First, no, I am not making an MMO (not now, anyway).
However, I’ve recently been playing Defiance, and I saw a post on their forums that I seem to see on every other MMO forum… ever.
“Quests/Missions are nothing more than ‘go here, kill stuff’ or ‘go here and collect 3 things’”
Now, granted, Defiance does also have time trials, rampages, etc, but as far as these “missions” go, that’s kinda true. But what else can you do? People always complain about this, but really, that’s all you typically do in ANY game.
So that’s the question. In your perfect MMO, what kind of quests would you like to see, beyond the typical “kill X creatures” or “gather X items”. Some kind of puzzle solving? Exploration maybe?
Back when we were tinkering with our MMO (hopefully getting back to that one day) I had designed “break out” missions. Basically it was along these lines. For example, you would be hired to deliver a package to a certain person. You could either deliver the package and get paid, or you could open the package and keep what was inside (but this would obviously lower your reputation with the group that hired you, and possibly result in a bounty being put out on you).
There are also PUT missions, which typically cause some tougher-than-normal encounter to start for the sake of keeping those combat skills you’ve been training sharp.
Sure, the quest text just says ‘take the MacGuffin to [location]’, but it utterly fails to mention the big behemoth undead knight riding a flying dragon-donkey that just happens to be (barely) beatable and drop an item that gives you the next quest in the chain…
I think some of it is a complaint about the shortness and lack of depth in the quest as well. Most games have you trying to do or get something, but if there are some interesting characters, plot twists, and themes and it’s long enough to let it build up some steam, then it’s fun. When the entire quest from start to finish is 30 seconds long and the only narrative is “Kill 5 goblins because they’re bad” it’s not fun.
However, there are important reason that MMO quests tend to be bite-sized… the genre runs on having a constant stream of small rewards (grind) rather than long periods of nothing followed by a big reward. Quests also need to be simple enough to be picked up randomly by groups of people. If there are too many cutscenes or too much text, players will feel forced to skip them to keep up with the rest of the group. I remember in Guild Wars 1, I was kicked from a group half way through a mission after being cursed at bitterly because I didn’t skip a cutscene that was 15 seconds long. GW2 solved this problem by having all the “story” of random quests told via mail, which the player can read at his own convenience without holding up the group. It sucks as a storytelling medium but it’s brilliant as a way to include text and backstory for players who want it while ensuring there’s nothing in the way of players that want to grind as fast as they can.
how about a recon mission? I played a stealth game Shinobido which had reconnaissance missions. They were easy, but trying to make sure you did it without being caught was tough.
Ooh, interesting idea. Have a small map covered in a “fog of war”. The goal is to clear the entire fog of war by exploring the map. (Or possibly just uncover vital areas of the fog of war.)
I decided a while back that all quests can boil down to fedex quests in the end. The difference between good and bad quests is how it’s presented.
Bad: My farm is being attacked! Kill 10 wolves and bring me their fangs as proof!
Good: My farm is being attacked! Go figure out what’s attacking and protect my farm!
Better: Farm-hands are cowering in the barn, farmer is holed up in his farmhouse, almost incoherent. You (the player!) manage to make out the word ‘wolf’ in his ramblings.
Bonus: You don’t have to kill the wolves. You can also lead them off to greener pastures, sell them into slavery at a circus, or just murder them and wear their pelts as boots.
Dark Souls isn’t an MMO, but how it approaches quests is pretty different from many RPGs I’ve seen…
there are only a few sidequests, but they feel very natural. You’ll talk to NPC’s every once in a while, and they’ll do different things depending on your dialogue and choices. If you release one from a cell, he’ll kill a certain NPC, leading down a whole other string of events you never would’ve seen if you hadn’t released him. No fetch quests of any sort. You interact with with the people in the world, and they just kind of co-exist in the main world with all of it’s actions and consequences. As an example, you could talk to a certain shady NPC and find that something’s up, and conduct a “rescue mission” or just happen to do a “resuce mission” while you find the damsel in distress down in the area anyways, you would just be none the wiser. You could keep secrets from your pal, or tell him something he doesn’t need to know and watch him go crazy, and then fight him later on.
But wait, you might say these aren’t actually quests, but just little things within the main story. Well, none of this has to happen (and most players probably won’t find most of it) you have to actively search for these cues yourself, they are incredibly vague, and it does feel like a kind of adventure when you found you have sucessfully advanced to the next stage of this small side-line story. The world is just closely knit with all of the events, it’s quite interesting really.
I do love how that works. Unfortunately, its not as simple as that with MMOs. They add the element of, not only other players, but also persistence. It’d be great if I could interact with NPCs and have them all interacting with each other in new and interesting ways, but that means they couldn’t make different choices for other players. Meaning, it would either be a “first come, first served” situation, or one in which everything about the world is instanced (in which case, what’s the point).
I do think subtlety, however, is something we are GREATLY missing in today’s games. Especially in MMOs.
yeah, it really is an issue. I was actually thinking about how a first-come first served MMO would work and how world persistency would work. I guess you could just create a huge amount of end-game, with unfathomably difficult areas and small features / areas / clues that would take veteran players a long time to find. I can’t imagine this kind of undertaking, though. You wouldn’t want it to run dry for new players. You would constantly have to add new and interesting questlines that would be gone in a matter of days. And you would have to deal with hacking, as it could seriously mess up the world state and would be a pain to restore.
I wonder how community driven quests would work. I imagine assassination attempts, elaborate economy schemes driven by player markets (EVE Online scams), wars, e.t.c. that is completely dictated by the players. I know some games are stepping this in the right direction but most run-of-the-mill MMO’s are still ripe with fetch quests.
What’s really strange is that people will still play them. Surely there must be something to fetch quests that we don’t understand but players feel inclined to do them anyways. I feel like grindy repetive fetch quests are just in the nature of MMO’s. Your goal is to spend the players time. How else are you going to do it? You could put hours of work into an interesting persistent side story or “capture 2 dragon eggs” and it seems people will play them just the same.
It’s not really about making it something else than do X kill X trade X, it’s about making the quest much more refined in a way that you no longer “feel” you’re doing kill X trade X move to X go back to X.
Take everquest 1 for exemple, people whined in EQ2 , wow other modern games but not back in early EQ1, because while there was no mass quest from lv 1 where you had already done 30quests by lv 10 to hand guide you, each quest was actually solid, had lore, was handcrafted and thought out.
So it’s a tradeoff, a few good quests or a ton of generated crappy ones, what you really mind is not the kill X, it’s the fact that a random farmer is asking you for 10 rats that breaks immersion right after a widow asked you for a medication and a homeless guy asked you to kill a guard! Actual quests that make you involved in the world and not just helping the local guy with his 10minut problem, and that aren’t by the thouthands, actually get significance.
So to me the solution in mmo is to stop “quest feeding” people, you don’t need to have 20 quests at any single moment, make less quests, less straight path with auto quests, more special quests where questing isn’t the same as leveling, but an alternate option, and where each quest is non trivial, doesn’t take 2 minutes but 30min + at least, and doesn’t revolve around killing “more of the same stuff X time”, basically take a quest text and remove any number except “one” to make it better, repeating tasks are no fun.
I find that a lot of people think of questing based on what they have already experienced from other traditional MMO’s. There can be quest without having to interact with an NPC to learn about the particular quest. There are plenty of things that haven’t been explored yet in the market and I think as technology keeps getting better we will start seeing people introducing new systems what will make us look back on today’s questing systems and laugh. I am personally looking for a game that allows you to explore to discover clues to things rather than a NPC with a big “?” over their head.
Quests are frustrating. Sometimes you’re like… escorting an npc or something, and you’re like “why am I doing this?” how can anyone care about a lifeless npc that follows you in artificial motions, when you know what’s going to happen anyway?
It’ll reach the destination area (not one inch before) and that’ll trigger the little quest complete reward… 200 coins that you can probably use to buy 2 small red potions. So damn predictable, there’s no immersion whatsoever.
That’s not fun, it’s almost like work. You perform the tedious tasks only hoping maybe something interesting will happen later on in the game, but the truth is that there’s rarely anything exciting in gaming nowadays. Indie games are the only hope!
There’s not a single MMO that I like. They often have fairly interesting locations, but the actual “game” is really boring because of these quest problems. When the genre was still nonexistant I dreamed that the “quests” would actually emerge from the players and the environment interacting with each others. A rich player with nonexistant combat skills could hire adventurers to gather some interesting objects from nearby cave, or attack competing player guild etc. But it didn’t happen that way. Thus I don’t play MMOs.
