flexible ways not tied to hard permanency developer content requires.
But to the meat. Vast majority of MMORPG quest are of a technical quality that could be done procedurally outside of the theatrics of voice over and cut scenes.
These are basically mechanic behind almost all basic MMORPG quest/task. MMORPG are filled with filler quest that don't add anything to the narrative. They are the majority. They are time sink content designed to give players something to do and pace exp. These quest are far more common than the quest you are talking about. They could be done automated.
Your argument is that essentially machines fully automated creating a Toyota Camry are bad because there are handmade super cars of better quality(which I fanboy secretly). Yes, we know WoW makes the best of the best in your eyes. But the vast majority of their quest and the vast majority in the genre are still basic filler quest.