Jan 15 2009
Creating Quests in an Online Game
Quests, as a word in the gaming community, has been dumbed down beyond belief by the churn-n-burn questing style introduced by World of Warcraft that has continued in Everquest II, Warhammer Online, Lord of the Rings Online, and just about any new MMO that has come out since then. I remember when quests used to be epic, and a game might be designed around ONE quest with a bunch of puzzles to solve. Now, bringing three boar farts to an NPC is considered a quest. (Though, actually, having to figure out how to capture boar farts might be more involved than most of the quests on these games now.) Seriously, the sheer number of ‘quests’ in these games makes one feel like they’re on a forever grind of never-ending bitchy, needy NPCs.
Interrupting the Story
The worst things about these quest is that players often cannot find the main storyline. If everything in the world offers 5-10 quests and 50% of these quests are part of some chain, it’s impossible to keep the stories straight, especially for someone who tends to do a ton of reading. You basically need to pull out a spreadsheet and start charting the various stories told by different developers who aren’t quite on the same page, and honestly, who doesn’t stop reading sometimes when the mad rush for gear interrupts questing? And who hasn’t done a quest just for the reward, not the story? Thus, these quest grinds that MMOs are turning into actually end up hurting the world story, and I won’t even get into how it hurts the gameplay.
Now, of all the current MMOs, I think that Everquest II and Warhammer Online do the best job of trying to preserve the storyline by allowing players to come back and read it later. You basically “unlock” parts of a story by questing, and then, you can come back and read all about it via your tome. WAR’s tome is extremely appealing, and seriously, Games Workshop has always been excellent with their writing for their fantasy and 40K armies.
Anyway, I hope that this grind via quest thing falls out of favor soon so that quests can go back to actually meaning something epic and cool.
Great topic. Never thought about it like this.
Current Quest types should be named Tasks and Quests should be left as the Epic stuff.
Peter is quite right. Daily Quests in WoWcraft are indeed daily labor tasks.
Today’s “Quests” are far away from the destiny changing adventures and quests of arthurian legends…^^
True Virtual Worlds work nicely without quests - Ultima Online had none, only player, GM or “server” run events, most of them unique in nature.
Quests are not bad per se, but they cannot make up for design flaws. Questing cannot compensate for a lack of interaction with the environment e.g..
While I am all for reverting to the EverQuest mob grind, and quests that had some meaning (I loved crafting my Trueshot bow!), I think the gamers being targeted by modern games would be lost in such a world.
I know plenty of people that would not touch a game without quests the way they are today (the endless Let’s-find-a-new-excuse-to-get-them-to-kill-or-click-a-certain-creature-or-object-X-times) and i’m not sure most of the people that play WoW are much different. Even if WoW players are discontent with quest design WoW’s gameplay is not conducive to the mob-grind style of play found in EverQuest. Everything happens too fast in WoW, people would be camping square miles in-game because they could kill so fast and move so quickly.
But so what is the solution? Epic-style questing would work if the game’s experience gaining system was excluded from the questing system mostly if not completely. Why do I say this? Because people would seek out those quests solely for experience because as they are in games today quests give bonus experience for killing specific mobs that you would probably be killing anyway.
When you’re grinding mobs for xp:
kill 10 mobs
you level
When you’re questing for xp it’s only slightly more complicated:
talk to npc first
kill 10 of a specific mob
return to npc
Now I haven’t studied it enough to know, but it seems to me like you will probably end up killing about the same number of mobs either way, questing just puts a middle man in between the kills and the experience for you. I’ve heard this explained as “giving the players a sense of accomplishment” and while it may work for some people this blog entry’s existance is evidence that it doesn’t work for everyone.
Now I understand that questing serves other purposes, such as advancing the story and producing items, but since experience gain in indeed the driving force in an MMO (we couldn’t have any of these games without levels now could we?) everything else plays second fiddle to the accrument of experience.
Close in priority to experience is loot. While level is the most important determining factor for power when two similarly leveled players walk into the same situation the one with better gear will prevail.
Last in priority is lore. Someone recently said to me “Knowledge is cheap. You can just go look up whatever you want to know on the internet” and I cannot find flaw in the sentiment. Yes, for those of us interested in the story we can read quests, but in the end we can be at max level, have the best gear in the game, have never read an ounce of lore we didn’t have to and look up everything on-line and become our guilds resident lore guru. In this way the value of quests cannot really be counted in terms of lore for the masses, but simply a leveling/looting mechanism.
Is there another way to level besides grinding mobs or grinding mobs under the guise of questing? If you imagine your favorite MMO without textures on the landscapes, and instead blank grey/white tiles you will see in outdoor zones a lumpy sheet, covered in creatures to kill. You gain levels by killing those creatures, whether for quests or otherwise. This is a very one-dimensional concept. Sure I guess exploring places can give some experience, but in the end there is very little else to do that progresses your character in levels.
How else should we give experience? Yes, questing can be dull, but it seems to me that the only alternative is reverting to the EQ grind. Please! Prove me wrong! I want to be wrong!
The formatting messed up on me, replace what looks similar above with this:
When you?re grinding mobs for xp:
kill 10 mobs
-repeat-
you level
When you?re questing for xp it?s only slightly more complicated:
talk to npc first
kill 10 of a specific mob
return to npc
-repeat-
you level