Quest: I want to really be "questing" again.

This one is hard to explain for me. This is the third write-up I have done of this thread in trying to explain it. Hopefully I will make sense with it.

I believe we are not truly questing anymore. I say this because when we are killing 10 creatures because little billy needs a fur coat and then having to kill 10 more because billy needs a fur hat to go with it is not what I call a quest. I call it a temporary job. Now, I am not going to wave the flag of destruction to grinding quest. Not what I am going for here. What I am asking for here is the truth being told here and maybe even a bit of interesting features being added to it.

I am not asking for a reinvention of the wheel here. I am asking for a new innovation of the wheel to be made. Would it really be that hard to rename the grinding quest into task, jobs, or even favors? Quest of course will remain in MMOs but they will actually take the form of quest. Now, as I am maybe becoming known for I will give an example of this to make my point very clear.

As my character travels into a new region I see the signs of war. The countryside is torn asunder. As you make your way into the zone you see a town. Once in town you see a bulletin board with posters about it. Here we have the hero for hire jobs. (These are jobs posted with money rewards: the grinding jobs.) These ask for a certain amount of creatures to be killed. Bring trophies of there killing back. Now you take these jobs and complete them. These appear in a section of the log marked jobs. Now these types of activities can be avoided completely if the player chooses to. All they miss out on is cash. They add no part to the actual story of the zone other than to show the desperation of the Zone inhabitance.

Now the hero ventures into the village. Some of the inhabitance have favors or task to have you complete. Such as recovering something from the enemy or finding something they lost. Some may even ask for revenge. These task blend the grind and find quest together sometimes. Others are just find quest. Once finished with these quest your hero ventures into the town hall.

This is where the quest is found. The town leader ask you to find the enemy camps and slow them by whatever means you deem necessary. Now, this is where it derives a bit from the normal quest method. You can choose how to handle the quest. Maybe you should go and spy on the enemy. Then with the right information turn them upon each other. Maybe you could find an "unguarded" catapult in their arsenal and set it upon the camp. Maybe arson is your game. Maybe you want the hands on approach and want to grind through the camp. In the end all that matters is that you decide on how to handle the quest in your own story. Not some cookie-cutter pattern.

I want quest to be quest again. If they want me to kill 10 creatures fine, just make it a job and not a quest. Hopefully this makes sense I what I am trying to say. This was a hard idea for me to translate into words. If you get what I mean by this whole thread then do you agree?

I think I get what you are saying. Basically a clear definition of Quest, Job, and Task. It might also be good to have the rewords in line too. Quest get more XP, and sweet drops, jobs are about money, and task could be faction standing. Then there would also be a verity of ways to complete an assignment in all categories. UI ability to organization / sorting by category is good to. It would help in making the grind aspect of questing in general have more verity.
I think EQ2 (FYI Do to a billing disagreement, I don't endorse any SOE product) was / is attempting that to a degree, with Heroic, signature, faction, guild, quest, and then a verity of errand type quest. LotRol also has has Deeds that give you virtue, that can for your traits. So I do see how to some degree separating “Quest vs Errand” does already exist. Yes? What you are suggesting is that the quest not only have a certain level of depth, they also have a verity of ways to complete them.

Ultimately it would still end up a “cookie-cutter pattern, just more verity to the patterns.

To me so far in my meager 4 years of playing on line MMO, RPG games I have found they are all a grind, because the patterns of fighting and questing never really change as you progress. I will paraphrase what many have said before me “Killing a level 10 wolf and killing a level 50 wolf is basically the same thing.”

I totally agree that there should be a difference between a “Quest” and a “Errand”, as well as more verity in how a quest is completed it would help in breaking the monotony of the grind.

It is also always nice to be able to easily pick for the type of play I feel like doing, be it a quest with depth, or some simple hack and bash.

What might be a additional idea to make the “Quest” and a “Errand” different is to have the dynamics of the play be different to have a different feel yet still have continuity. I can kill a wolf with a club or an arrow, killing a mage in a “Quest” should take more thought, be more complicated and have more story depth. Yes?

That is exactly what I meant. Couldn't have been said any better. So, if you don't understand my post just read zanntis's post. That is essentially what I wanted to explain in mine.

It all sounds great, but from a building perspective, the sheer volume of classes (and I mean programming classes, not game classes) would make my head spin.

Originally Posted by Laethyn

It all sounds great, but from a building perspective, the sheer volume of classes (and I mean programming classes, not game classes) would make my head spin.

Yes I was thinking about that too. The amount of programing would be very heavy. I wonder if another approach to breaking the monotony of the grind and enriching the depth of the quest stories line could take a different direction that might not require quite as heavy programing as adding more quest content.

Here is my thought, probably not original, but here I go.

First is a simple concept that gunslinger proposes separating the quest from the errand, that should be a fairly simple thing to do not require a lot of new program itself. The next thing is increasing the depth of the quests storyline and increasing immersion into that story line. It is a fairly simple thing. Good voice over work,good scripts, good voice over actors. Voice work can create a very immersing effect for the player and takes very little "new" programming. And you can get the fans to do most of it for free with voice over contest.

Now to really address the problem of the grind, the monotony of it. This is a very difficult area to find a solution for, no matter how complicated the sequences of key commands created, eventually the player learns the patterns, an the patterns become monotonous. Really the best we can do is expand the UI to create as much variety in the patterns as possible, utilizing the technology that we have available today. To do this may take a revolution in the UI control, i.e. the keyboard and mouse doing something different. For now we want to use existing cost efficient technology. What about utilizing the more widely emerging tuch technology. This technology has been around for awhile, it is just getting better and more mass-produced. That means cheap and easy to implement. For instance a mouse touch pad, that would allow for making sweeping motions, slashes, lines, cross motions and then combine with button sequences, that could vastly expand the UI patterns, how we do things and how we interact with the game itself. The applications for crafting would be wonderful for helping crafting to become something that was more than just pushing the buttons 1234, and fighting could have some real complexity to there patterns. Now instead of just pushing buttons, I might be making a swirling pattern followed by a line followed by a dot, then pressing a button sequence for that finishing move.. This might even allow for the user to create their own customizable commands. Of course this is just another set of patterns at some point those patterns would be learned and memorized by the user, they would become rudimentary just like button mashing, but this potentially expands the patterns that are used in the user interface to the degree that it would take a lot longer for the user to memorize all the patterns. Then with expansions, you could add more new, complex patterns continuously creating new ways of fighting crafting and completing tasks.

Another idea or even an addition to my first idea would be to utilize voice technology. Their are many dictation programs that potentially could be dumbed down a little bit, with a limited list of words. It would not take as much programming as trying to implement a full dictation program. The user could potentially have some options for customization. You can have a set number of verbal commands and default verbal commands, but allow the user to customize the verbal commands to a degree. The default command for auto attack might be auto attack. But if I wanted to I could teach the UI to recognize killed him as auto attack. I get the vision of the old movie Dune and the voice weapons. That could potentially be very entertaining. If this concept caught on imagine the expansions. Eventually people might be singing their commands, crafting some armor might be singing a song.

The basic concept is changing the controller to expand the patterns available in the user interface. By utilizing existing technology that can also be used for / with other existing programs. I would be more inclined to pay a little extra for game that came with a controller that could also replace my mouse and or can be used with other applications as opposed to the new controller like say a motion sensing controller. That really is only good for games.

I don't know, I doubt these concepts are new, but perhaps with the technology getting better and cheaper to implement the ideas worth taking another look at.

Keep in mind that you then have to deal with packet transfer. The more data transfer you are dealing with in an MMO, the worse off you are going to be.

Now, I'm not trying to poo-poo your ideas. Not by any means. I'm just looking at things from a programmatic/development view.

Please always poke at my ideas.
My experience is in office management for small companies, so really a office jack of all trade. I have been fortunate to work with software and hardware engineers (great people) in wireless R&D. I learned a long time ago, an effective manager can come up with a decent idea every so often, it is the experience specials that can determine if the idea is feasible or not.

Speaking of heads spinning.....

I just come back and THIS is what I get to read? EEESH!

I want my Munchie Plushie!!

I just made my first post earlier tonight in the Discussing MMOs Today thread, and it had much to do with this exact thread. Since I feel it fits into the spirit of the thread, I will go ahead and repost it into this one:

There is something that seems to be so heavily ingrained in the current mindset of MMOs I fear it will never be done away with until something comes out that completely changes the way we think about MMO advancement forever. The insane amount of quests in MMOs.
Every MMO I have played post-EQ seemed have quests be the main, and sometimes only, worthwhile way to gain experience and items. EQ2, Guild Wars, Vanguard, WoW, LoTRO. They are so overly saturated with quests it is sickening.

Quests should not be forced upon you. Quests are supposed to rewarding and challenging. A quest that says, "Collect 10 bear pelts and get this trash sword." are neither, but you must do them anyway because it's usually the only way to get experience or get slightly harder, slightly better quests. It would be alright if there were only one or two of these every set of levels, but in most games there can be like 20 per zone.

Having quests being the driving force behind a game also make the game completely linear. The same sets of quests are for everyone, regardless of the class or individual playstyle of the player, based solely on the fact that you can select from a multiple of rewards and the exp gained alone. This makes a boring, straight-forward, "Go to this zone, complete this quest chain, go to next area, complete this quest chain, go to next area, ad infinitum," scenario. Furthermore, with everyone doing the same quests, everyone you meet has the exact same gear. How can you possibly say that is a rewarding experience? Do you want to be like everyone else? Call it elitist, but I find owning a piece of gear and people saying, "Wow, that is awesome, where did you get that?" to be one of the best moments of gaming.

The final beef I have against catch-all quests is the destruction of community, as Fahn has already touched upon. MY VERY FAVORITE aspect of MMOs is community. I love being in groups for hours, talking with other members, making new friends, or exchanging stories. I am quite aware that sometimes there can bad times, but I feel the good far outweigh the bad. In EQ, which had static camps, there was enough time to have some great conversations. The trend of quests have ruined this. Speaking with the experience freshest in my mind, I will use LoTRO as an example. There are many, many quests in that game, most of the better ones requiring a moderately sized group to complete. But people do not look as other group members as companions or possible friends, only as a means to an end. As soon as you have completed the quest, and your use is complete, they can drop you, without so much as a word. I have seen this happen many times, and I always wonder if they don't so much as speak in group, why not just go play a single player dungeon crawler? Without active members there can be no community.

Also echoing Fahn, the one game that I feel has achieved the closest to what I feel as a workable quest system had the least quests of all. Ironically called EverQuest. Who remembers the epic quests? The time poured into them, but the reward from being able to show off your new weapons? Anyone ever played a wisdom caster and got a Testament of Vanear? Sure it took a long time, sure it was based on chance, sure it sometimes seemed mind-numbingly boring. But the gains were worth it by far. This is not just some rose-colored glasses nostalgia sort of thing. Nothing since has given me the feeling that game did, not even close. These quests were few and far between, which made them so much better. You could go through that entire game without ever touching a quest if you wanted to. Some people just didn't want to put in the time required. But if you did, you got such a feeling of satisfaction that cannot be put into words. It wasn't the driving force, is was the extra challenge. It was the reason why.

I fear that we will always be under the shadows of questing. Until we come to a completely new system, something most of us can't even comprehend until it is upon us, I will just have to keep holding on to that future day.

It's good to hear other players complain about how questing is implemented in most MMOs today, because I feel exactly the same way.

In the EQ days, the biggest problem with questing was the UI and tools were too primitive. It was difficult to discover quests unless you looked at spoiler sites, and then it was more difficult to keep track of quests and your progress within a quest because there were no in game tools for this.

Fast forward to today, and now the quest tools are there, but the general quality of quests is horrible. Way too much quantity and not nearly enough quality.

I wonder how many players today just grab all of the quests they can in an area, don't bother to read any quest text, and just try to do as many of them as quickly as possible because that's the fastest way to advance and earn some minor rewards. I bet a majority of players approach questing this way. I know I do, even though I hate having to play that way.

There's no adventure in that, no thinking required, no mystery, no sense of accomplishment, and it's not really any fun. It just becomes a completely mindless, repetative grind after a while. And the explosion in questing was probably implemented because players complained that killing mobs for exp. was a mindless grind. It's like one mindless grind was replaced with another.

Questing really needs a complete overhaul from how it's done today. I agree with TheGunslinger that most quests are really just tasks. Any quest of the type "Go kill n of x and return to me" quests should not even be worthy of the name quest.

If I was developing an MMO, I would have criteria that all quests would have to meet to make it to production.

1. Quests must not be of the "kill n of x" variety, or anything close to this.


2. Quests must different and memorable.
The Shawl quest in EQ was memorable to me. In part because of all of the work I had to put in to it, also in part because of the different methods I had to figure out on my own to accomplish the individual tasks (how could I get a no-drop swordfish tooth on my own at my level, and how was I going to get my tradeskills up high enough to not fail the critical combines).
Also all of the cool places it lead me and the cool item I got at the end of the quest.

3. Quests must have a story that is integral to the quest and overall game.

Basically, you should need to read the quest text in order to figure it out and accomplish it, otherwise most player's won't bother reading it. I'm not saying that all quests should be puzzles that need to be figured out, or have complex instructions, or tons of text, but if all you ever need to look at is the quest summary like: Collect 10 bear hides (0 of 10), then what's the point of even having any quest text.

4. Completing a quest must feel like an accomplishment to players, and rewards should generally be a cool and useful item.

Many short quests will never give players a sense of accomplishment.
Long, multiple stage epic quests, where stages can be done in any order, can.

It really shouldn't be hard to create quests that are better and more involved. Instead of 10,000 mostly mindless low quality quests in a game, I'd like to see the devs spend their time instead creating 500 different, high quality quests.