Kilsin said:Community Debate - Side Quests - What makes you stop to check out a side quest and how do you decide whether to complete it or rudely decline, leaving the NPC stranded and in need of 40 apples for their pigs? #MMORPG #CommunityMatters
You kinda hit they nail on the head with the whole "40 apples". Is it a simple annoying fetch quest for some coin? Denied! Is it under my level but has good lore behind it with a decent gear reward? Might click accept. Is it a rare hard to find side epic spanning the continent, great story with a cool clicky or BIS ring? Hellz yeah! Lets go!
Recent MMOs are all about level level level! Get to the end before we start having fun. If you want me to enjoy the journey, make the side quests interesing, fun, and engaging. Useful loot is not required but a great bonus.
I always do side quests, because you never know what you are going to get. To me, it doesn't matter what the quest is, I like to complete what quests I want or even all of them depending on how I feel that day, and depending on my time I have to play. Even if the promise is just some coin and you move on after getting the apples, that coin could be used later for something. Not only that, but the quest could lead to something else; sure I might be getting 40 apples right now, but while I'm getting those 40 apples, I might stumble across a corpse or something, leading me to a bigger mystery and possibly a completely different side quest than what I signed up for.
To be perfectly honest, I would rather have side quests that are fun and not all that in depth; and have that depth put into the main story line. If you can have both be in depth without it impacting anything else then go for it, it doesn't hurt; but if time is a factor, then focus on the main story as the main story give people a guide on what they could do next to advance and give them the choice of advancing or not.
I'm doing every single quest there is - even if it's level 1 quest from the starting area of different race and I'm close to end game - leaving things undone always bothered me, besides I like to explore and expirienve everything there is. If menial task leads to something epic later on - and with perception system it's even more recommended than usual - it would be amazing.
The first time through I will do them all - if reasonably possible.
"Is it a simple annoying fetch quest for some coin? Denied! Is it under my level but has good lore behind it with a decent gear reward? Might click accept. Is it a rare hard to find side epic spanning the continent, great story with a cool clicky or BIS ring? Hellz yeah! Lets go!"
Unless I have already done it or looked it up on some out-of-game site how could I possible *know* which of these things it is? So I do it.
On later trips through the world I will do it if the reward seems worth the time or I like the story it tells enough to repeat it. I will not do it just for the sake of doing every single quest on every character.
If VR wants us to do all the quests every time through the game they should give an incentive such as a meta-quest to complete every quest in an area. With an appealing reward. Not huge amounts of experience that isn't what Pantheon should be pushing but a title or cosmetic outfit or mount or home decoration or ......
I dont mind side quests that leave me hanging, or rather that I can leave hanging. By that I mean in the above example, i'll put that on back burner because I'm doing more important stuff, and If I happen to hear someone talking about their cousin in a dungeon- good luck with that. Buuut if the group is doing stuff and we're heading to a particular dungeon and I happen to see apples as we are going, i'll pluck them. And if we just so happen to go into the one dungeon where there happens to be a relative? then the next time I pass through the areas I will touch base with the NPC's and feed the apples to the pigs and deliver the note from the cousin. (and secretly hope it leads to something else and the pigs snout ring is something ill need to turn in but is useable until I do.)
In current MMOs where the quests are just your story mode to get to max level it leaves you pretty disengaged from the quest even if it is well written.
Back in EQ I would sometimes take a day off from the level grind of camping and just go around doing quests and I remember being a lot more invested in them.
Xanafel said:You kinda hit they nail on the head with the whole "40 apples". Is it a simple annoying fetch quest for some coin? Denied! Is it under my level but has good lore behind it with a decent gear reward? Might click accept. Is it a rare hard to find side epic spanning the continent, great story with a cool clicky or BIS ring? Hellz yeah! Lets go!
About does it for me.
The exception to the rule is if I intensely love the game and don't feel like I am in a rush.
I have done an incredible amount of side quests for Dark Souls, Breath of the Wild, and Skyrim. I just love those games so much that while I am playing them I want to experience as much of them as possible. They also never made me feel like I need to spend so much time with their main goals, that I can't take the time to do something on the side.
On the other hand, EQ made me feel like rushing to my main goals for it, so despite my love for EQ, I never did most of the available quests for it. It is called "Ever"quest for a reason.
When playing EQ I would only do a quest if the items was of interest and many times would only look up the quest once I had a quest item. In VG and every game since I took every quest I ran into as it was the fastest way to gain experience in most cases.
I am hoping pantheon will have a closer experience to EQ than later games. I feel the best way to accomplish this is to remove the EXP gain from quests.
If the quests had no EXP reward but there were still lots of quests I would just be pickier on what ones I took. By lowering the number of quests taken, I would take more time in an area, exploring for the sake of exploring and not being lead around form quest to quest. I would hope this would lead me back to EQ play style which was more open world and less them park feel.
In more recent games as soon as the quests in the area are completed, I move on, checking the area off of my todo list looking for the next area with quests. Even when I know this is a horrible way to play a game the quest system in recent games draw me to this kind of play style and I just can’t seem to stop myself.
Kilsin said:Community Debate - Side Quests - What makes you stop to check out a side quest and how do you decide whether to complete it or rudely decline, leaving the NPC stranded and in need of 40 apples for their pigs? #MMORPG #CommunityMatters
Well, I have a hard time turning down quests, just because I want to say I did everything I possibly could. But if a quest is literally just collecting 40 apples, that is something that might result in me rudely declining. I'm much more likely to undertake a more involved quest with multiple parts, especially if I don't have my hand held through it with sparkly items to pick up or destination markers on a map.
If the quest is boring (like collecting 40 apples sounds at least) I only will do it, if the rewards seems worth it. This will probably be more of a problem a few expansions down the lane, as lots of stuff will be outdated by then (at least it is in the games i know). So there would also be the need to keep in mind that these kind of quests stay worthwile doing!
If the quest promises to be fun by itself, the reward wouldn't be important to me. I would do it anyways, even if there where no reward at all.
Unfortunately I haven't seen much quests of these sort, as they have to be designed carefully and still will be appreciated only once. I remember that horror house at EQ2 for Halloween. Such fun, but only the first time around. As the next Halloween came I was eager to see what they came up with this year and was honestly annoyed to learn that they just use the same scenario year after year.
I absolutely get it from the devs perspective. It would be an impossible task to dish out new and amazing stories all the time. On the other hand, this is what it would take to keep an world interesting longtermwise.
I'm very curious about the quest design in Pantheon, as Joppa just told us in the latest dev roundtable, that they dont' want to make everything about fights. This could be great, but it also can mean, that we just get more repetetive stuff of other sorts, like collecting 40 apples or deliver letters to dozens of people. Without an immersive story behind it, you will skip it or try to figure out, how you can do it as fast as possible to get your reward and be done with it, because it is more like work and not fun.
Again, I absolutely get, that a quest design that sucks a player into a story would be very time consuming and therefore probably will occur very rarely. Hehe, I assume I would love having an adventure game built into an MMO (like The Longest Journey or such). One can dream. :)
It's hard to answer either of these questions without providing examples.
Though it would have been more intriguing as a centaur, the headless horseman in Skyrim got my attention and would have held it until the completion if any side quest had one been associated with it. I followed and kept paced with it on multiple occasions, thinking it would lead to a battlefield where its fallen comrades would arise in ghost form and battle reenact the events that led to their demise. Finally I relented and checked online to find no related quest, nothing. But even that left behind a better memory than the generic side quests. But again, the quests that show something without telling much of anything are more compelling. When the NPC doesn't respond. When it sits weeping under a tree or over a well. I climb the tree. I swim down to the bottom of the well. I ask questions, not in the chat window but in my mind. The apples aren't mentioned directly and neither are the pigs. I have to put 2 and 2 together, or 40, on my own.
Honorable mention...
https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/554096/was-crassius-curio-a-plagiarizer-in-addition-to-being-a-pervert
For me, that's what makes the game fun after the first, second, and third play-through. Having to speculate. Not knowing with any real certainty. Especially when there are expansions on the horizon.
Dead ends, weapon partials, broken quests, and truly indifferent NPCs could be found all over the world in EQ; whether left there by accident or on purpose, those idiosyncracies added another layer to the game similar to when a D&D campaign is finally over but the adventuring party is still left with many unanswered questions.
But getting back to actual side quests, there were more than a few worth mentioning from Ocarina of Time. Out of the many favorites, I got the most enjoyment out of the ranch/horse track side quest for Epona (and the obstacle course for the cow). I also really liked how bottles could be used to scoop up random objects and presented before characters or poured out in specific locations to see if doing so had any effect. Bugs, fish, milk, etc. Collecting each of the bottles involved a side quest IIRC. Once acquired, every corner of the world took on that much more quest potential. They were unconventional keys that could be used to unlock equally irregular doors hidden in plain sight. Smashing pots and breaking crates is good times, but pouring out a little liquor in the memory a fallen compatriot only to summon a ghost because its remains were disturbed? Jump into a pot. Hide behind a crate. Oh right, we destroyed all of those...
Lastly, back in 1999/2000, I played Pokemon Snap quite a bit and always wished that quests in EQ required similar reaction times as a nonlethal means of proving oneself capable. Rangers scouting through remote jungles searching for an endangered species, one with see-invis and a large aggro radius. Unskilled players might cause the rare sighting to despawn suddenly, startled, or run off a great distance, faster than SoW. Skilled rangers would know to set cage traps and make use of tranquilizers instead of arrows. For rogues, the quest would have required them to frame a city official or tail them and get ahold of incriminating evidence without being spotted; assassinating the target would have meant failing the quest. Those types of side quests I would have checked out and completed from one class to another and so on, possibly even repeating a few.
Kilsin said:Community Debate - Side Quests - What makes you stop to check out a side quest and how do you decide whether to complete it or rudely decline, leaving the NPC stranded and in need of 40 apples for their pigs? #MMORPG #CommunityMatters
To be honest the first time playing a game I wanted to do all the side quests. When i play my alts I tend to ignore the some of the lesser side quests unless it specific benefits my alt in some way other than gold....experince, faction or my class is usually the priority. Armor and weapons not so much because my main is usually a crafter ( armorsmith or weaponsmith) as well.
It mainly depends on the sidequest's reward. If that reward is appropriate and desired, then I will probably do the quest. Lore, objective, and objective location also play a part when I decide to complete quests. If the objective location is in the way I'm headed, I'll go ahead and complete the quest. If the lore behind the quest is interesting, then I will go ahead and complete the quest.
If the quest doesn't provide reward info, then I will do everything at least once on my main to learn the rewards. After that, I will skip the quests that aren't worth the trouble.
I think a side quest that integrates with or enhances the primary story or events that are happening in the area is worth doing. Additionally, side quests that deep dive into an interesting piece of lore will grab my attention.
Side quests that are simply one-shot tasks and don't entail any deeper story I will do if that is the primary XP method for a particular game, but I won't enjoy it.
Side quests are like gummy multi-vitamins. They're good for you, but only marginally. They taste pretty good but not as good as a real Haribo gummy bear.
In my humblest of opinions, I really WANT to like side quests, but a lot of times they are just content fodder. They generally don't have very good rewards unless they're pretty hard or pretty long, which I don't mind. And they generally are irritating to repeat for faction purposes. Pantheon is breaking out the more tedious repitious quests like armor or drop turn-ins circa gnoll fangs, into a different category from side quests, which is nice.
Fixing side quests: get out of the reward rut. Get creative with the rewards and that will change the amount of player base to get involved. And it changes up the types of players that do them.
What if there was a quest you did for an old man in town that offered a decent faction boost, but in doing so, you upset the old man so now he personally is KOS to you and hits for like 1 damage every time you come in proximity, and he yells at you so that others around can hear him berate you by name for accidentally squishing his cat or whatever. That would be hilarious and certain types of players would like that sort of thing.
What if you helped a farmer out in Greater Sathe to bring in his crop by stopping some bandits, so no once a day you can visit his home and he will give you a ration once a day and say how appreciative he is everytime you are in proximity and uses your name so that other chars around would also know that you have helped him.
It doesn't always need to be a good reward, but a small thanks from the NPCs that recognize you would go a long way in making the world feel lived in. And it generates more NPC chatter in towns which would feel more natural.
I might be in the minority here but in every MMORPG I play I do every quest in the game that I can possibly do. The reason why is quite simple, I want to feel like i'm in a world and helping everyone I can ingame, no matter how tedious the task makes me more engaged with the world i'm in because I will have memories associated with Joe Blipbor and his family. Which If I see later down the line in a cinimatic or even in a ingame event that something destroys the area they live in or whatnot I'll feel more connected to that cinimatic because I know everyone that lived in that area where the destruction happened.
For most here it seems like the best case to use as a point is the Cataclysm intro cinimatic:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9o5jfAngIDs
But for me the one that I still remember even today is XIV End of a Era Cinimatic and that's because it wasn't just a destruction of a region but a whole world and game. One that I personally loved and I can never get to play again due to it's poor reception at the time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=39j5v8jlndM
I like that VR is acknowledging all manner of what most games just plop together in 'quests'.
I believe they have said there will be quests, tasks and also Keeper-related pings/discoveries and subsequent lore/storylines.
The more the merrier.
There's nothing wrong at all with 'tasks' like fetch 40 apples or kill 10 rats. Townsfolk would need that stuff doing and would be happy asking adventurers to do it.
As long as that's not *all* there is to do and as long as it results in suitably low reward.
Every side-quest, task and discovery with just a little bit of thought can be used to encourage players to explore every little bit of interest and fun Terminus has to offer.
Sure, just go after the 'big' quests, if you want. Take no interest in the 'small' NPCs other than to vend trash if you like. But risk missing out on some worthwhile content...