Let's face it questing today is terrible. Games either load up on a million "kill, collect, deliver" and FedEx style quests or they do their best to avoid them all together. Where did it go so wrong?
Face it even the developers know the current quests are terrible. They offer some combination of gear, gold, XP and reputation for every quest because that is the only way anyone will bother with their simple and uninteresting efforts. Quests are now nothing more than a slightly quicker more rewarding grind built to direct you to where you should be. How do we fix that?
While not a new solution, divide quests into 2 classes missions and tasks. Tasks would be the kill/collect/deliver "quests" so familiar to players. Ideally they would be more random (how many mobs to kill or items to collect) with a reward structure that scaled. These tasks could on occasion include gear, but at most 1 piece that may or may not be something you would want. Missions would become the epic "quests". These would offer open objectives plus they would offer some temporary change to the larger world. Disabling another faction's factory would be a great example: you could clear the factory of all it's workers (super advanced games might allow you to cause a strike, otherwise just killing everyone would be good enough) or you could destroy enough equipment to force a shutdown. If the system was really dynamic, the defending faction would offer a mission to stop the attempt after the attack began.
There are some things this system needs that are not commonplace in MMOs. A dynamic server that responds to what players are doing (even if it is only in the limited way presented) and ideally destructable enviroments. One other thing that could be handy would be a system for removing quests if the quest goes inactive (factory was protected, or the attackers move to a different target/truce). Even for tasks, a dynamic server could spread people out by generating quests to under populated areas. Ultimately, you could destroy the "you should be here" feeling in many games by cycling how hard an area really was (not including starting areas). So you didn't do an area before, oh wait right now it's really hard and a challenge to even the highest lvl/skilled characters. Sounds like fun to me.
Edit: oh yeah I sort of forgot about games where there are few to no quests. They often seem to suffer from "nothing to do" or a total lack of immersion. They rely on the community to make the game fun, unfortunately that rarely happens.
What you have sounds better but it still sounds like an easy way to make quests only slightly more interesting. I would like to see quests that can be completed in multiple different ways.
For examble: Some guy sends you to find his brother who was in this caravan heading north and he has not heard any news for over a week. So far sounds like the normal quests.
Ok, now lets say you find the carvan. It's all torn up, blood and guts everywhere so you search some bodies. You find items that may have belonged to the man's brother.
Now at this point, you can go back to the NPC and get exp and such or if you are careful searching the camp, you might just notice the footprints leading off towards the hills. There are also some drag marks nearby the footprints. Now you can choose to follow the footprints.
Upon reaching the hills, you find a goblin encampment. Again, two choices, you can kill your way through the goblin horde or you can search around the hills for a sleathy way in, avoid goblins in the shadows and strike them down when need be. Then save the hostages, either allowing them to arm themselves and hush out or to sneak back out the way you snuck in.
Something liek that would be my idea of ideal quests.
Wed Jan 07 2009 7:28PM ReportThat would certainly be cool, but a bit short lived. That would still be heavily depenent on the quest being scripted, and while it would be cool for the first few who do it, wiki's would soon make it just another quest. Randomizing whether a search mission had that trigger would help some, but soon enough each quest would have the step by step directions. Still quite an improvement since you don't need to use the wiki that way (or at all). BTW ever notice how hard it is to not reference fantasy? I'd actually favor a good sci-fi game, but I'm trying hard to keep it general enough to be used in any setting.
The other thing in your design is that it continues the tradition of questing being nearly all PvE. I'd really like to see that changed, somehow blending PvP and PvE back to just plain being killing stuff. The other thing is I'd want quests (the ones I'm calling missions) to have some effect on the game world. IMO that returns some of the "epic" to doing quests, while removing some of that I'm #2839503 to do this feeling.
Wed Jan 07 2009 9:34PM Reportquests? you mean errands? Here's a quest for anyone who's wondering what a real one looks like.
http://everquest.allakhazam.com/db/quest.html?quest=765;mid=1230657083234675711
real quests consist of more than mindless killing in a single zone.
Thu Jan 08 2009 1:10AM ReportHow about adding quest that you have to kill X amount of the other faction or pk someone. Now do you take the high road and refuse to pk someone or do you take the low road and accept the risk and go ahead and smoke someone.
They should also add special drop quest that have a very low drop rate from mob's but give out epic rewards.
Thu Jan 08 2009 2:42AM ReportMMORPG.com writes:
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