Goblin Squad Member
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- Keep an eye out for arrows and guard your knees!
Wow! I just found a new area! There's 15 new quests, and I can unlock even more by doing those! Of course it's really the same five basic tasks with minor variations, given with blocks of text that are meant to make them seem interesting but at boring themselves. Time to grind this out and claim my rewards!
I think we've all been there, and none of us are particularly eager to see this in PFO. So how can we make it more interesting?
- You need apples for a pie? Sounds like a quest!
I think the biggest problem with questing in MMOs is that everything is a quest. MMO developers are struggling to find stories to make all these quests seem relavent when they should be asking, "Does this even need to be a quest?", "Will anyone actually find this fun?"
Rather than hundreds of quests telling you to kill different monster types what if there were bounty boards advertising what needs killing and magistrates paying for their heads? What if instead of quests asking you to recover items the vendors in the market would just advertise they are buying certain things? Not only does this cut out the need for a ridiculous storyline, but it makes it easier for things to adapt with the changing escalation cycles, and for players to post up their own bounties and item requests.
What if instead of a camp outside of every dungeon with a bunch of quest giver screaming "Please kill Lord Gotye, he kicked my monkey and used my goat!" there was just a dungeon sitting there filled with dangers and rewards?
- Will quest for food!
So if all the tedious tasks aren't quests, what kind of quests should there be?
Long and interesting storyline quests, with recurring characters, plot twists, and voice actors. These should be the only quests we ever encouter, and there shouldn't be a great deal of them. But these kinds of quests are Pathfinder! Think of them as mini-adventure paths set into the greater world of Pathfinder Online.
No the developers can't supply is with enough of these quests to keep us constantly occupied but that's never been the point of this game. If they add and expand the epic quest arcs here and there it will just allow us to taste the great storytelling of the Pathfinder brand in the same world loaded with great player driven content.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I like it. And it makes it seam more real also. Real meaning if RL was in a fantasy setting....
I would love to see this, honestly. And as you said, demands could adapt to escalation cycles and such. Goblins becoming a nuisance because of a growing escalation, how about a post on the "task board" (Working name) stating the mayor will pay 1s per goblin head. (Amount just picked assuming gold is rare-ish) Anyway, I support this idea.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I agree. A quest should be something momentous, not a 'job'.
Kicking the Goblins out of the Cabbage-Field is a monday morning.
Going into the Goblin Tribe's lair and hunting down clues as to who is arming them with new, lethal weaponry and alchemical poisons is a quest.
Going down to pick up the Inn-Keeper's daily load of firewood in lieu of paying for a meal isn't a quest.
Going out to the Lumber Mill after several days of silence and messengers not returning can potentially be the start of a quest.
To me, that's one of the annoyances in WoW's questing. You're being paid for helping your people survive. Soldiers get paid, but it always struck me as ironic that there's plot-points throughout the game that both sides were on the edge of fiscal collapse, yet they'll give you several hundred gold coins for a bag of buzzard asses ... and you're supposed to be a champion of your people and faction?
There's a Bandit Clan raiding nearby ... either get off your ass and help and be prepared to support those who are defending. It's your civic duty as a member of the Settlement!
Your 'reward' is the removal of these parasites who are destroying the Development Indexes with their actions and the preservation of your Settlement, and all the tasty benefits it provides. Plus anything you can prise from their dirty, viscera-smeared corpses.
I need you to deliver a crate of turnips to the market, that's a job, and you'll get money and/or goods accordingly.
I need you to delve into the forest to collect a rare herb that I'm trying to cultivate and farm, and it may or may not be protected by an angry Dryad ... that's a quest. Your life is most definitely on the line, and it's a mission that could have far-reaching repercussions for the surrounding hexes. That is a Quest.
I agree.
I view a quest as something adventurous and important. MMOs generally use the word "quest" pretentiously to glorify boring and repetitive tasks.
The only type of "questing" I enjoyed were the longer, more immersive and varied chains.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I don't think it's possible to do quests in the traditional sense that are worth making as a serious system. They can't and don't compare to PnP GM led quests we naturally would contrast to. They're primarily filler content in a lot of forms. Making them more sophisticated, as per Dynamic Event content imho is adding a lot of work to adding a very small improvement over a very repetitive and finite content.
This GDC talk goes through how quests have developed in mmorpgs: Designing Guild Wars 2 Dynamic Events
Various mmos have gone for dynamic quests eg Firefall, Age of Wushu. I personally think it's still very limited.
The Repopulation has a system for "mission generation" that seems to feed data on your character into tailoring a mission for you. That sounds quite interesting, albeit again I don't see it being very powerful:
An Advanced Generated Mission system allows us to create complex multi-stage missions which are tailored specifically for your character.
Missions can have branching outcomes based on a player’s actions.
Generated missions are mailed to your character as job offers and are accessible from anywhere in the game using your in-game PDA system.
NPCs can talk about things that have happened to them to other players and NPCs.
Your actions will be remembered by NPCs, and they may exploit your tendencies if you let them.
One Time Missions spawn in random locations throughout the wilderness to encourage exploration.
Players can filter which types of missions they wish to receive, so only those missions are generated for them.
Missions are not all combat oriented. There are crafting, harvesting, diplomatic, and other non-combat variations available.
Completing missions in a group will generate bonus rewards and automatically split them among your group.
I know there is an mmo in development that indicated GM-derived quests, but forget the details. I think that has more chance of breaking the mould but it depends on how frequent that is and for how many. Effectively the devs have to be able to change things up. It's a reason why I think Escalations are interesting because they potentially are a dynamic system to interact with, that actually does something to the game world ie affect your economic operations, increase the danger of an area, turn up in a lightning raid and sabotage your crops/workers - ie inputs into the benefit or damage to your character(s) and your character's (s') goals.
EQ:N is using a story-bricks tech probably to allow players to create content/quests in some manner. That's another approach. Again, I prefer the attempt at simulation above that is a system you interact with and the output is a sort of story.
A mmo in development "Revival" is attempting a "generate on the spot quests which are more like singular events for creating your own experiences:
How you play has serious consequences to your player and the world around you. When we first launch Revival, we may have a quest around a cave to go hunt someone or something like that. That quest will go away, and come back again after a period of time, every time a player does it. Eventually, we’ll completely take the quest away. Some quests, you will only get one chance to ever do it. With our Live Storytelling aspect, you have a shot of witnessing and being involved in something that will never happen again. If there is a quest about stopping someone from building an army – if you do not stop that person, that army will be built, and that army will attack in full force. If you do not stop the army from being built, whatever it was that they’re attacking could be destroyed forever. All players are unique, they all experience something different, just like in the real world.
Ideally the above reads to me as a quest is a catalist for devs to spark a wider impact that could be random ie an escalation that then affects other players or areas.
I'd say GM's and players using a monster cast would need to orchestrate a "quest/epic arc" events sometimes for a significant PvE content. Otherwise imho, Contracts are much more powerful "quest material" it would seem. The only thing lacking is the story-telling and perhaps less integration with lore elements, though the context is suitable enough.
If GW are looking for small mini-quests to tag onto Escalation cycles, as a small diet of PvE content for players that simply love that stuff, I think adding lore stuff there is worthwile, and hopefully dependent on NPC reactions to your Alignment - I think for friendly you need to help spread them, promote their goals, and vica-versa enemy alignments, limit their goals. Their goals ideally feeding into other systems that have knock-on effects on the game world.
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Goblin Squad Member
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From today's Q&A on MMORPG.com
Formal quests where an NPC tells you to go do something for some reward will be modeled on the Agents of EVE Online. There will be a short list of mad-lib style assignments you can request and get paid for competing. The point of those things is to act as a faucet to allow us to inject Coin and potentially resources into the game, and potentially to drive some over-arching narrative plotlines.
We expect that players will be requesting other players to do all sorts of things for player-driven reasons, and those activities will be more rich and more interesting than anything we could design a repeatable script to do.
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Goblin Squad Member
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From today's Q&A on MMORPG.com
Formal quests where an NPC tells you to go do something for some reward will be modeled on the Agents of EVE Online. There will be a short list of mad-lib style assignments you can request and get paid for competing. The point of those things is to act as a faucet to allow us to inject Coin and potentially resources into the game, and potentially to drive some over-arching narrative plotlines.
We expect that players will be requesting other players to do all sorts of things for player-driven reasons, and those activities will be more rich and more interesting than anything we could design a repeatable script to do.
I like that. It gives players who may not have had access to decent MMOs and Computer Games a starting point, or rather a stable and familiar starting point, and it also allows the flow of 'Currency' into the game-world to be heavily controlled.
That also makes me think of something ....