Kill 10 Rats Is Dead: It's Time Modern MMORPGs Redefine Questing | MMORPG.com

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Kill 10 Rats Is Dead: It's Time Modern MMORPGs Redefine Questing | MMORPG.com

The classic "kill 10 rats" quest is the perfect symbol of just how stale quest design has become. Should MMORPGs evolve past this staple of the genre?

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IceAge

..no! I think I'm fine killing 10 rats.

Angrakhan

"Questing should be the backbone of MMORPGs, or at least, a primary progression driver"

I find this statement interesting. Do you realize this was not always the case. WoW actually introduced this as a concept. Prior to WoW, if you want to dust off your memories from EQ1, Shadowbane, and DAoC, the primary progression driver was hanging out in a group or solo if you could manage it next to a spawn location of mobs and pick them off as they respawned. Groups of players would stake out their claims and ask other groups who started to encroach on their 'camp' to move on. Remember that?

Killing 10 rats was actually an upgrade because it represented a fundamental shift in how to level. Now the quest reward XP was far more than the actual mob kills, so you had an actual incentive to do the quest.

There. Now you young whippersnappers learned something about the past. Now get off my lawn while I drink some tea in my rocking chair.

Lithuanian

Kill 10 rats is not dead and never would be. Nonsensic "U, hero, kill da ten ratz cauze me too lazy npc" should die right there, right now.

All I want is at least some sense. NPC stands in the middle of rat-infested swamp and demands I kill 10 rats. For Morgoth's sake, move out of cursed swamp, settle in town - or learn to kill! What if lame NPC is surrounded by ten rats and you have, say, 2 minutes to kill those rats (before they bite NPC, NPC dies, quest fails). What if there is some lame village and local were-rat lord sends its scouts, same 10 rats. Kill 10 rats, rat-lord temporaly does not know about village, village is safe. Or there is a plague in city and you can help efforts by killing 10 cursed rats (but NOT got biten).

All I want is - horrible dictu - choices. NPC demands to kill 10 cursed rats and bring Stinky Rat Brains as proof. I can kill; I can buy those Stinky Brains; I can lie that I killed. Each my action has consequences.

Is dynamic event better than 10 rats? hardly. You go through Stinky Swamp and you know that from time to time Stinky Daemoness spawns at these coordinates, 10 heroes needed and loot is some nice bikini-shield. It hardly differs from same NPC at same swamp demanding same lame 10 rats.

Traditional questing must change towards more sense and choices. Then, killing 10 lame rats or doing same DHL quest won't be that lame.

Nanfoodle

For me its... where does the story start? Am I the Hero of the world going on another adventure? Or like Fable, are you a kid on their first adventure. Kill 10 rats needs context to what my back story is. 

Vrika

Killing 10 rats is fine.

It goes too far when the game makes it a daily quest and asks me to earn tokens by doing it repeatedly, but I'm perfectly fine slaughtering my way through the area once.

jenk3m

http://thenoobcomic.com/comic/24/ http://thenoobcomic.com/comic/25/

uriel_mafess

Yeah no. Tired of this bs that new is better. Developers have demonstrated enough times they can't improve the classic trope of MMORPG questing. In fact all their efforts have come with way worse outcomes.

Assume that you don't have the quality to do better and at least try to do as well as they did.

cameltosis

"Questing should be the backbone of MMORPGs, or at least, a primary progression driver, drawing players into the world and making them feel like they're part of something greater."

I also take issue with this statement.

Quests are a tool, and tools are there to serve a purpose. The purpose totally depends on what sort of game the developers are trying to make.

For some developers, they want to tell a story, and so quests are designed to tell that story and make players feel a part of that story. Cutscenes and text tend to provide the majority of that content, but if we're very lucky, then the actual actions that the player has to perform to complete the quest are also woven into the story. Sadly, this is a rareity in my experience - the actions of the player and the content of the story rarely mesh well together.

For some developers, they want to provide players with personal progression, usually vertical progression. They want players to get stronger and stronger, giving them that power fantasy. Quests are then designed to hand out those progression upgrades (through xp upon completion) and new experiences so that players can see that progression in action. To them, the story and context of the quests is immaterial.

For some developers, they want to create an amazing world and just let players have fun within it. Quests become a way to guide players around that world, to hold their hand, a way of saying "come over to this spot and see what we've built!". So, as long as the quests are designed to guide players to the right spots, then both the content of the quest and the rewards are immaterial.

For some developers, they want to bring people together and give them a reason to work together. Quests can provide a focal point, a reason to work together with others, to socialise, to form bonds. For these developers, the story and context is immaterial, but the content of the quest is the point, requiring multiple people to work together to overcome it. A shared experience, guided and controlled by the developers.

For some developers, they want to provide their players with challenges to overcome. Problems to solve, and in the solving make their players feel good. For these developers, the story and context are meaningless, but the content is the key. Quests provide a convenient start and finish point, a concrete way of saying "you completed this challenge".

I'm sure you can come up with a bunch of other purposes that quests can solve. They aren't mutually exclusive, a quest can serve multiple purposes, or even all of them at once. But the more purposes a quest is supposed to serve, the harder it is to create, which is why so many quests seem bland or pointless. They aren't, its just their purpose is not one you care about.

It's also worth noting that everything that a quest is supposed to achieve can be achieved without quests. You can have a compelling story without quests. You can have challenges, progression, exploration and multiplayer events without quests.

The only real advantage that quests have, imo, is that they are familiar and accessible to the masses. I know it seems derogatory, but most of us are sheep. We need people to tell us what to do, where to go. We're not very good at setting our own goals, finding our own meaning, and taking the initiative. Quests deal with this issue.

Sovrath

Questing, for me has become a dirty word. I initially liked it because it gave context to combat but it quickly became “do a little combat “ and run around a lot.”

I’d rather grind. Or, better yet be given a premise like “zombies are continually plaguing a town after dark “ and I can take care of as many as I’d like and then bring the zombie hands in to collect my reward.

 like spontaneous group events but after a time players ignore them if they happen too often.

Quizzical

Before kill 10 rats quests, it was go kill 1000 rats to gain a few levels before moving on to a different area that is good for such grinding.  Making it faster to kill 10 of this and 10 of that, moving around a lot and doing different things, was a clear improvement over the older system of pure grinding.  More variety in gameplay made the game more interesting.

The problem with kill 10 rats today is that in many games, the rats don't meaningfully fight back.  They nominally attack, but barely do any damage if they hit you, so you just completely ignore it and deal your own damage until you kill them.  That means that kill 10 of this and 10 of that and 10 of something else is not meaningfully different from kill 30 of one thing, as fighting against different types of monsters isn't meaningfully different.  So we're back to the grind of kill thousands of things to level with no variety, except now with a lot more running around.  That's worse than the old system of pure grinding.

Slogging through many hours of something that is painfully dull is also worse than auto-combat.  For a lot of MMORPGs, automating combat for the leveling portion would be an improvement.  That doesn't mean that automating combat is good, but rather, that the way that they actually do do combat is so spectacularly awful as to be less interesting than automated combat.  Standing Stone has addressed it with adjustable difficulty levels in both DDO and LotRO, but I can't think of any other major theme park MMORPGs that have addressed the problem in a serious way.

omakta

I was thinking about that today and I think that survival games keep the feeling of old mmorpgs better than modern mmorpgs.

Scot

You need to think about world design, it is all very well starting a new player with a Machiavellian plot quest, nothing wrong with that. But what about the way the world is designed, if you are doing that quest and keep running across packs of rats and so on, does it not make sense you would get a quest to kill 10 rats?

So you can't have handy monsters nearby unless you intend players to hunt them down and how many MMOs do you know where the nearest monster is a couple of zones away?