There are more than a few items that have been in the mmo genre for a long time that are well frankly boring, these are also things that provide opportunity to set one's self apart.
Mounts. Yep they've been around for a long time, and they are nothing more than a movement buff usually... dull and boring. How could we possibly improve on them? Well for starters you could make them not disapear when you get off of them, though I wouldn't go so far as make them killable. Getting down from your horse ccould establish you camp spot, so if you die you can spawn back at your horse as an option rather than just some points of interest. There would be limits on where your mount might go to limit abuse such as they won't go in dungeons or other adventure heavy areas. When you log off your horse disapears with you so you don't see fields of horses every where you go. Allow your mount to have storage and containers perhaps with spare sets of gear for that inevitable corpse run. Equipment that can affect the speed and strength of the animal as well as give it unique traits. Perhaps a requirement to keep it fed with feed to keep the animal happy. High grade or even magical feed might improve stats or have other effects over time. Alot of options here to improve this aspect.
Weapon proficiencies skills. Great in theory, but usually in practise these sytems are usually boring and neglected and often removed from games altogether. Instead of just improving their rank from what ever base is to 5x your level is lets add in some trainers every 50 pts or so, yeah there could be that generic trainer whom will teach the base skill at many towns and cities. But what if we add specialized trainers that you can find out in the world. Maybe you need so much faction with them before they will teach you, or maybe you need to do a questline to prove your worth. However what if instead of being Sword Skill II(26-50 skill) you could learn "Mid Guard" from a knight for the 26-50 skill slot that adds a 2% parry bonus or something similar. Maybe a known gladiator will show you some "Dirty Tricks" giving your auto attacks a chance to interrupt or a small chance of a short stun. A fencer might teach you how to maximize your reach giving you a slight range buff or a stance that helps to side step attack. Each of these 25 proficiency ranges could contain a new stance or form, giving you creative control over your fighting style with auto attacks. Some stances might require higher skill slots, while others will be limited to certain weapon types. So instead of simply having 250 spear proficiency, you've studied with the hunters of the king's woods, learned with the rangers of the hidden vale, lived with the grove guard elves and have been challenged by the master monks of sky temple... Meaningfull content ideas that shape a players experiance and story and I believe that's cool.
Make quests great. I can't stress this enough. People skip through quests in MMOs usually because they are so often so boring and generic. Some great stuff coming with what Pantheon is doing with the perception system and such I really look forward to it. But if the first handfull of quests aren't engaging, and aren't set up in a way to make a player think on how he wishes to solve it, or to tell compelling storyline; then the player will probably not be invested in later quests and will develop the habits and desire to rush through them. Questing if done right won't be viewed as means to get to content that a player wants to play, it will BE the content the player looks forward to playing. For example a simpler engaging quest could be like say a quest to investigate why some merchents are disapearing along a forest road. You get there and then you find a broken down wagon with tracks leading deeper into the forest. You follow them only to find a crude and hastely constructed fort against a cliff face, you climb a tree to get a better look, and you see orcs using what appears to be the merchants as slave labor leading them into a mine. You take your findings back to the quest giver and the townfolk pool their resources to hire you to gather a party to go rescue the captured men. You round up some partymembers and you either find a way to sneak in or fight your way in to get to the captured men. You escort them to the town and are handsomely rewarded for returning the men home safely to their loved ones, but all is not ok. The shaman that was leading those orcs had apparantly found the artifact they were looking for and had taken it to some fortress deeper in orc country, and it's only a matter of time till they unlock it's secrets and use it against the realm of man.... The point is here, I don't think anyone wants kill x mobs of this type styled quests or fedex style quests.
Hidden achievements and traits that have very real benifits to you or gear that you may have. Maybe you performed 12 miracles like hercules and gain a slight blessing of strength. Or maybe you are swimming across a river when suddenly you get a message that your silver gilded longsword just gained the trait orc slayer. All you really know was that you are swimming when it happened, but what actually triggered the trait was that your sword has been used in the slaying of 500 orcs, it has tasted the blood of 5 royal bloodlines of orcs, it has delivered the killing blow to a high orc shaman, and finally it has bathed in the blessed waters of Trinidine river where 200 years ago a great orc warlord and his horde was defeated. The goal here should be to make these long and difficult with the requirements hidden, with at most a hint or two at some of the more common ones. Now eventually the community will probably discover the steps to unlocking the various traits, but by the time all of them are discovered the next big content drop could be just around the corner and a whole list of fun new stuff could be waiting to be discovered once again.
Itemization is an aspect I feel is over done in most MMO's. We don't need loot penyatas of gear everywhere we go. A couple items off of mobs in a dungeon over the course of a craw, a piece off of named kills, and maybe two pieces off a boss encounter is plenty. Raids maybe have 2 per boss with maybe a top tier boss or dragon kill awarding no more than 2 or 3 really good pieces, but maybe several lesser pieces. But the best stuff should come from long hard quests that require engagement with most aspects of game play from getting certain rare materials crafted, going to certain dungeon and completing tasks, to completing certain raid bosses. Allow these items to be great not by simply making them overpowered in terms of statistics but by how they can fundamentally alter how your character works opening exciting new modes of gameplay. And please don't stop at just one epic quest either, these are the things that players will remember; these are things that can set a game apart from the competition.
Auctioneers... get rid of them. They create a very centralised market that makes price manipulation easy. It also eliminates any potential for regional trade. Allow players the possibility to hire merchants possibly that will buy or sell certain items at set prices a player chooses but don't allow an auction system. Players can also conduct player to player transactions as they see fit.
Market based rents as a means for opt in services. Things like bank space, player housing and the aforementioned hired vendors could have their supply limited by location. Every week people can bid on those things for their use the following week. This will help alot to keep inflation at a minimum, and further helps to decentralize the economy.
Just a few things to throw out there...
Just replying to let you know I agree in principle with everything you are driving at in this post.
I could go into a lot of detail on what I hope to see for each of those things (they've all been discussed in these forums in the past), but all that would do would probably be to draw people out who really seem to enjoy arguing with everyone who doesn't share their exact vision for the future.
I think the main thing that many of us would like to see is for Pantheon to evolve the MMORPG genre in a more positive direction. This means different things to different people, but a component of it absolutely should be looking at some of the tired old tropes that abound in these games, and asking the question: "Can we do something more with this to make a more meaningful experience?"
Anyway, kudos for a good post :)
Much I agree with much I do not agree with - how could it be otherwise with so many different points discussed.
VR likes to say that these are development forums not general discussion forums and encourages us to keep comments on specific issues in threads devoted to those issues. Thus you might consider doing a forum search on any issues you care more than others about and giving your opinions in threads already devoted to them. Even if they are old threads - resurrecting old threads is encouraged over staring new ones in many cases. A point it took me a while to figure out.
I agree with Nephele that it was a good post.
Belzavior said:Make quests great. I can't stress this enough. People skip through quests in MMOs usually because they are so often so boring and generic.
People skip quests because they don't want to read. If you allow any means of a player to skip the quest text to get straight to the objective, most people will do this. When the internet is filled with TLDR, the problem isn't the content, it is the people. I think the best solution for a quest is not to allow people to skip by not giving them an easy way out with quest summaries, click key words, etc..., but most people would be against that because most people want to skip it anyway.
Tanix said:Belzavior said:Make quests great. I can't stress this enough. People skip through quests in MMOs usually because they are so often so boring and generic.
People skip quests because they don't want to read. If you allow any means of a player to skip the quest text to get straight to the objective, most people will do this. When the internet is filled with TLDR, the problem isn't the content, it is the people. I think the best solution for a quest is not to allow people to skip by not giving them an easy way out with quest summaries, click key words, etc..., but most people would be against that because most people want to skip it anyway.
I simply disagree once again. I'm gonna make an assumption in that you have at some point enjoyed reading novels, maybe you still do read alot. What sepperates your favorite authors from the rest? For me it either engages me with compelling story, well thought out and deep plots, and characters that have personality. If a book is lacking these things no amount of cover art is gonna convince me to continue reading it. Now maybe if someone wanted to pay a small reward for completing it (like a quest reward) I would skim over it as fast as I could; but it would never make it a good book. TLDR is a byproduct of bad story and engagement and not the other way around.
Let's talk quest journals.
I don't want to sprint to max level by clicking hightlighted links. What made everquest great was learning how NOT to get to max level but instead explore, fight, quest, hunt for gear, learn by accident was possible to hand lightstones to a gypsy in Karana for a book. Detailed quest journals in game are indispensible because nobody can remember how to juggle 10 simultaneous quests. But how you get them into the journal could use some exploration, and for this reason I love the achievement system in eq1. It gives me a place to track prerequites for future things I want to do.
Regarding quest text, I'm 100% guilty of not reading the mini-wall of text that comes when one quest giver spews out everything he knows about his "problem" all at once. Nobody would do that even in a fantasy movie. It's too much, way too unreal and tl;dr---real communication exchanges take time and trust and are believable and make you think what is best to say next. But maybe I will just be curious about an oddly behaving NPC that stands out from the rest of the group he's standing near. Please don't put a feather over his head or even the word "merchant", but if he's kicking the dirt looking annoyed while his cohorts are calmly sharpening weapons or reading books, that's a good hint something is up with this guy. Make me accidentally stumble onto his camp in the process of doing a different quest. I want to think I discovered him because I happened to track a different quest npc into a grove that isn't noticable until you get right up on it. And whatever you do, don't make a loot database, that just makes people feel bad when they don't have the good stuff. It's about exploring, puzzling, and laughing at the easter eggs, not being top on the dps parse or raiding for the weapon that accomplishes same.
That's what was intriguing about Eq1 except there was simply way too few of these kinds of multi-npc and multi-dungeon long meandering questlines, barring epics. (Eventually people figured out clerics level faster killing skellies at the commonlands tower.) Do, however, give us tools to find a way out if we get stumped. There has to be a cheat sheet website, but let us opt-in to various detail level hints, from minimal "He looks like he might have more to say" to medium "His glare seems to reflect his hate for your race." to maximal (nobody would ever think to say) "He wants you to say blech blarney and bongo blip". Heck, make us pay for the hints with ingame currency as an economy sink. Everything should be a puzzle to be solved, you don't get it then look harder. NO LINKS IN QUEST TEXT but some method to confirm our thinking is on the right path, verify or find out if we are on the right track or not, possibly from the questgiver himself or at a meditation statue where we can engage in personal reflection and gain internal insight (this was tried in eq1 PoT to let players know what flags they still needed, and was a bit tedious but could have been improved for this purpose). One example done right, the bard in Abysmal Sea, who smiles at you when you say the right text, in eq1's 10th anniversary Pub Crawl quest. To guess, you'd have to repeat every line of all his whole 10 song repertoire, but eventually you would figure out which song makes him smile as long as something along the way gave you the tip off that he likes when people join him singing. Bad on ZAM for making it possible to just copy paste the precise answers into hotkeys. That turns off the people who like to think they hacked the game by figuring out the puzzle without help or finding a new way to do something (kiting was fun even if unintended, figuring out who drops what keys in Nagena is fun by design, but multi-day ring events==not so much).
Make quest text as much like a real interaction with a real person as possible, we do have Cleverbot style databases to utilize, maybe you could use some AI to shake it up a bit, like random quest givers say something just a tiny bit different each time, so it's never possible to itemize on a website precisely what to say when others do the quest, make it about the idea expected, not the words expected. Perhaps there is a .05% chance the quest giver won't give the quest at all because he's in a bad mood, dictated by today's game-wide difficulty epsilon variable (which changes minutely daily) tweaks a stat that makes obtaining this quest over your luck threshold for today. Just make it clear what the rules are so we know to try again tomorrow. "It appears Blergle isn't in the mood to talk today, why don't you check on him tomorrow."
I for sure like all of that. I am certainly not against their interaction menu, or the perception system or any of that. I don't need feathers over their heads or any of that nonsense either. My wish though is simply that they don't do all of these cool things and then ask us to kill 12 wolves standing 20 yards away. None of all that cool UI stuff and interaction stuff, and npc behavior matters in the end if the quest it's self is boring and meaningless.
As for journals I think they should be limited to a seperate thing you have to open up that only tells you who the npc was and word for word what they told you. I would rather not have a quest helper thing that sits at the side of the screen or having it telling me step by step what to do. If for some reason people don't want to figure it out, or get stumped I'm not against people looking online for help, and it would be nearly impossible to protect against anyhow. But I would prefer that style of hand holding not be kind of forced upon me, or the default.
Two things most MMOs ttally whiff on imho:
1) Faction. In most games, faction is background fluff at best and serves no real purpose. Your race, class, religon, politics, alignment, etc...all meaningless as far as the game mechanics are concerned. EQ1 came as close as anyone in vanilla and Kunark, but it started going downhill into the land of "everyone is welcome everywhere" blandness around Luclin and then finished itself off in Planes of Power with the Plane of Knowledge. Faction was totally meaningless at that point, and it's never been remotely meaningful in any MMO since.
An example of how it should work - Plane of Hate and Plane of Fear. In EQ1, Innoruuk worshipping characters should have been able to advance faction enough to have Plane of Hate as a quest hub. Cazic Thule worshipping characters should have been able to advance faction enough to make Plane of Fear a quest hub. Think Brood of Di'Zok and the quests that eventually led to doing favors for Queen Di'Zok. Faction should matter.
2) Evil. Almost no MMO since EQ1 has had proper evil races and a clearly defined good vs evil vibe that the players can pick sides with. In every game, it's either good or "goodly" neutral, and everyone bands together against Teh Terribad Evilz. And even EQ1, again, went downhill with that after Luclin. Good and evil gave way to bland neutrality. Why? And why are evil classes available to non-evil races/religions? Sorry, but if there is a necromancer, direlord (blackgaurd/deathknight/whatever) or similarly evil class, they should restrict that class to evil races and religion only, and those classes should be properly evil. Things like making food out of goodly folk, like Elven Veal and Gnome Kabobs, should be restricted to evil only.
The bottom line is that most MMOs make your RP choices for you, and offer very little off the "everyone is goodly folk who are here to save the world" beaten path. And these are stale concepts.
Belzavior said:Tanix said:Belzavior said:Make quests great. I can't stress this enough. People skip through quests in MMOs usually because they are so often so boring and generic.
People skip quests because they don't want to read. If you allow any means of a player to skip the quest text to get straight to the objective, most people will do this. When the internet is filled with TLDR, the problem isn't the content, it is the people. I think the best solution for a quest is not to allow people to skip by not giving them an easy way out with quest summaries, click key words, etc..., but most people would be against that because most people want to skip it anyway.
I simply disagree once again. I'm gonna make an assumption in that you have at some point enjoyed reading novels, maybe you still do read alot. What sepperates your favorite authors from the rest? For me it either engages me with compelling story, well thought out and deep plots, and characters that have personality. If a book is lacking these things no amount of cover art is gonna convince me to continue reading it. Now maybe if someone wanted to pay a small reward for completing it (like a quest reward) I would skim over it as fast as I could; but it would never make it a good book. TLDR is a byproduct of bad story and engagement and not the other way around.
The problem with your argument is that it ratiionalizes it position on subjectivism. We can not meet some elusive means to appeal to everyone as to what quest subject or text is considered "acceptable". That is, if your argument is that people skip text because they think the story is bad, well... we can not establish any solid foundation on such a premise as each individual views things in various means of acceptance. So, by the basics of logic and reality, we can not please everyone, so therefore basing ones argument on that foundation is invalid, irrelevant, and pointless as an objection.
Yes, "some"people will not like the story, but that is not justification for dumbing down the system.
I think it really varies on quest dialouge. Sometimes I like reading it, sometimes I don't. If the story is engaging I'll read more than a farmer who wants me to go collect 10 cabbages for him. I really enjoy the MSQ in FF14. There is some voice acting and some reading and I've read most of it, but there are times where I just don't want to bother. I skip the text and move on.
Now my hope with Pantheon is fewer more meaningful quests. I don't want quests to be a means of leveling up but rather towards items, or other rewards. I don't want quest hubs or anything else where i walk into a village and everyone has some menial task for me to complete.
That being said I see no harm in letting someone skip the quest text. If they choose not to read it then it has no impact on my gaming experience. Honestly if you don't allow people to skip through text it is going to be deeply critcized after launch and I'd accept it to be changed. You should make people want to read the text, but if they don't want to I see no benefit in forcing them to.
Questing was birthed in MMOs, by design they are ment to be what they are now. It comes down to choice, whether you want to read the text or not. You can't go with one side, you need to choose whether you want to involve yourself in the story, if you care enough. BUT, what you can do is have a quest have multiple answers and mulitple ways of finishing them. Adding a "multiple choice" type way of finishing quests. Nothing would be stagnant, also adding different rewards for finishing the quest a certain way.
I'm the type of person that likes long quests as opposed to smaller and more quests. It makes the quests feel more important. Attunement quests have always been a favorite for me, when you need to really focus on completeing a certain quest that unlocks an area. Some people are not too fond of those quests but like @Tanix said, you can't please everyone.
Tanix said:Belzavior said:Tanix said:Belzavior said:Make quests great. I can't stress this enough. People skip through quests in MMOs usually because they are so often so boring and generic.
People skip quests because they don't want to read. If you allow any means of a player to skip the quest text to get straight to the objective, most people will do this. When the internet is filled with TLDR, the problem isn't the content, it is the people. I think the best solution for a quest is not to allow people to skip by not giving them an easy way out with quest summaries, click key words, etc..., but most people would be against that because most people want to skip it anyway.
I simply disagree once again. I'm gonna make an assumption in that you have at some point enjoyed reading novels, maybe you still do read alot. What sepperates your favorite authors from the rest? For me it either engages me with compelling story, well thought out and deep plots, and characters that have personality. If a book is lacking these things no amount of cover art is gonna convince me to continue reading it. Now maybe if someone wanted to pay a small reward for completing it (like a quest reward) I would skim over it as fast as I could; but it would never make it a good book. TLDR is a byproduct of bad story and engagement and not the other way around.
The problem with your argument is that it ratiionalizes it position on subjectivism. We can not meet some elusive means to appeal to everyone as to what quest subject or text is considered "acceptable". That is, if your argument is that people skip text because they think the story is bad, well... we can not establish any solid foundation on such a premise as each individual views things in various means of acceptance. So, by the basics of logic and reality, we can not please everyone, so therefore basing ones argument on that foundation is invalid, irrelevant, and pointless as an objection.
Yes, "some"people will not like the story, but that is not justification for dumbing down the system.
It doesn't matter if the Game writer, Developer, or any number of players feel a story is good, its not a subjective truth to the player wishing to skip what they see as a poor experience, bad writing or just uninteresting.
People know what they like, and any attempt as your suggested to prevent the ability to skip what is perceived as boring will only encourage people to just quit the game, I know I would.
Additionally, when your boil it down, if your write a story and feel the need to force your audience to consume it, then you already know it’s garbage.
HemlockReaper said:Tanix said:Belzavior said:Tanix said:Belzavior said:Make quests great. I can't stress this enough. People skip through quests in MMOs usually because they are so often so boring and generic.
People skip quests because they don't want to read. If you allow any means of a player to skip the quest text to get straight to the objective, most people will do this. When the internet is filled with TLDR, the problem isn't the content, it is the people. I think the best solution for a quest is not to allow people to skip by not giving them an easy way out with quest summaries, click key words, etc..., but most people would be against that because most people want to skip it anyway.
I simply disagree once again. I'm gonna make an assumption in that you have at some point enjoyed reading novels, maybe you still do read alot. What sepperates your favorite authors from the rest? For me it either engages me with compelling story, well thought out and deep plots, and characters that have personality. If a book is lacking these things no amount of cover art is gonna convince me to continue reading it. Now maybe if someone wanted to pay a small reward for completing it (like a quest reward) I would skim over it as fast as I could; but it would never make it a good book. TLDR is a byproduct of bad story and engagement and not the other way around.
The problem with your argument is that it ratiionalizes it position on subjectivism. We can not meet some elusive means to appeal to everyone as to what quest subject or text is considered "acceptable". That is, if your argument is that people skip text because they think the story is bad, well... we can not establish any solid foundation on such a premise as each individual views things in various means of acceptance. So, by the basics of logic and reality, we can not please everyone, so therefore basing ones argument on that foundation is invalid, irrelevant, and pointless as an objection.
Yes, "some"people will not like the story, but that is not justification for dumbing down the system.
It doesn't matter if the Game writer, Developer, or any number of players feel a story is good, its not a subjective truth to the player wishing to skip what they see as a poor experience, bad writing or just uninteresting.
People know what they like, and any attempt as your suggested to prevent the ability to skip what is perceived as boring will only encourage people to just quit the game, I know I would.
Additionally, when your boil it down, if your write a story and feel the need to force your audience to consume it, then you already know it’s garbage.
You like cake, I like pie. What you think is bad, I think is good. Because of this it is impossible to attend to everyone. That is, you may think the story is bad, I may think it is good so there is no means to establish who is right, merely a polling of opinions as to what the majority likes at any given speciifc and this is impossible to establish because opinions, tastes vary.
The point of forcing people to read is not because the story is garbage, it is because it is a component of gaming. That is, the player must then critically read, pull out all the relevant information that will allow them to further a query an obtain more information concerning the quest (an element of adventure questing of old where the player had to figure out what to do next, what was relevant or important. Whether they "like" the story is irrelevant, the game play is what I am talking about, that the player in this case will be required to figure out what is needed for the quest while the quest "highlights" just dumbly point the player to the objectives without thought.
That is the quest text could simply be various dialog interaction you have with the NPC and what is important in that dialog will be up to the player to figure out. It doesn't matter if the story is good or bad in this case as this has no bearing on that point. You can have a great story or a horrible story, the player still has to figure out what is needed through investigating in dialog.
What the poster I was talking to was objecting to was my point that people don't want to read and that is why people click thorugh the quests. Their premise was that people don't read because the quests are horribly written and that if they were written well, players would read them. I disagree with this as 1) what is good or bad is entirely subjective (which was the point I was making) and 2) in my experience in games like LoTRO where the quests were often quite good, people still didn't read the quests.
So again, my game play point forces people to play a game rather than simply click through everything and whether they like the quest or not is entirely subjective to which you can not solve the issue by simply saying "write better quests".