I liked EQOA a lot because there wasn't really many quests, only a few throughout the game, i.e. epic weapon quest. I think WoW kind of started this bad trend of putting in 10000000 "collect X and turn into Y" quests. At the end of the day, i would guess the majority of quests people just click through them without reading anyway. When ever i watch twitch streams of people playing MMO's they are usually skipping all the quest dialogs too. I just feel like quests are really boring over all no matter how interesting the quest mechanics. It would be nice to bring back the days of XP camps and to just do away with the 1000000 turn in quests model. Having a quest every few levels maybe for a new spell, new weapon etc would still be nice. but please, oh please, don't shove 1000000 quests down are throat. Anyone else feel this way too with the current trends of quests in MMO's?
You certainly are not. Playing the game should be the quest. Making it to the zone where you heard an item you want drops is a quest. Getting a group down to that camp is a quest. Getting the rare loot is the quest. Getting back out alive is the quest. There was this tremendous backlash to EQ's quest system and it has been horrible for games. Now you are told what to do at every point. Where to go, when to go there, how long to stay. Developers have slapped single player quest mechanics on top of multiplayer games and it completely defeats the point, imo. Let us go out into the world and make our own quests.
Agree. EQ 1 had a few quests scattered about. Travis Two Tone was my first quest. Carry a letter to the bards guild from Nek Forest. But I didn't do that quest expecting a lot. It was a simple delivery quest. I did get some faction. That was good.
I'm not sure I did another quest at all until the epic quests. Getting groups at Orcs camps, befallen, NRO Dervish Cutthroats, SRO Cros, Unrest. That Was the quest. Get a group and kill stuff. Best quest ever. no turn in. no fetching.
I would be happy with a game with 2 quests in it. Make it there alive and Epic weapons.
I don't think that they should ditch quests, I think they should be re-purposed consolidated. Quests should be just that, a quest and not exp fodder. I wouldn't say I want few quests because I don't, what I do want is all of my quests to be high quality (which would inevitably mean that there are not so many of them). A quest can bring ways to aquire new items and gear or lore or even currency and fame/faction rep/whatever so I definitely want to see them continue to be a part of mmorpgs, just not in the fashion that they are used by many modern offerings.
I am hoping it goes back to the quest of MuD's, Ultima Online, EQ etc. Quest that took time, you picked up while you where adventuring more in the hopes you got the items then knowing that you would finish it get the XP and move on to the next quest hub. Since this is more of a open world MMO then the run of the mill Theme park MMO's like WoW, Rift, EQ2, WS ETC I am optimistic that we will have that old school feel to it.
Thats one of the reasons why WoW (vanilla) was successful in my opinion. Quests weren't just spammed everywhere.. they were balanced and each bunch were a "teaser mind break" from grinding. That's what made quests so awesome. *nibble quest here*, grind, *nibble quest there*, grind.. and you actually read them because they had value.. then because we wanted more because they were such a rare(ish) awesome thing to find (in WoW vanilla).. you wanted more quests so that you had a break from solo grinding (which is boring btw). So it's just that.. if you give people what they want and too much of it... they get bored and the quests/the thing ceases to be come this rare awesome thing.
Quests should be quests like Sarim said. A unique experience you won't forget.. with a great/useful reward.
I personally do not like quests because most feel to have little thought put into them. I am also against quests you HAVE to do just to play the game.
EQ's epic quest and The Spirit of Garzicor are some good quests I think of right away. They have good effort vs reward, they took awhile to do but were not just time sinks. Quests I do not like are the "Collect 10 orc pawn scalps", "Take this item to that guy over there", etc. Quests like that are nothing but time sinks, have no thought and become boring after you do 2 of them.
Now... quests can make good solo content and don't have to be all about killing mobs, have some that are class specific. Just a few quick examples
Have a quest intended for Rogues / Enchanters where you ninja into a dungeon, steal an item and return it to someone. Any class could do it but a Rogue could sneak / hide to it, Enchanter could mez / lull, charm. Have the reward be a good solo reward but weak enough that the quest would be under valued for a group to do it.
A Cleric / Shaman quest where someone has fallen ill and they have to make the medicine (Cleric would need alchemy skill). They would need to find special ground spawn plants, kill a mob for a component, visit a certain world location for special water and have alchemy above a certain skill.
Where I find fault is the overuse of the term 'quest', applying it to everything some NPC wants a player to do. Most should be tasks or jobs.
Quests should require a significant amount of effort from the player, consume quite a bit of time, need creative application of class spells, abilities and capabilities and, finally, require extensive travel only after all that does the player receive some appropriately scaled reward (which should not necessarily be fully known before the quest starts. Literature is filled with such quests: Gilgamesh, Odysseus, Jason and the Argonauts, Percival, the Arthurian Holy Grail and of course Tolkein's The Hobbit and The Lord of the Ring.
Naturally you do not want a game filled with hundreds of such quests as their commonness will only diminish their uniqueness. Rather each class should have a few each expansion and then a few based upon race. Only one or two should be open to everyone, with the best examples being the Coldain Prayer Shawl and the Coldain Ring quests from Velious in EQ1.
What EQ did right when it came to quests was hiding them in plain sight. You never knew what NPC might offer some task or long quest unless you talked to them. So you had to take the time to talk to lots of NPCs, make note of their conversation, think about other conversations to see if there are any connections. No automatic conversation logs, no big arrows marking quest NPCs, no checkmarks of completed steps and as yet unfinished future steps. You could happy go through much of EQ1 without doing quests (though certain zones did require a key which was given after completing some tasks) or you could fill your days with quests and tasks. The choice was yours.
I definitely think the "find 10 of these", or "kill 10 of these" quests need to go. I know i'm just appealing to the awesomeness of EQ1 again, but I really love the way EQ1 did quests, because they felt organic and challenging. Even some of the nooby armor quests were more involved and challenging than a lot of high level MMO quests, haha. Although instead of typing your response to NPCs with key words, I think there should just be response options in a dialogue box.
Linkamus said:I definitely think the "find 10 of these", or "kill 10 of these" quests need to go. I know i'm just appealing to the awesomeness of EQ1 again, but I really love the way EQ1 did quests, because they felt organic and challenging. Even some of the nooby armor quests were more involved and challenging than a lot of high level MMO quests, haha. Although instead of typing your response to NPCs with key words, I think there should just be response options in a dialogue box.
It is for these type of tasks that I think NPCs should have the ability to broadcast to a given area. If the Elven Tailor wants 7 wolf hides and is offering 15 silver (5 more silver than what a normal vendor will pay), he should be saying so. Much like players and their "WTB X" in /auction, NPC vendors should do the same. This lets the player know the reward for a task yet doesn't require them to converse with every single NPC in the area to see if one of them just happens to be offering a task. I'd go so far as to give merchant NPCs the ability to see into my inventory and say to me directly "Hey Vandraad, I see you have 7 wolf pelts there, I'm willing to pay 15 silver for them which is 5 more than any other merchant in town will pay". Might go a long way to making the world feel a bit more lively.
Vandraad said:Where I find fault is the overuse of the term 'quest', applying it to everything some NPC wants a player to do. Most should be tasks or jobs.
Quests should require a significant amount of effort from the player, consume quite a bit of time, need creative application of class spells, abilities and capabilities and, finally, require extensive travel only after all that does the player receive some appropriately scaled reward (which should not necessarily be fully known before the quest starts. Literature is filled with such quests: Gilgamesh, Odysseus, Jason and the Argonauts, Percival, the Arthurian Holy Grail and of course Tolkein's The Hobbit and The Lord of the Ring.
This hits nicely on the problem that seems to plague most games now. Fecth and deliver tasks have their place but so much questing seems to just be that now.
Vandraad said:What EQ did right when it came to quests was hiding them in plain sight. You never knew what NPC might offer some task or long quest unless you talked to them. So you had to take the time to talk to lots of NPCs, make note of their conversation, think about other conversations to see if there are any connections. No automatic conversation logs, no big arrows marking quest NPCs, no checkmarks of completed steps and as yet unfinished future steps. You could happy go through much of EQ1 without doing quests (though certain zones did require a key which was given after completing some tasks) or you could fill your days with quests and tasks. The choice was yours.
This is probably what I miss most from EQ and seems very difficult to find anywhere else. Just finding the quest needed some effort and you often had to keep an eye on NPC conversations and events. Then once you had a quest, it required at least some thought and effort to complete. No journal full of instructions and minimap markers guiding you around like a GPS.
First, /agreed Krixus and very well said.
And, if quests existed, I'd rather they be hidden in plain sight like EQ as Vandraad suggested, or, through the journey as Krixus discussed. Basically that they don't feel like forced quests and simply an extension of the journey. EQ did this as well with having no drop/lore items with no description and no idea what they're for. Perhaps with Pantheon you could use the identify spell/perception skill to identify a tidbit of information that leads a player to an NPC which begins an epic sprawling quest like the Coldain Prayer Shawl. But, if, the player chose not to complete the quests, the journey in and of itself should be the "epic" quest.
I don't mind obvious quests, like the ones you'd expect to get from a class trainer, or a crafting trainer. I, however, am certainly not a fan of the floating "!". I wouldn't mind something like a job board ... something that might be zone-staple ... a place where you would know you could go to find the general whereabouts of an NPC with some "jobs" for an adventurer. Perhaps these jobs could even be breadcrumbs that lead to a real quest. Say you kill 3 yettis and, when you return, whispers of a rare yetti that lives on a distant mountain top that killed [job giver's brother] and now guards the map he had in his posession ... Regardless, you'd need to complete the quest chain, and that chain would only open up after completing some kind of interaction - perhaps suggested by completing a basic "job" quest. I'm not a fan of the floating "!", but I don't feel like I should "click" on every NPC in the zone, either. Some direction for finding optional quest activity is nice.
Vandraad said:It is for these type of tasks that I think NPCs should have the ability to broadcast to a given area. If the Elven Tailor wants 7 wolf hides and is offering 15 silver (5 more silver than what a normal vendor will pay), he should be saying so. Much like players and their "WTB X" in /auction, NPC vendors should do the same. This lets the player know the reward for a task yet doesn't require them to converse with every single NPC in the area to see if one of them just happens to be offering a task. I'd go so far as to give merchant NPCs the ability to see into my inventory and say to me directly "Hey Vandraad, I see you have 7 wolf pelts there, I'm willing to pay 15 silver for them which is 5 more than any other merchant in town will pay". Might go a long way to making the world feel a bit more lively.
Ya, this could definitely work as well!
Raidan said:First, /agreed Krixus and very well said.
And, if quests existed, I'd rather they be hidden in plain sight like EQ as Vandraad suggested, or, through the journey as Krixus discussed. Basically that they don't feel like forced quests and simply an extension of the journey. EQ did this as well with having no drop/lore items with no description and no idea what they're for. Perhaps with Pantheon you could use the identify spell/perception skill to identify a tidbit of information that leads a player to an NPC which begins an epic sprawling quest like the Coldain Prayer Shawl. But, if, the player chose not to complete the quests, the journey in and of itself should be the "epic" quest.
I think that would be a cool dynamic. EQ had too many of those "wth do I do with this?" moments that ultimately led nowhere. If bards or wizards had a lore skill that would uncover a part of the mystery of an item, that could be a nifty bit of gameplay.
Amsai said: Have to agree with Mephiles on this one. Nothing wrong with quests and even plenty of them but they should be deep and thoughtful. Not experince fodder and not quests disguised as tasks. They should be long and tough and provide favor, gear, lore, and access to gated content. Hell even just some for bragging rights, and no other reward other than its fun. But quests in my opinion should never reward xp. And for that matter neither should "achievements" like you just wandered into the Forest of Feelings...... bam 1500xp..........O.o
I want to go out into the world, kill some mob and get phat loot. I do not want to have to run back to town to do a turn in to get handed an item. It cheapens the experience. The item I got from the mob is the item I take back to get my reward? Really? Why this level of abstraction? Why not just have the mob give me exp and loot to begin with and do away with this hollow kill 10 rats quest hub garbage.
Ask me how I really feel.
