Green Monster Games (Curt Schilling)

[spronk]

WAR will move the genre forward with Public Quests and the tome of knowledge, those two things should be required in any new MMO. PQ's are really awesome, basically get into an area with some global goals, and everyone who participates helps moves that goal forward, and is rewarded a bit with faction/rep/items/potions/etc when the goal is met. You don't have to create groups, you don't loot mobs, it all just naturally moves forward. Absolutely brilliant in their implementation, and implementing dozens of PQs throughout the entire game makes leveling fun.

Of course it opens up to the "AV AFKer" exploit problem, of people just running scripts at the PQ areas hitting auto attack or whatever and leeching xp/rep/honor/blah from others who are actively participating.

Be nice to see more games get away from the mentality of "rush to max level, thats where the game REALLY starts!" No clue how to do it well, but yeah, would love to see quests be more meaningful and involved rather than all the bullshit ones WoW and others give you.

[Maleficence]

Originally Posted by Grave

Of course, on the flipside it could prevent the player from experiencing the quest storyline the way it was meant to be told. For example, if there happened to be 2 or 3 quests leading up to taking out the orc leader, you'd have missed out on those. It would be difficult for the developers to make that work right.

I'm all for story lines, but seriously you've lost my interest in the story when it starts off with: "Help us, a Big Orc Boss is threatening our village." and I've already killed off Big Orc Boss. At that point, I'm annoyed more than anything, as the game has made two things clear:
a. the story is bullshit.
b. my actions in the story are bullshit.

So unless the writing is so superb or the story so engaging that I'm just aching to read the next part, I've lost all my motivation story-wise. The only motivation left is getting the quest reward, which is a game play aspect.

If they want to tell a story I think there are better mechanisms, where the story revolves around your actions. Hence there is no Big Orc Boss roaming around unless you've triggered it as part of the story you're developing. Otherwise, if my actions have no impact other than advance to the next wall of text, what's the point?

Finally, you can still relate the story even if you've completed the objectives. "Thank you, Big Orc Boss had been terrorizing our village. Have this as your reward." Same message conveyed, just in a different manner to suite the situation.

[Grave]

Originally Posted by spronk

Be nice to see more games get away from the mentality of "rush to max level, thats where the game REALLY starts!" No clue how to do it well, but yeah, would love to see quests be more meaningful and involved rather than all the bullshit ones WoW and others give you.

It'd actually be pretty easy to do by simply making the player feel like a hero early on, which we discussed earlier in the thread.

Stuff like cool looking armor sets, major storylines that culminate in an epic battle with some powerful being, meaningful rewards that stick with the player like titles or permanent character boosts; these are all things that are for some reason nearly always stuck on at the end of the game instead of spread throughout it. If you rewarded the player meaningfully at all levels they would be much more likely to enjoy their time leveling and not feel in such a rush to get to the "good" stuff.

Some games are trying to do this. I know LOTRO and WAR both offer titles and other achievements a player can earn at all levels of play, EQ2 has some low level armor sets. It needs a step up though. I should be able to earn a full set of matching, badass armor through an incredible storyline that makes me feel like I saved the world at level 20. There's no reason to make the player wait until max level to do some crazy stuff. With enough creativity on the team, there will be plenty of stories to tell later on as well.

Less quests to kill bears at low levels, more engaging storylines and substantial rewards.

EDIT: @Maleficence: Certainly a valid point. One could also argue that if a major story needs to be told they could simply do it through instancing or have the "boss orc" not even spawn until the player is at that point in the quest, preventing anyone from killing it by accident. That frees up open world quests to be able to be completed in multiple ways.

[Horse]

Originally Posted by Maleficence

I'm all for story lines, but seriously you've lost my interest in the story when it starts off with: "Help us, a Big Orc Boss is threatening our village." and I've already killed off Big Orc Boss. At that point, I'm annoyed more than anything, as the game has made two things clear:
a. the story is bullshit.
b. my actions in the story are bullshit.

So unless the writing is so superb or the story so engaging that I'm just aching to read the next part, I've lost all my motivation story-wise. The only motivation left is getting the quest reward, which is a game play aspect.

If they want to tell a story I think there are better mechanisms, where the story revolves around your actions. Hence there is no Big Orc Boss roaming around unless you've triggered it as part of the story you're developing. Otherwise, if my actions have no impact other than advance to the next wall of text, what's the point?

Finally, you can still relate the story even if you've completed the objectives. "Thank you, Big Orc Boss had been terrorizing our village. Have this as your reward." Same message conveyed, just in a different manner to suite the situation.

Have you played Final Fantasy XI? I think they handled that portion of it as well as it can be handled.

It being the inherent paradox of being "the gratest hearo in teh landz" in a game where over 9,000 other players are also "the gratest hearo in teh landz."

It isn't that hard of a problem if you instance everything. You don't get the key to get into the Orc's house unless you're on that quest, etc. FFXI even had level restrictions so you couldn't gimp encounters.

You're right, of course, that one day every MMO will be able to store all of the quests you've completed if you have the quest or not.

I suppose that's the "what the fuck is all this shit in my bag" nature of EQ versus the "i only can pick up the sparkling shit if I have the quest" of WoW.

WoW could stand to have some more quests that don't lead you around by the hand like a chaperone. The flipside is, I wish there was a way to turn on quest notification for old quests because talking / interacting with NPCs randomly is fucking boring.

[Maleficence]

Originally Posted by Horse

Have you played Final Fantasy XI? I think they handled that portion of it as well as it can be handled.

I did enjoy that part of FFXI, and you're right they did a good job there.

As far as quests go, I'd like to see them split into two main concepts: quests and tasks.

First, we have quests: they attempt to narrate a story. Quests should mainly focus on narrating the global and situational events that surround the player. They provide the atmosphere and setting, and provide the thread that guides us across the world. Quests create story lines out of global events and change the world as a whole, or at least change the world for the player by providing access to new areas, abilities, levels, dungeons, etc...

Then, we have tasks, which are the various assignments that are given to us by NPCs. Shit like kill 10 rabid raccoons, bring back 100 bear asses, the dreadful "quests" that get constantly mocked. For these we have the possibility of generating dynamic tasks where the focus is on the player's interactions and decisions.

There is no point in trying to inject a story line here save as a vestige from table top RPG games. Instead I'd like to see designers focus development efforts on making tasks repeatable, enjoyable and dynamic based on player input. Player-driven state machines could be used to generate quests with various phases. The objectives change based on whatever state the task is in. Additionally, tasks shouldn't be discrete and instead should allow for improvement and rewards based on personal performance.

Story has its place, but it shouldn't be shoved into every aspect of the game. Some parts just aren't worth writing a story about.

[Ukerric]

Originally Posted by Grave

Using the same example: You go into the cave and complete the first objective when you see some zombies ambling around inside. You recognize that they are wearing tattered clothing similar to that of the villagers nearby. This auto-completes your "see what is disturbing the animals" quest, as well as one you got earlier in the village to "seek out the missing villagers". Rather than turning back though, you get two new quests immediately that tell you to seek out the source of the zombies and look for any live captives. You go on and eventually find a tribe of hex-weaving goblins and a witchdoctor are behind the whole mess, and your quest updates telling you to slay X amount of them and the witchdoctor himself. So you've been getting exp the entire time from completing the different objectives, and then you finally go back and inform the original questgivers of the result and get more exp + item rewards. Sounds a lot more fun to me.

That's essentially the AoC quest engine.

You also had LOTRO's achievement system, which ran as an invisible quest engine (basically, you had all achievements as quests you already had; they just didn't show up in the quest journal. You even had an interface option to add achievements in the monkeyquest-style righthand panel, along the "standard" quests)

[Grave]

Originally Posted by Ukerric

That's essentially the AoC quest engine.

Interesting. What few quests I did in AoC seemed the same as WoW, but I admit I didn't do a lot. If that is how it is though, here's hoping future games will take a look at it.

I also think players would be more inclined to read the text and get the story if it just appeared on their screen at various intervals as things played out. As it is now, most people I've asked say they just hit accept on the quest and don't bother reading any of the dialogue, they just look at the objective afterward or let questhelper guide them. I think that's a shame since some of these games have very interesting storylines and writers are putting time and effort into delivering them. Still, if the players don't want to spend time reading it, you can't force them. All you can do is try to deliver it in a way they may be more inclined to accept, and I think a questing system like this is a step towards that.

[Quince]

Exactly, LotRO and AoC did a fairly decent job of making "epic storyline quests" that were involving, required multiple steps and sometimes even groups for better rewards and "Tasks" for random grinding / knock out a couple of quests before work etc.

I think this is a happen medium that allows the RP player to be the hero and still get his "phat lewts" while still allowing that min/max player push to end game content.

I think I heard Curt say it before, but you need to hook the player in from the start, and having some unique dungeons / zones from the start with cool quests that involve movies or cut scenes really does the trick.

Just cause you are level 10 doesn't mean you shouldn't be able to get a zone like Sirens Grotto (one of my favorite zones in EQ1) and have some long fun quests with multiple stage quests to go along with it.

On the flip side I can see the argument about time invested and players skipping content due to out leveling it too fast, but think about Befallen, Crushbone, Splitpaw etc. Noob zones that aren't your typical "spider cave"

Quality before quantity please

[Maleficence]

Originally Posted by Grave

I think that's a shame since some of these games have very interesting storylines and writers are putting time and effort into delivering them. Still, if the players don't want to spend time reading it, you can't force them. All you can do is try to deliver it in a way they may be more inclined to accept, and I think a questing system like this is a step towards that.

I think so too. I've always forced myself to read all quest text the first time I get a quest, but it takes actual effort to go through with it. Some times it's worth the while.

However, the problem is that EVERY quest has text. You get 5-50 of those text pop-ups per play session as you do quests. After a while, you become indifferent, so all those efforts go to waste because no one's going to care about the intricate story behind the rabid raccoon infestation. That's why I say that stuff should be left for the important parts.

I liken it to exposition in a movie. A good director won't waste 5 minutes of screen time elucidating the past of an extra in the background that won't appear again in the film. Neither should MMOs. The effort and time required to make quest text is too high and people's threshold is too low for what they will tolerate reading. They need to reevaluate when this exposition occurs.

I'm definitely intrigued by AoC's quest system as Grave described it, but at the same time it seems they didn't implement it thoroughly enough if people still came out feeling it was just like WoW's system.

[Grave]

Speaking of hooking the player from the start, there's all this buzz going around right now about the Death Knight starting quests being so involved and amazing, some even saying it contains the best quests Blizzard has ever implemented.

To that I say, why can't that be the case for every single character?

Sure, it would take a lot of development time and effort, but if whether or not a player continues to play your game hinges on the first hour or so of playing (and it often does) why wouldn't you want to make a monumental effort towards blowing them away during that time?

Once again, games like LOTRO and AOC have tried to start down this path, but they didn't really do much with it. Tortage is alright, I guess, but not very epic. The LOTRO intro scenes are kind of cool, but they're very shallow and only last a few minutes.

[Fog]

Originally Posted by Grave

Speaking of hooking the player from the start, there's all this buzz going around right now about the Death Knight starting quests being so involved and amazing, some even saying it contains the best quests Blizzard has ever implemented.

To that I say, why can't that be the case for every single character?

Originally Posted by Kuro

2 year expansion cycle is fail....Just make sure you've got enough content in each expansion to last a middle-of-the-road player's main character until the next expansion.

You can't please all the people all the time. Either they neglect early content, they neglect endgame content, they neglect raids, they neglect PvP, or they spend years polishing them all and then someone complains because the release cycle isn't fast enough.

[Grave]

Eh, I think it would be doable without being forced to neglect too much.

You're already going to be designing starting areas and quests, that's a given. You could simply make a unique area for each race, use some of the same quests and have a few tailor-made for the chosen class, make them heavily scripted and exciting, and you're set. One area for each race isn't that big of a stretch. Making the quests more involving than collecting cactus apples is where a big difference can be made.

[Fog]

Originally Posted by Grave

Eh, I think it would be doable without being forced to neglect too much.

You're already going to be designing starting areas and quests, that's a given. You could simply make a unique area for each race, use some of the same quests and have a few tailor-made for the chosen class, make them heavily scripted and exciting, and you're set. One area for each race isn't that big of a stretch. Making the quests more involving than collecting cactus apples is where a big difference can be made.

It seems like that from this armchair I'm sitting in, too, but look at the facts: there have been many MMORPGs over the years. The people writing them haven't all been incompetent, and they all know that more interesting content (especially early-game content, where you do indeed see the majority of effort spent in most games) will make them more money. If it weren't quite a hard task to make a sufficient number of fantastic, unique quests on a reasonable schedule, more games would have them.

[Maleficence]

Originally Posted by Fog

If it weren't quite a hard task to make a sufficient number of fantastic, unique quests on a reasonable schedule, more games would have them.

Making every single quest in a game fantastic and unique is part of the problem. Especially, when everything that drives a game forward nowadays is a "quest". You end up with 100's of quests per zone and most are neither unique nor fantastic.

They should just realize it's impossible and focus on a limited amount of quests that will absolutely meet these high standards and leave the leveling aspects to other gameplay mechanics that lend themselves to that task.

[Gaereth]

Grouping should give you access to abilities that are group oriented. Soloing should give you access to abilities that are solo oriented.

Incentivize grouping. Make it a game play device that improves your character rather than just a means gather loot and exp....you are gathering skills for your character.

In EQ we had to group because we couldn't really advance solo. It was an artificial block to moving forward...what if I didn't want to group??

In WOW we have a choice but there is very little reason to group while leveling unless you just like being social. So, while I get a choice there really isn't any incentive if I am not social.

But what if I could choose AND got something out of it?? The bottom line is that most of us are selfish bastards and would like to get things done rather than dealing with other people...but if I improve my character by grouping then I will group.

Put skills in that are only accessible via quests. Like the warriors defensive stance.

In the end, allow people to build characters rather than a place to collect experience and hang their loot. Let people sculpt and build their character via the skills and talents the character has rather than just a loot holder.