Pardon the proceeding rant, but many MMORPGs have been stuck in the same rut for too long when it comes to questing. The classic "kill 10 rats" quest is the perfect symbol of just how stale quest design has become, and that it has been perpetuated for more than two decades bothers me. Maybe twenty years ago, these simple tasks were enough, but today they feel like pointless busywork.
Quests asking players to kill some wolves, collect herbs, or play the role of 'always overgeared and strangely compliant' FedEx man aren't creating memorable experiences anymore—they're just filling time in lieu of real content. Many of these quests are no more than daily chores I do myself, minus the rodentia brutality. Players rush through these "quests" skipping dialogue because none of it really matters, and in the off chance a quest has any complexity, it often ends up being easily forgotten, making the effort feel wasted.
When players stop caring about why they're doing a quest, the entire point of having a quest falls apart. Questing should be the backbone of MMORPGs, or at least, a primary progression driver, drawing players into the world and making them feel like they're part of something greater. Yet when quests are so generic that they don't even need to be read, what value are we really adding here? Or worse, when they are so plentiful in number that it's just elongating a leveling process arbitrarily so that they slow the discovery of an endgame that isn't entirely as fleshed out as they would have you believe. These bland, overabundant tasks aren't just boring; they fail to create any sense of investment.
This isn't to say every quest needs to be some intricate storyline rife with the complexity the likes of which games like The Secret World employed. And nobody likes complexity for the sake of complexity, that can be just as frustrating as monotonous questing. There have been a few developers that have combatted this in novel ways, where at least the theater of a choice is enough to entice players to take part. Guild Wars 2 is one such game. The public nature of questing has made it so you're dealing with problems as they happen in the world. While we might still see some personal heroic quests along with the story in Guild Wars 2, we're largely dealing with massive zone-changing events, including world boss battles that the game has largely become known for.
Dynamic events have the unique distinction that they evolve over time, creating a sense of urgency and at least a temporary impact, which is far more interesting than meeting yet another old maiden on a farm with an ongoing rat problem. However, we haven't seen a game implement a system that utilizes Dynamic Events or leverages them in a meaningful way since Guild Wars 2. Instead, we've seen some games double down on the old, tired questing system and then find ways for players to circumvent having to do it at all.
Welcome the rise of autoplay features in MMOs—where the game essentially plays itself. We haave seen this mostly in mobile titles, but recently we've started to see it rear its ugly head in PC MMOs too. Sure, we have games like Old School RuneScape and Black Desert Online that have some Autoplay features, but we've even gone so far as to see cross platform pseudo-MMOs like AFK Journey completely build the case for the entirety of the game to play itself. While this may be expected of their brand, as platforms become marginal hindrances as technology advances, the last thing I'd want to see is an excess of autoplay MMORPGs.
When questing and leveling are so dull that players prefer to let the game do it for them, something has gone very wrong. MMOs should be about adventure, exploration, and overcoming challenges—not watching your character do the work with the click of a button.
If you're an oldschool gamer, where do you stand on this issue? While the old ways are familiar, and there's certainly some nostalgia to those first few steps of questing, are you like me? Do you want to see some evolution in the genre? Jump into the comments and tell us about it.
