Sanya Weathers's MMO Underbelly: Take This Column To NPC X
Sanya looks at the truth behind low level quest design in this week's edition of the MMO Underbelly.
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One.
You’ve been playing MMOs for years, and if there’s one thing you’re sick of, it’s the verb number noun quests. Kill ten rats. Fetch twenty pelts. Talk with four NPCs. Gaaaaah! Is there anything more dull, more mind numbing? Anything less original, less compelling? You did better when you were the DM for your Second Edition campaign back in elementary school, for crying out loud.
Let’s say you’ve put your money where your mouth is, and you’ve gotten yourself a job at an MMO studio doing quests. What’s the first thing you’re going to do?
You’re going to implement all the kill ten rats quests someone else wrote, for starters. But let’s back up and go through some of the things you’ll find.
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Two.
Every studio uses a different tool to get quests from your brain into the game – it comes with the game engine, typically, but is then modified heavily for the needs of the team. The extent of the modification varies depending on the imagination and ability of the tools programmer who landed the task. A great engineer can fix the tool so that you can copy and paste straight from a Word document, without the formatting screwing everything up. But you could be using anything from a straight text uploader to a fully integrated system with all the bells and whistles.
You’re going to be working with NPCs and locations that someone else designed and placed. As a senior quest person, you’d have some freedom to make requests and work with content designers about specific ideas. And as a lead, you’d be part of designing the showpieces – the epic quests, the custom content, etc. But as a newb, you’ll be shown a village, told how many quests go in that village, and handed a deadline.
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Three.
“Text limitations mean you have to learn how to write again. No lengthy descriptions, no rambling dialogue. Short, concise, yet still interesting,” says a content producer on an upcoming triple-A MMO. That seems easy enough, but that’s not all. “You can't write in your own "voice." You have to learn someone else's writing guidelines, that you may not agree with, and often times write quest lines that you flat out don't like.”
Text limitations are actually fairly new. It used to be assumed that people playing an MMORPG wanted story – as they did in their single player RPGs - but then the industry introduced metrics. The fact is, people skip walls of text. They might listen to a voiceover (LOTRO’s primary means of dishing out long bits of lore), and they will occasionally pay attention to backstory if it’s a large part of the game’s feel (see also Warhammer Online), but for the most part, if the text consists of more than two sentences, forget it. In fact, one of the newest MMORPGs (Free Realms) usually keeps their quests to one sentence blurbs interspersed between one sentence task assignments.
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Four.
It’s not just metrics that proves that this is what people want. It’s the feedback.
Lisa Krebs was a quest writer on Dark Age of Camelot and all of its expansions. Today she’s a career consultant for a video game degree program. She remembers having to remove a lot of narrative work in response to player feedback. And she remembers the feedback she got when she tried to depart from the FedEx norm. “We'd do a story based low level quest where you'd have special low-level mobs that only popped if you were on the quest. We'd have a special ending where you 'affected the outcome.' There would be special effects. But because it took the player out of the mindset of 'to level I need to go through these kill mom quests and fed ex quests' the results were really hit or miss. Roleplayers loved them. Everyone else hated them, especially the people who were very methodical about getting to the highest level as efficiently as possible.”
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Five.
That’s the hardest thing about designing MMOs, by the way – people want to get past all of the content as quickly as possible so they can get to (and consume) the “real” content. That “real” content is the least tested and least complete part of the game, but if there’s a way to powerlevel past the tested and polished material, people will find it.
Part of leveling quickly means avoiding anything that might require time. Puzzles, word games, and riddles are only acceptable if the answers are already posted in spoilers on fan sites. The hardcore enjoy solving puzzles, but the hardcore aren’t keeping the servers running. The truly dedicated will alt-tab out to a spoiler site and continue playing, but everyone else will simply quit playing. One anonymous source told me that in a zone with a quest completion rate of around 70%, the sole puzzle quest will have a completion rate of 15%. And it wasn’t that high until the answers were on The Brasse and Allakhazam.
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Funny, the game that I played the longest and had the most fun in was UO and there were no quests, at least when I played it. Of course this was before EQ and Wow decided to cater to the "I want it now" generation.
Your article describes to me what is wrong with all the new MMO's coming out lately, the story and the questline are basically after thoughts.
Asheron's Call was one of my favorites , the story line was deep and the quest line followed and enhanced it. While the game had other issues, namely botting, it still had the best story and integrated questline in the genre and still does in my opinion.
So, Twitter and SMS should be training a whole new generation of content writers for MMOs eh? :)
Shava
This blog highlights why MMO quality is sliding so fast. Its design by the numbers, dont even dare to think of anything that hasnt been done by someone better than you previously, and god forbid actually make a gamer think.
Its interpretation of statistics with very little talent.
The games that hit it big, the games that manage to stay relevant, arent done with 2-sentence questtexts and "Kill 10 Wolves". Its just another way to eliminate a variable and go the safe way. Of course, I see the necessity, or rather, the allure of that path... you dont risk much. But you also get no chance at being good.
You know, if you ask me, the basic flaw is not actually in the texts, or their length. The basic flaw is that everyone and their dog just swallows the clumsy way Blizzard introduced the massive-number-of-quests-grinder into the world: A big block of text in a window with a small tagline telling you whats really up.
That is the problem. The industry has latched on, by and large, a pretty bad method of delivery, because I suppose if Blizzard does it, its safe. Age of Conan does it differently, and far better. I am one of the types who skips most run-of-the-mill quest-textes, but I read most dialogue in Age of Conan. Its far, far superior to a little Window with a generic wall of badly written text. And mind you, I spend quite some time checking out all dialogue options in AoCs conversation trees, as do pretty much all people I know at least on the first playthrough.
Change the way you hand out quests. Blizzard did a lot of good stuff, but the Questtext-Window spam wasnt one of them. it works, but you can get a lot more mileage out of different systems.
That was a fun article to read, and very nicely structured (I loved the rat progression). The MMO Underbelly column has become a favorite of mine; while I never had any intention of going into the gaming industry (and would actively avoid jobs in that area after reading what it's like to work there), it's always valuable to see things from other perspectives. I appreciate the insights and the fact that the author is able to provide not only her own commentary, but also remarks from others working in the field.
Most of what one hears from MMO developers and community managers tends to have the same "low-detail, ultra-positive, non-confrontational'' spin to it (and for good reason), so it starts to become easy to forget that there are actual people attached to those brightly-colored names on forums instead of an "us" and a "them." And, of course, a Scruffy.
The rat is dead, long live the rat!
I never knew people actually gave feedback saying "We hate quests that are outside of the let-me-level-fast quests." That saddens me greatly...
Why do people complain about it now?
Instant Gratification for the win!
Of course games that deliver instant gratification are rarely capable of holding a persons attention over the long haul, leading to people leaving the game for the next source of instant gratification. After all, once everything has been handed to them there is no reason to stick around.
As much as I have loved you since the early DAoC days, please don't write another one like this. My hopes for a future MMO worth actually playing died a little more with every paragraph. I know it is the reality of the situation, but I usually get through my day without facing it.
Facing the reality that MMOs are being steered towards the ADD-rattled and lemming like masses makes me want to start building the bunker out back and writing a manifesto...
I liked this one a lot. Mainly cause it's something I've always been curious about. I mean, kill 10 rats was fun when EQ did it. *pats Scruffy* But seeing another kill 10 rats quest these days is probably what makes myself, and a lot of people, skip quest text in general.
MMO: "Kill 10 rats."
Me: "Ah, so that's your delivery? Cool. I'll stop paying attention." [insert quest text skipping and powerleveling mentality... right about now]
The game has already told me that it has zero desire to actually give me an experience while I play. It's like, having one of those low level retail/fast foot/etc jobs where if there's not a whole lot to do, your boss will tell you to mop the floor. And if there's -still- not much of anything to do, your boss will give you a toothbrush and tell you to clean between the tiles. Just to justify your existence on the payroll for that minute in time. "There was a blizzard outside so we had no customers, but that's okay, Johnny scrubbed tiles and floor boards all day. Isn't the store shiny?"
I appreciate the opinions of people in the industry, but I'm pretty dismayed by this article. It was well written and interesting, but the content is just sad. It leads me to the very very sudden realization that in the chase for money money and more money...
the MMO industry has forgotten how to make MMOs.
For shame.
Have to agree with the previous posts. The main thing I pulled from that is since players skip the lame txt in the fed-ex quests to level faster means that players want short lame quests. As the previous poster mentioned thats just piss poor interpretation of the stats they are seeing.
(Goes a bit off topic here... ) /rant
In my opinion, players dont even want to do them at all... just have to to level. And thats the problem. Eventualy a game company will strike gold when they do away with levels and skills, which ruins the community and content from day one.
Everyone should be able to play with everyone. In every aspect of the game not just in the large battles where the lowbies are only there for fodder and to clutter the screen and make target selection more difficult. Skill base games come close but rather than take the high road they take the low and make each skill it's own treadmill just as worthless as a level.
Skills IMO should be like a buff that increases at a good pace and degrades rather quickly when not used(durring gameplay). Gains should depend upon how well you do what it is you are doing. You should only be able to have so many points ( like UO) and another skill would start dropping. This way it can be a quick cycle with almost instant benefits but with enough skill types to allow for alot of diversity in skill sets between players.
/end rant
Once we do away with the poorly though out revenue model, or levels,(eventualy people open their eyes...) we can then start thinking of making good solid questlines that will send you on an adventure from one end of the world to the other. With epic stories and challenges that reward cash and reputation both PvE type and PvP type. That actualy have meaning in the world and affect the way things develop.
Like mabe, delivering a transport of medical supplies to a player village on the outskirts of your kingdom that was recently raided by a neighboring kingdom. If they recieve the supplies they may be able to recover and hold off long enough to bolster the defences helping keep the enemy out. If they don't they may be completely wiped out and the area anexed by the enemy weakening your kingdoms stance in the world. PvE stuff can obviously be more epic, but atleast even the low PvP quests can have "some" meaning.
Sorry I know I veered a bit off topic there and I am not a great writer but this article tugged at something had to get this out.
shane
Why write a wall of text? Why write anything even?
Its a game, an experiance, why should everyone read it as a book?
If I would want to read I would buy a great book to read not start up a game...
Show the quest in a different context. Videos, voice, a picture or something different and not a wall of text
And whats the hell is it with all mmos starting out exactly the same with exactly the same mobs in the start?
Why cant I meet a big ass dragon at lvl 1? why cant I experiance something different than to kill rats, wolves, rabbits, sheep, etc etc etc etc for the first 20 lvls?
Why do I need to kill 20 of that or fetch 10 skins of that? Why cant the quest be about stopping a great necro sorcerer and I must go through this big castle as one of the lvl 1 quests?
Its because developers are LAZY and quest makers are LAZY with ZERO imagination.
I don't really have anything insightful that hasn't been said already. The rats were just too cute to not comment on though hehe.
One big reason that people don't bother reading quest text is because the quests themselves simply aren't worth it.
In your average game, how do you that "uber gear" and all the "top end" stuff? It isn't by questing, that's for sure. You get it from killing big bad raid monsters or PvPing.
All quests do in MMOs now is direct you where to kill some mobs so the game doesn't feel as grindy - when in reality it's actually more so. Instead of standing in one spot for 20 hours killing mobs, you spend twice as long running back and forth and only kill half as many for many equivilent experience. Mob killing has been replaced by running in circles - which is arguably more boring.
Make quests worth doing and people might be enticed enough to read. But why should I waste 5 minutes reading a level 1 quest when it'll be irrelevent in 10 minutes?
I'm guilty of not reading quest dialogue. Mainly, it's because when I'm in a group, there's seldom time to read long quest directions. Everyone is so go-go-go. The voice-over for quests is a good idea, but I can remember getting yelled out while playing DDO because I was more interested in listening to Gary Gygax than to what the party leader was babbling about on teamspeak.
I disagree. It's not that they're lazy; it's that the vast majority of MMO players are.
We here at MMORPG.com might want clever quests and original game mechanics and all that jazz, but we're the minority, the small hand stuck up the back of a room full of angry, shouty types. The majority of MMO players want a simple and familiar way of levelling beause if they don't get it then they have to go to the hassle of looking the answer up on Allakhazam. Devs and quest makers are simply providing what's asked for by the majority because the majority are the ones who will decide if, in the eyes of the moneymen, the game is a success or not. You could argue people who make the decisions high up in MMOs are greedy but I don't think it's fair or accurate to say devs and quest designers are lazy.
And the other problem is Allakhazam and it's ilk. The majority of MMO players want the endgame and they want it absolutely asap. That's where the phat loot is and that also, perception would have it, is where the big and interesting quests are. This probably comes from the 'endgame' perception of movies, where the special effects and 'wham, bam' payoff stuff comes at the end. Why blow your wad in terms of story, graphics and 'ooh, wow' game mechanics early on when people are burning through content? People get stuck on a puzzle or a search for who drops what and when need only look up one of the endless sites tha will tell you everything you need to know. Solutions, walk-throughs, answers and who, where, what, when and how and all of it broken down into percentages and hit rates and dps and XP given.
The biggest group in the game, the casual players, just want to play a game with all the texture and consistency of babyfood and the second biggest group, the hardcore players, just want to play a game where they can grind out weapons and armour in order to get a few more dps.
And between those two camps lie the third group; people who want quest text worth reading and original, if not revolutionary, game mechanics. They'd be the same people who want open-ended, 'choose your own adventure' style sandbox games, too and aren't likely to get that to their satisfaction as well.
Amd it's the devs and quest makers that are lazy for not pandering to a minority? Sure.
Actually, what I love about LOTRO is the care and love that's gone into a goodly fraction of the quest dialogue and quest lines. Lord of the Rings is a strong lore to draw on, and Turbine is very lucky to have that IP to work with. The quests are fun enough if you read the texts without having so much as seen the movies, but if you know the Tolkien lore, some of them are very clever, and give a sense that you are, indeed, a small but significant part of the War of the Rings as an individual.
Turbine does use things like cut-scenes as rewards for epic-line quests. But there still end up being lots of errand running, kill ten wargs, and find-the-hidden-(glowing and sparkling for people who didn't read the quest color text)-objects.
Still, I am pretty happy with Turbine's quests and storylines. Let's face it, SOE had great IP and lore for SWG and they squandered it on an incredibly grindy mission-terminal system, and a few quest storylines that didn't amount to much.
Props to Turbine's quest team. Now if they could only make the servers more stable...:)
Yrs,
Shava
Fantastic article. Best thing I've read on this site (and I've been hanging around a long time...of course what should we expect from the infamous Tweety). Really explains a lot, and it saddens me to see what I suspected confirmed: most players don't give a rat's ass whether the quest dialogue is well written or not. Goes a long way towards explaining why I find LoTRO enthralling, and the bulk of players that try it don't seem to "get it" at all.
@El Guapo: great post, I agree 100%.
@Shava: exactly! LoTRO is a real gem if you are into engaging storylines or well written quests. Even the fed ex and KTR quests feel more important because the dialogue is so well written. The difference when you go back to another MMO is really jarring if you are as focused on prose and lore as I am. The only MMO I know of to find storylines as engaging is City of Heroes. And even there it's from the one quest arc in ten or twenty that's well written in the Mission Architect (player written missions). The stuff that the devs came up with is all pretty pedestrian.
NPC, probably in Tabula Rasa: "If I didn't know better, I'd think you didn't give a rat's ass, maggot. All right, soldier, get out there and collect me *TEN* rats' asses! Hut!"
(sorry, it was the image that leapt to mind... I'm just silly that way...)
Yrs,
Shava
Thanks to the new player mentality of rushing through content to get to the "end game" and not actually enjoying the progression - although it's stupid to read a whole wall of text if it's just for a single quest with no chain and in which nothing mentioned in it will ever be mentioned again when the quest is done. Because in that way I agree it is so not necessary to have a useless wall of text for kill x things.
Quests could be such a good opportunity to introduce the location, talk about the monsters, developing your role in that place and develop a bond with it. My dreams include basically endless quest chains on many different locations, that game is not about the level but about enjoying helping that specific location. And updates will also focus on further expanding these quest chains, which will also offer different paths to take, even leading into working against that location. But no, must end the quests here so I can go on to the ultimate level to go play the "end game".
This probably won't change though, changing this is a risk and it's not viable for most companies to risk millions to try to change this idea.
But yeah, currently quests are a way to help your level-race grind with variety, in return for a massive bonus XP and some equipments to help you level faster. This is sometimes a reason people hate asian MMOs, because some might not make quests in this way of shortcut on the level grind.
And mentioning LOTRo is cheating heh, it is an IP that will make players more inclined to doing quests for lore, after all it is a the IP is like a living legend that made it into MMOs. Not fair =)
Please stop killing rats. They're such awesome little animals!
I cannot tell you how much I look forward these columns. The perspective is great and like another poster said the delivery is well done. I am one that likes to see the story driven quests. I would like to see more reward for actually reading the quests and more choices. Perhaps the would encourage players to read them. I guess, cancel that, I am in the minority when it comes to level, level, level. I actually try to enjoy the ride. Oh well perhaps someday it will come back in style. I do have to say that in Warhammer the large collection of lore you can read and unlock, and to have it all in one place is amazing. I wonder if we will see more of this?
EQ hardly catered to the "want it now" generation....Though the game was called Everquest there were very few quests in its infancy......Also you worked hard for almost everything in the early days......Maybe it wasnt a gankfest like UO was but it was hardly a carebear hand it to us on a platter game......
Two things: I really enjoyed this glimpse behind-the-scenes to see why things are the way they are.
And the little rat pictures were adorable. I want to hug ten rats. Even Scruffy.
In other words "thank you MMO community for being min/maxing failbags who only care about hitting the level cap and then complaining why there's no content". Seriously, the first time I heard of a mod designed specifically to skip quest text, my faith in humanity, if I had any left, would have died just a bit more.
Once again a great column by Sanya. I really enjoyed the read, it's always good to know how things work behind the scenes.
To be honest, I'm getting to the point where I'd much rather have the great stories and deep immersion of a game like Oblivion over the grinding in the guise of quests that most MMOs offer these days. It's really a lot more rewarding and plus saving money each month doesn't hurt.
but then the industry introduced metrics...
... and intentionally misinterpreted the results.
"introduced" is the correct term. Maybe "imposed" would have been even better. Like statistics, metrics can be twisted to give any result you want.
And what companies want is to "streamline" (ie chop) the dev process down to the point where it doesn't cost anything to produce. Deep immersive linked story arcs are antithetical to that streamlinig .
99% of MMOs suck in this area, not because that's what players want, but because that's what companies tell us we want.
Metrics are a Marketing tool. Metrics don't follow, they lead.
As with every other industry, from cosmetics to corn chips, companies don't use metrics to =discover= what customers want and then try to deliver it, they use metrics to =tell= customers what they're supposed to want, to shape opinion, to create consensus, in order to justify their continued cranking out of drek.
Vapid prose describing insipid quests aren't the result of customer demand, they're the result of greed on the part of the company.
Well it looks like it's been boiled down to the "babyfood" crowd and the Min/Max Level grinders. I guess those of us in the middle don't count. I suppose that's why it's beginning to seem to me like all MMO's are the same. That's a pity because I saw a lot of potential in the format. Well I guess we'll see what GW2 is like and if that bombs, then farewell for me.
Wait for Bioware's Old Republic MMO. It may restore Narrative back to it's rightful place.
"Help me Obi Wan Kenobi, you're my only hope."
Also, genres evolve. Much like TV and film, eventually a Rod Serling and Alfred Hitchcock will emerge and produce quality stuff.
Yea! Someone else remembers Scruffy.
This column killed any and all desire I had to do MMOs. I think, instead, I'll stick to single or classic multiplayer (as in, 2 to a few dozen players) games - that way lies less frustration and self-hatred.
Very nicely written, and now I think I'll never look at killing rats the same way.
Fortunately, there are still some MMORPG which are plot-driven and have more imaginative quests, with actual backstory. Well, at the moment I can only think of two, but that still counts as "some", right?
First, there is Guild Wars - yes, it's arguable if it should be called a MMORPG, but it defenitely is an online RPG that relies heavily on story. The quests there are anything but the generic "kill X Y" thing, and usually have quite an amount of text with them, often rather funny too. I admit, more often than not I did skip past the text and just checked my quest list to see what to do. But sometimes I read it, and it almost always made for an interesting read. I would really miss it if it wasn't there.
Next, for something newer (alright, the game itself is not really new, but it was only recently introduced in the west), Shin Megami Tensei: Imagine Online. Another game that is not your usual MMORPG - but this time I think no one would argue that it is a MMORPG. Also plot-driven, and even though it does contain some of these generic quests, many are different, and again, with a story to them.
Both of these are games I really like, and the story and quests are more than a small part of the reason why. I definitely hope there still will be more MMORPG which don't just follow suit with the rat-slaughters. Even if I also often skip large amounts of text in quest descriptions, I like them being there so I can read them when I feel like it.
Those rats are us, the player base.
The developer drops a piece of cheese somewhere within the maze of the game, then watches as we madly scramble around trying to quickly get to the piece of cheese.
Then we start complaining because, as we get close to the piece of cheese, they haven't put in any more walls to the maze.
We feel cheated because the piece of cheese is left out in the open, with no more "content" around it.
But we still feel "uber leet" because we got there fast.
Then we move on to the next game to do it all over again......
Your right,
took Guildwar the main quest is between each town that so funny and its keep the player in game. the video play uuntil a percent of people press "esc".
Well the only problem is the re-playability... Since after you did the game once you always press "ESC" for the other toons, so if a new gamer game into de the game he might miss some story only because the majority want to skip. They should keep this way of doing thing for the main story and pay developper for the developpement of new way of distributing the quest.
My personal question to Sanya Weathers:
Have you played Dungeons & Dragons Online to date?
If not, you're missing out a huge portion of knowledge of how "different" quest approach, or even whole MMO concept approach may be. You'll hardly find any "kill 10 rats-like" or "deliver x to npc x-like" quests there.
Of course, if you'll try, you may find some similarities to that in a few quests at the beginning. Especially Harbor quests. But they're hand-crafted too, with their own areas all designed just for those quests - not just some "area" in the open to fill in with 3-7 other quests.
So once again Sanya - I love your articles. They're not only good - they're crucial and important, I bet you're changing whole MMO community via giving us real knowledge. Most people now live in some unrealistic dream about MMOs and their developers. How they work, what is possible, what should we expect and what not. Nearly whole MMO community is NOT educated in those areas, and writing these columns you help us all - players, developers, everyone. Some realism, some logic would help us all to better understand each other. Help players understand developers and developers bettter understand players, who (the players) will know better what they want if they'll know what is like the reality they "play" in.
Just one thing for which I'd ask - check out DDO. I really wonder what would you think about it, but still I know you would need to spend in this game enough time to reach at least 6th level. Anyway, that would be appreciated. I still think DDO is a gem in some ways, especially how different it is from what you write about. There are some similarities, but those details in DDO seem to really make it stand out from the "herd" of other MMO games. In my own, humble opinion - you'd probably know better.
The problem is that this "questing" concept was invented for single player RPGs and is mostly irrelevant in an MMORPG. Player interaction is the only thing that really matters in an MMO, and players work to get the kind of interaction they want, whether it is power, prestige, companionship, respect, competition, fear, etc. The lore and backstory of the game is meaningless in this context, and that includes quests, it only gets in the way of the "real" game.
Except for "role players", who are the most unimaginative of all gamers, most gamers want the "story" of the game to be basically what they make of it. It is like life, the "story" is what happens to you, you figure it out along the way and conceptualize it yourself as your mind gradually develops a contextural "story" framework around the experiences that you have had and events you have witnessed. If I fight an epic battle against a dragon in-game, that has a particular, personal, special meaning within the context of my story, I don't need some so-called writer trying to tell me what it means [unless I'm an imagination challenged "role player"], he only gets in the way and takes me out of the immersion in the game story that I am experiencing, i.e. MY game story.
Part of the solution to making the world content matter more would be to make character progression less signifigant. The whole concept of "leveling up" was not intended for MMOs, and does not make sense in them. Your character's skills and abilities should be a part of you, something in your brain, not an arbitrary game mechanic that happens from pushing a butten 10 million times.
Game developers should be working to put quest creation into the hands of the players, rather than trying to think of clever ways to describe "collect 10 rat tails quests". The average gamer is not as dim witted as the average mmo "writer" apparently is, and recognizes these quests for what they are: empty, boring, uniform, and completely arbitrary. Nobody likes to think their life is exactly the same as everyone else's, everyone likes to imagine that they are somehow different [and in real life we all are], but backwards ass game developers of mmos do everything they possibly can to make players feel like they are all the same. Players, who want to enjoy the game as a kind of "second life", an escape from their life into another more fun life, these players naturally rebel against such attempts by the game developer of trying to make all the players feel the same, unifrom, grey, and worthless, for example by giving them quests such as "collect 10 wolf tails" which just underlines for the player that they are exactly the same as everyone else in the game, having the exact same experience, jumping through the exact same hoops. This is everything the player doesn't want, and so the players ignore it as much as possible and just get it over with to the extent necessary.
Anyways..... The bottom line is that your article [or at least the developers you spoke to] tries to paint the players as if they are too dim to pay attention to a good story line, but this is really a misconception of what is happening in an mmo.
I'm an old timer. When we first played D&D it was all about the levels. Hell, we even eschewed scenarios in favor of just rolling up random encounters, killing them, and makng lists of the rolls we'd make on the loot tables at the end of the day. This was Diablo before there was Diablo. Then, slowly, we got a little more into the tactics and started getting into the classic Gygax modules. Story mattered a little more here and some of us got, if superficially and more for comic relief than drama, into our characters.
Two companies really changed how we looked at tabletop roleplaying which was, in early going, essentially the same grind for levels and lewt most MMOs are today.
One was Judges Guild. Instead of laying out pat scenarios they built entire world maps chalk full of interesting little places and situations. The players were dropped into the world, broke and inexperienced, but could really set out and discover new things. The DM would find himself, instead of reading text from a block quote somewhere, improvising details from the thousands of broad but leading descriptions in the JG worldbooks. Pretty soon something would have sparked the player's imaginations and they'd be taking the initiative, finding a place worth defending or a foe worth pursuing or some other personal goals. The DM's would adapt and work in elements from the worldbooks and we ended up seeing some great improvised narratives rising from that interaction. The world felt 'real' because it was so vast and because you could effect it. Later JG products would be nothing but lists of randomized tables for all kinds of things. These worked because they could give a DM a list of attributes to synthesize into some unique and more elaborate places or encounters that could be fitted into the moment.
With Judges Guild we tended to forget, a little at least, about magic items and levels and became more curious about what was going on right now and how NPCs or our personal goals fit into it.
Taking that "improvised world" a step further was a company called Game Designers Workshop who produced Traveller. Here were deep background systems for generating characters, randomized tables for patrons, types of quests, creature creation, jobs and the generation of entire sectors of space. You want a real adventure with a fleshed out character who feels like he had a past? There was no alternative at the time. Nobody knew, even a GM if he was a seat-of-his-pants improviser, what would happen next. What anchored the game to a kind of reality was the fundamental economics of running a starship and how trade routes functioned. However, this was twenty five years before Firefly mind you, the crew would almost always be scraping by rather than accumulating wealth and took more 'interesting' missions on the side in hopes of picking up some temporary economic advantage.
After that you had the next generation of "fluff" (as powergamers called them) games like Vampire: The Masquerade that brought setting, story and interpersonal drama to a whole new level. There are many many more that all helped RPers move beyond the "kill ten rats" and "end game" mentalities (powergamer, min-max, rule lawyer, monty haul, twink) that were endemic in early tabletop roleplaying too.
But these things will take time. People have to get bored of what they're doing and want something more. They won't know what they want. They may argue violently against the very thing they'll ultimately end up embracing simply because they're wary of something new. You can't force it.
Those of us who want more depth in settings, more believeable worlds and gameplay, and all the rest will see this come to pass. We just have to wait for the world to catch up. It has before.
I find it interesting that the 2 games mentioned as having superior storylines; DDO and LoTRO, are both Turbine games. ( Did someone mention Asheron's Call also? Also Turbine). So props to the folks at Turbine, they seem to be " getting it " more than any other MMO company at the moment.
Interesting to note is, that most of us, errr, those people *cough* who don't care/hate the standard lowbie quests, complain if it is made too obvious (or cheap), eg. instead of ten different "kill 12 xyz", only one "kill 120 xyz" .....
Killing 120 is actually not that bad if you are in a group. Some PQs in Warhammer are like that and it can go pretty fast and gives good xp. If you do it in lineage 2, especially alone, well, then you are scr..ed. Now, if there isn't a group available and trhat quest is your only alternative.... speak of grind.
The most bothersome thing is, if you do such a quest at point A, you go, say, to the other end of the village of A, and are requested to do a similar quest. "What??? I already killed 10 Wolves! Why again? Can't you give me credit anyway?" "Oh, you want the pelts, sure, I got some here. What? Hello? I finished the quest! I got your 10 pelts!" And so you have to kill again.
Drop rates are another question. "You want their paws? Sure, one bear, 4 paws".....50 kills later, 5 paws.....
Although some modern MMOs try to adress this, it is still far from "perfect". Funny thing is, if one points this out during a beta, then it doesn't feel as if it is being listened to. LOTRO was an extreme example for me in that aspect, which promised not to have have the average quests, and still ended up with tons of these shitty quests (even if there might be "tons of different, cooler quests").
Something else I would like to mention, even if it deviates a bit from the article, but there is a connection, imho:
(XP) "Grind" - obvious(?) part of leveling, especially for fast leveling, and even more so for repetitive quests. In contexts of MMOs widely known.
But to a certain extend, this existed in single player old school rpgs as well:
Ultima series, they were not linear (even if some of the dungeons were only doable from a certain skill level). If you were not able to do roam in a certain area which you needed for progression, (and didn't know where else to go, no internet for cheating), then you killed mobs for your skills.
Or Dungeon Master I remember, no quests, other than to get through the dungeon - but man there were some great puzzles. Anyway, too weak with magic? Or weapons? Stand by a wall and click on attack constantly.
And finally a more modern version (still talking single player rpg): do side-quests (Baldur's Gate or similar), to get XP to get stronger to do the main questline. [This would by the way be based on D&D rules at least, back to DDO with great quests; but there we are back to repetitive quest-grind].
So single player old school rpgs aren't only the "Roses" that everyone would like to see them to be. It was the overall story where you are the hero and there is a definit ending. And MMOs will never have that, no matter how close they try to get or come to that (as say LOTRO with the epic story line).
Quest grind, kill this kill that, weapons grind, spells grind.... Whether its level base or not you will always have grind, just different forms.
And it seems like the problem is mmo is being chun out in mass productions lines.... Now we are seeing more and more mmo being produce, and at a faster and faster rate, War only takes 4 years?
With this kind of mass produce for goods, the quality will definately goes down the drain sooner or later, and that's what we are getting now.
All companies want a piece of pie and want it fast, so we end up with unimaginative kill rats quests, early release of games, and copy paste of gameplay...
Till a company really takes their time to do it and do it right, we will be in with this kind of crap for a very long time...
PROBLEM
To say that "verb number noun" quests format is the problem is misleading. In a sense your main grief is with the number part.
All quests are going to have verbs and nouns (and usually a preposition or two). Stop the orcs (from killing travelers in the forest). Forge this blade. Take the One (uh oh! a number!) Ring (and destroy it in a volcano).
Almost all complaints eventually lead to one fact: players have no effect on the game.
For instance, a player gets a "quest" like this...
"Those rats are destroying my field! Kill ten rats and return to with 10 rat scalps, and yes, I know not every rat has a scalp, you'll have to kill at least 30 to get your ten scalps."
All 20 players in the newbie area hunt and kill-steal for the rat bounty. When they are done they get their reward and perhaps a thank you ("Thanks! Now I can plant those crops!") before they move on to the next quest giver, wherever that may be...
...and the field is still flooded with rats with 20 new newbies hunting and kill-stealing for the rat bounty.
Oh, and... Want to create a new character and try out a new class? Better be ready for that rat quest again!
SOLUTION
The solution i think, comes from the REAL TIME STRATEGY genre.
Take this scenario, for instance...
You're a human. The orcs army is coming. If you don't go out and kick some orc butt, the city will be overrun and there won't be any merchants in this area for you to sell your phat loot to- unless your an orc, which you're not.
Now - you'd better complete this fed-ex quest to get this bundle of wood to the bowyer and this ore to the blacksmith because they will probably reward you with a weapon and you can get out there and kick some orc butt!
If they players don't act, the orcs will overun the area. If the orcs overrun the area, the playerbase is faced with the task of re-taking the area.
Either way, the players have things to do that will affect their gameplay...
This article should be stickied so whenever we see another complaint of how boring a game is and if they say the quests suck, just link this piece.
Anyways, has anyone thought of the reason why a majority of the mentality is to powerlevel? Every MMO veteran knows the answer. They want the unique, rare loot. They want it because few have it. It looks kewl. It performs great, maybe has unique animations and effects.
Why don't game developers think outside the box and provide this incentive on day one. I applaud city of heroes/ villians in starting the ball rolling with their invention system. Only in the sense that enhancements (loot in the game) can scale in level with their players. In other words, you don't outgrow your loot.
Why can't games provide loot that can be enhanced from day one to be as effective and unique throughout the characters game life? Yes, monsters can still drop items and treasure can be found, but the player is given the option to toss aside his weapon, or like in some games disenchant it for spare parts which could enhance your original gear. The trick is to make the choice mysterious so cheat sites like Allakazam won't turn the gear system into a lop sided economy (Oh that Shield of the Fallen can only be broken down into x components, which is useless for a wizard). A player that does not want to use the item must sell it or break it down with a chance of receiving a random rare component that is bound to the user or equip it.
Players can hire blackmsiths, jewelers, etc to enhance appearance of their gear too, so a player can enjy various looks of their gear.
In theory, a player doesnt have to throw away that practice dagger from the day he started to the day he ends playing. The dagger is enhanced and modified over time and perhaps become a purple dagger after all.
What does this have to do with quests? because we do quests as a means to an end. Level and level fast to obtain new skills and use them to consume the end game content, because we perceive the end game has the real prizes.
I find that the quests in most MMOs are boring and ill written. I can read a wall of text if it is intresting but if I already read a lot of junk I just click it by.
I hope Bioware change that and introduce interesting quests into MMOs. Remember Baldurs gate or Neverwinter nights? A lot of the quests were still boring and grindy but they were well written and many of them got a lot funnier if you read tehm.
But we need to get rid of all the crap quests. I rather do 1 long and fun quest that 20 short and boring, deliver this and kill that.
I want to be a hero (or villain) when I play, not a messenger or pest control.
Well "ever"-quest at launch should have actually been called NeverQuest. How many quests were actually in game the first year? (yes there were some but not enough to even entertain the name).
As to UO... no there were not quests. There were "events".
Ultima Online had the interest team. Seers and Troubadors were pretty much the start of the volunteer side. Seers were meant to create long term content and interact with player towns... Toubs were people who played roles in the events. Elders were added to create short term or "instant" events... and then there were the Interest Game Masters who were the "go between" for the volunteers and the company. IGM's also did the "official" events.
The thing with UO was you could try to get to "end game" which was spending your 700 skill points. Yet even once you got there you could take part in content... anywhere.
The only thing this article really does is highlight the core flaw with the level base design for MMO's. Along with the fact that from the launch of EQ in 1999... right through the launch of WAR... Developers still aren't testing "end game" content.. tho they know exactly what will happen.
Altho I feel it was an attempt to slant the blame towards the players... rather than after 10 years... developers still aren't testing end game content.
*note* I know about the Interest team for UO because I was part of it. Pretty much I cut my ties with Ultima Online the day they shut the programs down. Which wasn't EA's fault... but that's a totally different story.
I usually liked reading the quest texts. WoW, LOTRO, Tabula Rasa, PotBS no problem.
But some time ago I played the WAR trial, and that was the first time I just had the urge to race trough stuff. Maybe my mindset changed. But it was just so much text. At least it was (usually?) split up, but skipping that I felt I was missing out on things. At least their map region-marking per quest was quite a good feature. AoC really had the worst directions. Bad directions aren't a disaster.. unless they make you think you have to go trough this area where you can die in seconds by pulling too many mobs.
There's a very delicate line in the amount of 'text' and how it's being told. A good writer also really makes the difference.
There's this indy MMO, A Tale In The Desert, where you didn't really have quests (and no combat in the normal sense). Just society goals. And for some reason the developer decided that they needed sort-of levels and quests, because players expected progression like that in MMOs of 'today'. I happened not to have played it that much with those changes, but it always felt limiting.
Some of my all time favorite quests lines would definitely have to be the Heritage Quests from EQ2. Alot of people skipped certain ones that really didnt benefit them in favor of power leveling. Me personally I never skipped one once I was appropiate level range and had blasts doing them. I eventually incorporated them into guild events and had HQ Sundays. After doing them a couple of times I would have tons of in game email asking me when was the next one. People commonly would tell me that was the most fun they ever had in game because all they typically do was power level.
On behalf of the jaded MMO players you need to bring good meaningful quests back to games. Because if you don't then you will at least know one reason why your subscription bases loses half in only two months after release. Fellow gamers don't just settle demand better games. Vote with your wallet. I started doing this and have been much happier. Hell gives me an excuse to dust off my Xbox 360 quite a bit these days.
Speaking of Heritage Quests in EQ2 - yes, they are pretty interesting, but some of the older quests include like 3+ hours spawns of the (not even final) hero character/monster. SWG had a few of those quests as well. Respawn timer in the range of hours, so that the loot in the end wouldn't be something that everyone had. Okay. But if those are the more interesting quests, than long respawn timers are just as poor as the usual lowbie quests.
BTW, we are discussing lowbie quests, but those quests are just as common in the max-level area. Heck, just the fact to get rid of 1-2 hours of trash-mobs in a raid, isn't really a sign of design-ingenuity.
Yeah but Lotro is full of kill 10 X get 10 X Take X to X where X will give you a quest to kill 10 X - Some of the early quests involved running back and forth between hobbits over and over and over..
Funcom made a point of trying to remove a lot of 'rat' quests and making it much more entertaining with voice acting.. its just a terrible shame that after the 1st 20 levels the voice acting all but stopped.
Perhaps they should forget about story and have KILL 10 RATS! pop up in big red letters with some exciting music.. trying to make story out of that is just silly.
Storyline and quest type are not the same thing. If you just want to level quickly and dion't care WHY you are doing anything, then LoTRO will be boring and repetitive to you. If you enjoy the journey and the STORYLINE, then you might enjoy this game. That running back and forth between 2 hobbits was a love story that I actually enjoyed from a STORY p.o.v.
For most of us running back and forth is unacceptable even if the story is epic. Running back and forth is a awful time sink, plain and simple.
Great write up. Really great stuff.
It's too bad that the 'art' of writing is really sliced, diced, and chopped into a format that is 'system' friendly. I mean, it sounds as if the feeling is really sucked out and watered down so that the 'gamer' can digest it.
I think the issue is that most gamers don't want to think... unless it's to find a way to level quickest. While a lot of people will take find that phrase offensive or abrasive, it's still truth. Like the OP said, people just wanna hit level cap and move on to 'the real game'.
Anyway, it really sounds like the creative hand-cuffs are applied to people with genuine artistic ability.
Another topnotch article.
Personally, I like "Kill 10 rats" quests, but I don't need them to be complicated. This type of kill/collect/return quest works perfectly well as a bounty task and seldom needs any fleshing out. I'm more than happy with lots of guards/oficials/obsessives placed all around the world, who want ears and tails and paws and rocks and leaves brought to them for a small reward.
I honestly don't need a lot of detail. It's a mechanism to add structure to what would otherwise be aimless random slaughter of wildlife. I know what it's for as a player and my character knows what it's for in context. FedEx quests, which I love, are even more straightforward.
This might make you assume I woudln't be the kind of person to bother reading quest text, but in fact I read virtually all of it, in every game I play. Moreover, badly written (or even worse, badly translated) quest text is enough, in and of itself, to stop me playing a game. I don't read badly-written prose in other media and I won't put up with it in games, either.
I thought Warhammer had the ideal solution - full, coherent dialog for all quests, but with a short one or two line summary of the actual requirements of the quest in bold font at the end. I would suggest designers could even go one step further and have a toggle in the UI for "Full" or "Short" dialog.
If the Bioware MMO doesn't have some very high quality quest dialog, however, there is going to be hell to pay!
Well, it better be really epic then because running is boring... And if I get bored it is not epic.
Well, it better be really epic then because running is boring... And if I get bored it is not epic.
Well said, Loke.
Actually, they patch in a lot more voice acting after Tortage even if its just 10% of the game it is there. But AoC do have some really good quests like the one where you interview 3 suspects to find who is a thief. It ain't epic but you really have to think there to find the culprit.
On the other hand have AoC still a lot of quite boring quests, the fact that you can talk back makes it interesting but your answers rarely matters.
AoC have it's good points about quests but it is too little, if your answers mattered and if they gave you more different option depending on who you was maybe. But Im sure Bioware will do that, to bad they are doing Star wars and not Forgotten realms.
Holy guacamole, I didn't expect so many comments!
In no particular order:
- Yes, I think Turbine "gets it" in a way few other studios do, but LOTRO as a license helps a lot. I don't mind running back and forth within one single town when the story is exciting - like the two hobbits in love quest one of you mentioned - but I mind a lot when I'm supposed to run from one end of the map to the other for a stupid non-story related reason. There's a dev in every studio that gets off on doing that. I don't know why.
- I didn't mind kill ten rats in EQ because that was my first MMO. I tried AC, couldn't get past the art style. That was part of my problem in WOW, too. I'm not a big graphics snob, but I do have major aesthetic preferences.
- Speaking of Kill Ten Rats... I just want to pimp these guys: http://www.killtenrats.com/
- Y'all saying that MMO studios are willfully interpreting the data so they can save money and use any old warm body as a quest writer aren't entirely wrong. But you are missing one basic thing - the metrics prove people are skipping the text, period. Not skipping the text if it's not well written, not skipping some and not others, not reading some lengths and not others. Customers are slapping the "gimme quest" button within two seconds. They are not reading the text, no matter what it says. If writers bury key clues in the text, the only result is a bunch of customer service tickets from people who can't solve the quest because they didn't read the text.
I suspect this is less true in LOTRO because if you're into LOTRO, you're into the lore, as some of you have pointed out.
- I haven't tried DDO since the third week it was out. It launched without dungeons or dragons, so I was not really into it. I meant to give it another shot ever since I heard about the massive improvements, and just haven't had the time.
As an entertainment marketer (you may all boo now...) I have to come in defense of parts of this. One part is the "companies" -- perhaps you should say, "the accountants" or "the investors." If game companies could make games that make no money but were awesomely entertaining to a small niche, I think many people in the game industry would *love* to do that.
But take SOE as an example -- they had what was a niche game, skill based (which is rare), SF base (which was rarer at the time), and with an AWESOME IP (Star Wars).
So, did SWG jump, or was it pushed?
We don't know what the internal conversation was that led to the nerfing of SWG.
Perhaps Lucasfilms, who licensed the IP to them, was threatening to do what it did last year, and license the IP to another MMO company because they weren't seeing enough revenue from a niche game. (Has anyone bothered to count the years between SWG's inception and SWTOR's license? I bet that's the duration of Sony's exclusive rights in their IP contract....)
We don't know if someone up the then-more-tiers of management between SOE and Sony-the-borg-top-level hit the panic button because SWG's subscriber base wasn't growing fast enough, or their profit margin was bad because they'd spent too much dev time on an awesome housing system, or what.
Or, it could have been SWG's own crew in Austin. But personally, I kind of doubt that.
The game companies, ultimately, are not there to make great games. They are there to make games that make profits. It's just like the movie industry. Make a suck movie, and you'll probably still get financing to try for another hit. Make a suck sequel (or expansion, or nerf) to a hit, and it'll still probably make enough money.
Until the players figure out a way to create the equivalent of HBO, we're doomed.
HBO came onto cable when cable didn't *have* premium services. Cable was about $20/mo most places. HBO was more than the base cable charge on a monthly basis. So you had to more than double your cable bill to get it. Wisdom on the street: No one would pay. There were plenty of movies on TV, already.
Many years later, HBO is not only one of the strongest cable networks, but it's budded off Cinemax, and has a whole constellation of competitors.
So, if you want *GREAT* storytelling -- are you willing to pay for it? Are there 200,000-500,000 gamers willing to pay $150 pre-order for a kickass game and $50/mo after the first three months? Because, ultimately, that's what it's going to take to get the game you want.
Assuming you can all agree on what great storytelling is, and don't get pissed off the first time something isn't to you taste and cancel your sub.
Now, given that, do you understand why companies -- who must make money on these things -- are (a) risk averse; and (b) don't believe the market is there for people like me and you?
It sucks. But it will take something like an HBO-level transformative risk that *makes it* to change what we get fed to us.
The gaming companies tell us what "we" want, because statistically, that *is* what we want. Just like the movies that were already on TV was all that the stats showed that people wanted on TV before HBO.
Yrs,
Shava
/*who is looking for a marketing or writing or PR job in gaming atm in Boston, pls PM me! */
having interesting quests would definitely be nice, however my priority list looks something like this:
1. Server stability
2. Combat
3. Economy
4. PVP content / Endgame
5. Interesting quests
My guess is that devs have very similar priority lists and that is why we get kill 10 rats quests. I personaly dont care what kind of quests we get as long as first 4 points are done properly.
There will NEVER be in-game balance unless there is only one type of character combat skill per 'WORLD'.
Sword and Shield.
Dual Wield.
Pet Master.
Caster.
Whatever.
Quests are a necessary distraction for Noobs who need to learn combat skills. They should be optional.
Once you eliminate character imbalance (mezz, stun, pets, special weapons, shield bash, glowy swords) used in varying balance, you get balance.
Just make the PVP abilities equally achievable in each world.
If I am going to spec Magician, then that world has magic and anything goes BUT all I fight PVP are magicians who can have the same powers.
If I want to be a Stealth Warrior, then that is the way of my world - watch out! (or is that try to watch out???).
There has NEVER been a game with balance - in truth, the Human side of DAOC would have ALL been Smite Clerics within a year of game inception had Mythic not screwed that up.
For Calararon - a GOOD cleric. (and not me)
Long Live OOTBW!!!!!
:)
I tend to agree with the people who are not interested in being told a story or playing through storyline quests. The only story I am interested in when I play a game is the story of my character in that world.
I liked that EQ was originally 'NeverQuest' -- there were quests, but that wasn't the biggest part of gameplay. You did them for faction, items or later, for zone access, but they weren't a major component of getting experience or even gear. Newer stuff (Secrets of Faydwer in particular) has had more quest-oriented content, but it's still mostly stuff you can either do while in a regular exp group or can do quickly before getting down to the business of pursuing your other goals of the day, in my experience. You may have chosen to play differently, which is my point-- it's all choice.
I might have been killing 10 rats, but unless I was desperate for faction or the trinket from that, I could skip it. Those little quests were mostly a waste of my playtime in terms of achievement. I might have spent forever getting a key to Veeshan's Peak (I hate you, "pained soul"! I hate you forever!) or to Vex Thal, but once you do that, you don't have to do it again for that character, and even having done it was a mark of achievement in itself when that content was current. (Nowadays, most old keyed zones are open to everyoneof appropriate level anyway.)
When I played WoW, it became really clear, really quickly, that quests were the most efficient way to progress. I felt like I was on a mandatory quest conveyor belt that took me from one set of quests to another as I levelled up. I hated it. Grinding away at quests is not necessarily better than a straight up kill-for-exp grind, and can be worse if you're not getting together with other people and being social over it.
EQ2 had it's share of typical quests, and then some other ones that really got me interested in the story related to the quests, which is really something, since I'm not usually into any of that stuff. On the other hand, as with WoW, I felt like a slave to my quest log.
Do we need better quests or just more interesting worlds to play in? Depends on your play style. If you're a gamer interested in the game (as separate from roleplaying or the virtual world), better quests might make you happy. If you're just interested in racking up levels, gear, and other marks of achievement, you might go either way. If you're interested in suspending disbelief and having the freedom to set your own goals and write your own story, then maybe better quests are the least of your worries.
Those rats are us, the player base.
The developer drops a piece of cheese somewhere within the maze of the game, then watches as we madly scramble around trying to quickly get to the piece of cheese.
Then we start complaining because, as we get close to the piece of cheese, they haven't put in any more walls to the maze.
We feel cheated because the piece of cheese is left out in the open, with no more "content" around it.
But we still feel "uber leet" because we got there fast.
Then we move on to the next game to do it all over again......
This is why I play games that don't make Quests a main focus in character advancement.
Why would I want to run quests if all of them have two line descriptions and basically make me to the same shit over and over?
Give me my freedom let me make my own content and leave those lame quests in as an optional way to make cash.
If you want to keep quests feeling like Jobs then stop making them the focus of a game!
I appreciate when the writers interject some humor into the writing. It helps to make those basic newbie quests more fun.
After you've played a few mmo's, the quest system begins to feel like a treadmill. Quests are task oriented. Do this. Do that. Not everyone in the game is on the same page so atleast for me I end up running around on my own, especially where chain quests are involved. And then when I do get in a group, everyone is somehow a speed reader. I can read 80 pages an hour in real life when reading novels, but people I end up grouping with have can glance at a few paragraphs in 2 or 3 seconds and be done. It makes me feel rushed, and I don't like to be rushed. I'm trying to relax and have a good time...
I wish they would just let us enjoy the game by letting us be self directed, doing what we want to do. That is true freedom. Instead of having to do quests to get nice items, there should be a chance that those items or similar will drop from mobs. A good chance not a rare one.
I think the most fun I had in an MMORPG was Ragnarok Online when it first came out in the Beta. Why? There was so much interraction between players and the GMs. We didn't get free items or anything of the sort, but you would be able to walk through the main towns and SEE GMs sitting around talking to people. And if they got bored, well hopefully you weren't a merchant advertising your wares, because hell would break lose as they would summon TONs of bosses into the towns. It was so much entertainment, even as a low level, to fight these big bosses that the whole town would have to fight to take down.
I haven't really had any gaming experiences similar to that, ever. I understand GMs not wanting to be around their players in some settings.. but never? Seems a little cold shoulder to me.
This is one of the main reasons why I solo in every mmo I play. If the team skips the quest text, then I have to if I wanna keep up. Then, if it's a quest I haven't done before, I wont have any clue what's going on. That lessens my fun.
You bring up a good point. I found myself doing this exact thing in LoTRO, and I hadn't thought about my behavior until I read your post. What I have done routinely, now that I think about it, is skip to the bottom of the dialogue to glance at the requirements. When I see that it's another "kill 10 boars" I completely ignore the paragraphs of text and dash off.
A darn good point there DefB. My feeling is, "Why should I waste my time reading all of that?" Not because I don't like story - quite the opposite! - but because it's just another brain dead counting game. If they took the time to make the mechanics interesting then I would definitely take the time to read the dialogue.
As far as skipping text is concerned, there's also the issue of paragraphs of text on a quest NPC in the middle of a dungeon. If you're with a group then it's not like you can expect the group to wait for you to read the dialogue, ya know?
You bring up a good point. I found myself doing this exact thing in LoTRO, and I hadn't thought about my behavior until I read your post. What I have done routinely, now that I think about it, is skip to the bottom of the dialogue to glance at the requirements. When I see that it's another "kill 10 boars" I completely ignore the paragraphs of text and dash off.
A darn good point there DefB. My feeling is, "Why should I waste my time reading all of that?" Not because I don't like story - quite the opposite! - but because it's just another brain dead counting game. If they took the time to make the mechanics interesting then I would definitely take the time to read the dialogue.
As far as skipping text is concerned, there's also the issue of paragraphs of text on a quest NPC in the middle of a dungeon. If you're with a group then it's not like you can expect the group to wait for you to read the dialogue, ya know?
That's why I solo.
I love quests why is this artilcle being soo rude about quest
Yet another "it's the players fault" so-called article by what's-her-name.
Imagine a game where your actions effect the outcome. If you do not know what to do during a mission you might kill 10 rats and get ingredients to cook them...... and get a minor reward for doing so. But maybe what the person really wanted was for you to kill 10 guild rats ( slang for childeren in street gangs ). Obviously both would be correct..... right?
Star Wars: The Old Republic,. If it is anything like the KOTOR series RPG games, You better bealive skipping walls of text and just clicking to reward will cost you :-p.
This is exactly why I thought DDO would be so good, and why it was so disappointing to me. I thought we would end up with groups who, as though we were running on a tabletop, would be interested in story and framing for each scenario. Instead, the instances became speed challenges...
*sigh*
Shava
This is exactly why I thought DDO would be so good, and why it was so disappointing to me. I thought we would end up with groups who, as though we were running on a tabletop, would be interested in story and framing for each scenario. Instead, the instances became speed challenges...
*sigh*
Shava
Yeah, "speed challenges" are fine once in a while if it's something for the story. [Pull the 3 levers within 20 minutes or the dam will flood.] But it's not okay for every adventure. That "Timed Mission" stuff should really only be in racing games, in my opinion.
What bothers me most about quest grind is that my choice of quest tends to have no particular relation to my character's goals. I tend not to be making interesting decisions, just riding the rails.
I've played with many instant gratification people in the past. You know the type...you're on an interesting quest line and want to read the text...they click accept and run off, or start the next part before you've had a chance to read the first 2 words of the quest.
Quest window vanishes, give heavy sigh, realize that mmos are dieing a painful death because the stories and roleplaying is vanishing.
This is why I rarely group anymore. Other players often detract from my immersion when trying to quest and appreciate those quests that ARE interesting. I know, it makes no sense...play an mmo but play solo lots of time. But this is the pidgeon hole that communities and writers are forcing lots of player in to.
Meh.
Great article. It clarifies the frustration that a new writer for an MMO project must feel. I tend to think MMOs decline quickly these days for lack of passion - the new writer's passion is strangled as their creativity is funneled into the same pattern of writing that is born from what the statistics tell us and is used by every other MMO out there. No wonder we keep getting the same games over and over.
it always boils down to what the "end-game" is all about. if it is about PVP then most of your pvpers will blaze through to the end just to take part in the end-game pvp battles etc. if its a pure role playing game with no pvp elements then, most likely you won't have the so called "hardcore" players that skip content to just level as fast as possible, as much, there will always be people like that to some degree. and you really can't cater a game to that sort of gaming style. because you'll never win...
honestly if you look at some of the most addictive games in history, none of them have the "Kill 10 rats" sort of quests, except WoW. its all about making it interesting, addictive and overall fun. making tons of mini thought provoking quests... that lead into dungeons that have actual traps that test your gaming dexterity, eye-hand coordination and overall character building talents.
Asheron's Call 1 has some of the best dungeons in any game to date... well thought out and somewhat puzzley.
Sure you could be catering to a nitch group of people, but there is still that nitch market group out there. because there is only so much room for the mindless EQ style gameplay. and eventually you are only left with a small nitch group anyway when its all said and done.
companies just need to learn to keep being unique, because they all can't be the phenomena that WoW is. you have to have an already huge player fan base before making an MMO in order to do that.
Quests are boring and dependent on player objective. Fallout 3 for example and offline single player game had an awesome quest design and layout. Cause and effect quests that determine your path of success. My personal objective in an MMO being that i prefer PVP style games is to get to the max level and play against other players. Getting gear does not appeal to me along the way as long as i have a fair chance to beat any of my opponents 1 vs 1. Skill based.
I started MMO's early on but my first were World War 2 flight simulations. Fighter Ace, World War 2 Online, Aces High yada yada. You got promoted based on kills and kill ratio but everybody started in the same equipment. There were no levels. Sure there were mission objectives but they played no real outcome on the game itself other then adding challenge.
Dark Age of Camelot was my first fantasy based game with quests as a leveling quotient. I didn't care about the story line. I barely even quested back in the hard grind days because i could level faster just killing mob after mob after mob achieving max level, getting Epic Armor and off to RVR i go. Had they gave me a 50 as soon as i logged in with Epic Armor i would of been much more happy from a PVP perspective but the upside of quests and PVE was i met alot of wonderful people. That was one of the sole benefits of questing.
Quests have there place in PVE based games because they are all about storyline. PVP is a place quests or leveling really has no purpose other then to time sink. The next BIG PVP game will be a game thats skill based like Guild Wars but on a LARGE scale like Dark Age of Camelot. Bottom line is game companies need to separate PVE from PVP because they really don't go together. Developers who are directing quest makers need to realize that if the quest and the way its projected isn't immersive, people wont bother with them and are seen as a waste of time since all they want is the EXP bonus/prize. Oh btw Sanya your still hot! ;)..
I agree, but what can ya do? You give them books, and give them books, and all they do is eat the pages!
Well sorry if someone mentioned this already (I wasn't about to read 7 pages of posts to put in my 2 cents) but one thing I usually find to be the problem with the whole simple vs. story heavy/complex questing argument is that it assumes we can't have both. The current model of questing became popular because it made progression more interesting by forcing you to hunt different mobs and see different areas instead of camping the same things in the same camp spots all day long.
I don't see why we can't keep this system in place while adding some other type of quests/events on top of it to make the game world feel more alive. I just wish games would stop calling them "quests" to try and trick us into thinking there more interesting than they are. They should just call em "tasks" or "choirs" or "work", then you don't even need to bother with a stupid storyline or anything. Save the writing and effort for a smaller number of quality events that really intrigue the player, and make em optional in some way so people won't "have" to do them to progress (intice them with other rewards that aren't just better equipment, like a fancy title or some other thing they can show off but doesn't effect combat efficiency).
Forgive me for not reading over what has allready been said, I just wanted to get my thoughts out there. ill go back read all the posts after.
I thinkt he reason for the prefferance of the fedex quests is due to the nature of level grinding. Who wants to be at newb level? You have to reach max level and get geared to be accepted by anyone other than your group of friends you run with. This sadly where I find fault with newer MMO's. Yes it may be tried and true but damn its reptetive and boaring. And after a decade of playing MMO's with the grind mindset i am burnt. I would like to see some new games with an alternative to leveling levels. I would love to see an innovative MMO where the journey is not a grind. Maybe im just dreaming but there has to be a devlopment team out there some where that can pull it off.
Well I can say that I play one MMO that has trully been inovative and that is Eve-Online. I would love to see this type of innovation applied to a fantasy MMORPG.
peace
Wolffin
Wonderful article, Sanya! As always.
I do skip quest texts often, simply because I'm a slow reader. I remember doing the Van Cleff chain for Alliance in WoW for the first time and being blown away. Especially at the end with the characters that had voices, the cannon that shoots down the door, a Goonies moment when you find a big ship in a cave.. It was excellent.
The problem I see with most text quests is, there's a sort of disconnect between the story we're reading, and what actually happens in the game world around it. I'm sure there's a lot of technical reasons behind it, and that's due to the nature of MMO's and you have to accept that - There's really no way around it in a persistant world. Here's what I'm saying, and a little story.
Lets say I need to kill 10 rats because the rats are growing too big, and starting to eat merchants and soldiers gaurding caravans traveling to some city to bring medical supplies because that city is under siege. Sounds like a good story. I'd like to know more about why the city is being invaded, but that's sure to come in a perfect world. Anyway, I'm off! I'm going to save the people going to save the city!
Umm... Where are they? The rats are just wandering a circle. The city? Not even under attack. The rats are apparently fat and lazy and don't feel like attacking anything today. The fact that nothing is really happening that remotely pertains to the story enforces that disconnect between the story I'm reading and the adventure I'm playing.
Now, on the assumption that it were technically possible (It's likely not in an MMO without some heavy instancing, or at pre-set or random intervals, hence, fits in with single player RPG's moreso then MMO's) lets take that same story and add a few twists.
The carvan is bringing medical supplies to the city. It needs someone to defend against rats - they're not going to tell you how many - to get those supplies to the city as it's under siege by an undead army. It can start 2 ways, much like a typical escort quest. You leave with the caravan, or you have to wait till the next one sets out. And it sort of make sense that it not always happen immediately, they'd have to schedule this sort of thing - There's logistics involved here!
So anyway, the time finally arrives and the caravan is about to set out. There's some other people who showed up since they need the quest too. So they set out. Now we can add in possible scenarios to this quest to differentiate it.
A) Depending on the number of people, WAVES, and I mean WAVES of rats start coming in from all directions. It's mayhem! People trying to pull the rats off the NPC caravan, slaying and looting everything they can, over and over! You succed or fail by defending the carvan as it moves to the city.
B) A n NPC comes and says to the closest player or players in earshot (Not a big popup for everyone on the quest) saying, "Stop killing the rats! The medicines they've been sending have been tainted! The rats can smell it and they're eating the infections before leaving the good portion of the medicines to be picked up later! Stop the other players from killing them, and get everyone away from the supplies!" Now the players have a choice - Keep fighting, looting, and do as quest intended, or get people to stop and get away.
C) You say, "Screw them, they're too slow I'll bring the medicine there myself as much as I can carry as much as possible, run ahead, and bypass the rats. It's important that they get the medicine - The rats are merely the obstacle."
With either A, B, or C, whenever they get to the city, I better see it under attack. An NPC vendor better not be just standing there waiting for me to come buy something. And depending on what happens between A, B, or C, I need different outcomes.
A) The medicine was fine, you get them to the wounded in the city and the next part of the chain (And it SHOULD be a chain for a STORY, at least until the invasion of the city actually ends, and it should always start again for anyone who wants to do it at some interval).
B) You decided or tried to get everyone away from the supplies. Rats do their job. You get everyone back to the caravan and bring the cleaned supplies to the city, maybe you get something different but better. Yay! OR, you say screw it, and bring the caravan, tainted goods and all, to the invading city. Some die, some live. No one knows why. You still get your reward.
C) You bring the medicines in a crate at a time, saving as many as you can. Maybe you get the reward, maybe you don't.
These various paths you can decide to take is what makes it FEEL like you're part of the story. The environment in which the setting takes place, and more importantly, CHOICES a player can take all satisfy the requirement of a more abstract objective (In this case, getting medicine from A to B), and HOW they do it, and how the circumstances of the success affect the reward are what MMO's lack.
So until you can really CONNECT the player to the story in the game, they'll never take the story seriously.
Just my opinoin anyway.
To those who think these articles are "blaming" the MMO players... yes and no. The author is passing along the sentiments of MMO industry folks. Most of them are passing judgement.
But that's okay, because in truth, we are to blame.
Let's examine the reality of the situation a moment. We have millions playing MMOs these days. Aside from WOW, we probably have at least 2-4 million MMO gamers worldwide in most of the other top-tier games.
How many of them are actual geeks/nerds? How many of these millions do you think have even read any fantasy fiction, including Tolkien? How many of them made better than a B- in English (or the literary equivalent) in high school?
Most of you people on this website are very silly. You crawl into this aquarium, see all the other fish and the water and the little castle, and you think, "My God! The world is made for us! How can it be any different?"
All this article is doing is taking off the fishbowl and examining the truth. The truth is that most people do not give a rat's rectum about lore, storytelling, or character development. Role-players are routinely marginalized and harrassed in every game out there. Christ, half of Darkfall is already like that, and the game hasn't even been out more than a year or two.
The cruel, hard, unforgiving truth about questing is that those who want dynamic and interesting quests seem to be in the minority. Try going to 10 official MMO game forums and demanding less raiding, less grinding, and more story-based questing. Not only will you get flamed by half the community at that forum, you'll get either stoney silence or beat-around-the-bush platitudes that basicaly say, "No, we are not going to waste time on something that we see no clear majority wanting in the game."
MMORPG.com may have 10,000 people in favor of better stories and lore and quests.
That's still a minority in a single game with even just 100,000 players. And of the 10,000 people noted above, how many of them even play the same games?
This isn't to say we shouldn't demand better. Oh, no. But some of you are trying to lay the entire burden of blame upon the MMO company. What idiocy. That's like saying it is McDonald's fault that you choose to eat there instead of either eating at a healthier place, or just making your own lunch.
We need to pick a better fight. We aren't going to win against financial security for programmers and whatnot in the middle of a recession. So we need to target something else. My suggestion would be the rest of the MMO community, the folks who don't yet appreciate game settings for what they can be. As for how to get them interested, there's only one actual method I know of - get them interested in fiction of the correct genre.
The article is spot on. And should be a wake-up call to the entire community: get organized and stop the in-fighting, or look forward to a future full of suck and fail.
After all, the more we fight each other, the more companies like Blizzard smile and wring their hands as they get ready to count more easy money made off of suckers who could have better games if only they knew better...
Im definitely partying with you cowboy! Nice write up!
Oh yes! Or any other genre! There is way too much sameness in MMORPGs. I don't blame the companies - they are just trying to make a buck. But I wish I had more options!
Oh yes! Or any other genre! There is way too much sameness in MMORPGs. I don't blame the companies - they are just trying to make a buck. But I wish I had more options!
Well put! EVE-Online is a pretty innovative game and I would agree to the prospect of seeing this type of gameplay put into a fantasy setting. As long as theres no more Orcs, and Elves!
[rant] They call it fanatsy, but the only fantasy they seem to refer to all the time is Orcs and Elves. Im sorta burned out on that concept. I want to see new races, and lore made in games. Example AION seems ot hit this on the nose to me. While not totally innovative the fantasy setting is pretty cool! Now if everyone else would put the Orcs and Elves to rest and think of new characters to forge and stories to tell, it would be truly called "fantasy unlimited"! [/rant]
There's a rule in business called "The 80/20 Rule". In nearly every endeavor, 80% of your expense is going to come from 20% of your customer base. And the real secret to success is to either identify and get rid of the sponges, or figure out a way to make their fee proportional to the expense they create.
In nearly every MMORPG, the people who want to blow by all the content and then scream at the top of their lungs for an utterly undefinable "endgame" pay the exact same monthly fee as everyone else. But the unwinnable race to appease them takes up a hugely disproportionate share of the developer's resources.
It would be easy to code a game to make maximum advancement rate be in some way tied to the longevity of the account - through some sort of asymptotic soft cap on experience gains, with a dividing line kept well short of the end of the currently-designed material. The people who are interested in getting to the head of the pack can do that, but "the top" can be a fairly narrow range. Playing 24/7 and doing everything possible to break the system will still get you (marginally) ahead of everyone else, but always short of the current end of the content. The imaginary overachiever is free to scream "Yeah, I win!" (whatever the Hell that means) but he doesn't take a disproportionate share of resources away from all the of players who just want to play the game for its own sake and quietly pay their fees.
The thing that ruins the immersion for me, which makes the whole storytelling element fall apart, is the lack of persistence and game memory.
It isn't just "kill ten rats" but also "go kill the goblin king." You kill him, and the next day you run into another NPC who says "go kill the goblin king." Just once I would like to say "killed him yesterday, here's his signet ring, give me the darn reward." They could introduce a gazillion flags, which is data intensive, and the designers are probably afraid that I won't go back and help someone else kill the darn thing. So I have to kill the stupid goblin king every day. At that point, no wall of text can get me interested.
Also, three other variants on this grind really bug me.
First, is the 'the random number generator hates me' quests. You know, "kill ten rats and bring me their tails" and none of the rats have %^&*^ tails. After killing 30 and getting four tails, I want to kill the developer instead. You go on the forums and at least a half dozen people say "oh, I got mine killing only a dozen rats." I would rather the NPC say "kill fifty rats."
The second is the 'why can't you guys talk to each other' problem. In this one NPC A says "kill ten rats" and NPC B standing next to him says "kill ten wolves." You kill the ten rats and ten wolves, return, and NPC A says, "next, kill ten wolves" and NPC B says "next, kill ten rats." It is amazing how often I have bumped into variations on that one.
Finally are two variations on the classic 'hot dogs and buns' problem. One type is "kill five gribbles" and they always spawn in highly social packs of four. The other is "kill five blue gribbles and five red gribbles" and they always spawn in packs of four blue gribbles and one red gribble.
I don't really understand why MMO's can't be a lot less "tall" and a lot more "broad" in their approach.
The first few levels of an RPG are always my favorite, where you start with nothing and each new piece of equipment gives a noticeable feeling of improvement and capability. But most MMO's nowadays just blast you through this part. That paradigm makes perfect sense in single-player CRPG's, where the authors want to push you through their story in a linear fashion. But why do MMO's need to do that? Why not give me a lot more flexibility as to which zones I want to go to and whom I want to group with?
Of course, by their very nature, the pathetic souls who feel the need to "win" at an MMO will always be by far the most vocal element. But I can't help but feel there are at least a few million other people out there who are interested in the journey rather than the destination.
I blame the levels. Since levels tend to advance you in raw power rather than bredth of ability, the games too have to be "tall" rather than "broad". After all, the same area isn't going to be good for a 1st level character and a 50th level one.
I think a better approach would be something like Guild Wars, where after a certain point, there are no more levels to get and you just want to hunt new skills. Its like a collectable card game like Magic the Gathering - the new cards you get aren't necessarily more powerful than your old cards, but you collect new ones because they open up fun new tactics.
Yeah, I hate the idea of general increases in power; where your hitpoints, to-hit, defense, etc., all go up a notch at the same time.
I prefer the idea of "punctuated advancement," where ONE aspect at a time gets an improvement that you can really FEEL. Maybe like one new spell, or faster running speed, etc., every few hours - so each step can actually alter your gameplay, rather than simply advance you to the next zone.
Same with equipment. In most MMORPG's today, a piece of equipment gives you an armor increase, along with a whole bunch of stats that just advance along with it. In mythology or fantasy, each character would have a very few special items like a sword, or shield, or belt, etc., that had a very noticeable effect -- not a dozen items with a hundred bonuses and stat increases that you need a spreadsheet to keep up with.
What drugs are you on? Non-RPers don't want any story, period -- these losers are the min/maxing failbags who make the bulk of statistics telling devs that yes, players don't want text. You say these guys are more imaginative than RPers? Puh-lease. These are the unthinking reactionists who mash the esc button during videos, click the "gimmeh nao" quest button within seconds of the NPC text box coming up, and end up standing around the PVP arena yelling at each other all day long.
Whats going to happen with Onlive .com ?
How do you feel about this potential revolution?
Do you think Sony Entertainment will compete now that they have Free Realms... currently online?
(and anything else they have up their sleeves?) LOL.
The problem with levels is people start out playing with people. Their friends, guilds, people they meet in game. If they actually like the game, they play it more. But their friends may not be able to play it as much, or go out of town ect.. So they all end up at different levels doing different content. By level 25 we're all playing solo because we dont want to ever interupt our friends enjoyment by asking them to wait, or help catch up. The only time we can start to play together again is end-game. Thats why its the good part. Not because its any better content, because we can play together again. Developers keep making it worse and worse and worse. MMORPG's are about the PEOPLE playing together. That is the ONLY fun. FFS...it's a simple solution, stop ignoring the problem. Keeping friends apart is against the rules. MMORPGS are screwed when a mmo comes along and proves this.