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Worst quest ever?
Quizzical
Member LegendaryPosts: 25,483
Many MMORPGs have a lot of quests that players can do. Some of the quests are pretty good, some are boring and tedious, and some are just plain broken. But usually if a quest is broken or otherwise horrible, there's really only one thing that makes it so bad.
I was playing Champions Online recently, and one quest stood out as awful for many reasons. It actually isn't of the broken and uncompletable variety, as trying to complete the quest usually (but not always) works just fine. But there are so many things wrong with it that I thought, this might be the worst designed quest that I've ever done, in any game, ever. See if you can find a quest in any game that beats this for awfulness:
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The quest is "Let's Stop a Riot!", and it's a level 14 quest in the Westside zone. It's likely to be one of the last few quests that a player does in that zone before moving on to a higher level area, so it tries to tie together various storylines. And in this, it fails miserably.
The basic storyline is that there are five major gangs in Westside. Four of the leaders are in prison, but some prisoners are rioting, so MCPD Chief Surhoff asks you to enter the prison, quell the riot, and make sure that the gang leaders stay put. And that's the first place that the storyline goes completely awry.
One of the gang leaders, Kevin Poe, gets captured in the level 19 quest Poe-wned, in City Center. Note that that's a level 19 quest, and in a higher level region, so most players doing Let's Stop a Riot! haven't done it yet. In particular, it's not a prerequisite for Let's Stop a Riot! Why Kevin Poe is in prison already is something of a mystery.
Another gang leader, Frank Zaretti, appears in the quest Fight Club. This is a level 17 quest, which again, means that a lot of players won't have done it yet, though it is, at least, in Westside, rather than a higher level zone. And even if a player has already done Fight Club, the quest asks you to find some incriminating evidence. It spawns at random in one of three places, and Frank Zaretti stands by one of those spawns. If it didn't spawn by Zaretti when a player did Fight Club, then the player likely wouldn't have defeated Zaretti, and may not have even seen him in the mission. What he's doing in prison is also something of a mystery.
And then there is the third gang leader, Ludwig, who gets captured in the quest "Bit of the old ultra-violence". This is a level 13 quest, also in Westside, so a player would likely have done it before doing Let's Stop a Riot! But it's not a prerequisite, so some players might not have.
The fourth gang leader is Zoe Loft, who doesn't appear anywhere else in the game. Maybe she has been in prison since before the storyline of the game started.
So anyway, you start the mission, and notice that they recycled the map from the quest Prison Break. This at least makes sense, as both quests take place in the Millennium City jail.
At the start of the mission, several prisoners rush you. You kill them, and then wait. Then some more prisoners spawn, you kill them, and then wait. Rinse and repeat several times. It's not hard, but I could do without the constant waiting for prisoners to spawn.
Anyway, once the prisoners are defeated, the prison guards are all sprawled out on the floor as if dying. When you talk to one, he gets up and runs away, leaving the jail. So your quest asks you to make sure that prisoners in jail stay in jail, and the way you do this is to... make all the guards leave? Seriously? That's completely insane.
Most of the prison is still secure, though, with the doors still locked and intact. So in order to get into this area, you find a prison guard with the key that will let you unlock the doors. And then you go unlock a door, and leave it wide open. And then another. Seriously, you're ostensibly trying to keep prisoners in jail, and the way the quest requires you to do this is to unlock the doors, open them, and leave them wide open. Again, it's completely insane, but it's what the quest requires you to do.
Anyway, after the first door, there are some more scattered prisoners, including three named villains that you defeated in a previous quest, Millennium City's Most Wanted. This at least makes sense, as the quest is a prerequisite for Let's Stop a Riot. So you defeat them again and move on.
There are three doors past this room, and they have to be opened in a particular order for some inexplicable reason. But they're all opened using the same key, as you don't get a key beyond one door to unlock the next.
So anyway, you unlock the first door and there are two prisoners behind it who attack you, and then Kevin Poe. You fight Kevin Poe for a while, kill him, and move on. Well, sometimes you kill him. Sometimes he just randomly despawns in the middle of the fight. Usually he hangs around until he dies, but not always.
When he does despawn, whether still alive or not, he gives some voiceover, to the effect of, "I'm glad you're not my goons," and then most of the rest of it is unintelligible. After that sentence, the words "freezer" and "by now" are clear, but after hearing the voiceover a number of times, I can't make out the rest of it. So it seems that they went to the work to put a voiceover into the game, without playing it back to see if they could understand it. And there doesn't seem to be any reason why the voiceover should be unintelligible.
Also, after Kevin Poe despawns, two Cult of the Red Banner henchmen come in and attack you. Now, henchmen are very weak, so a group of only two isn't much of a threat. Why they broke into a prison to attack you is, again, something of a mystery.
Anyway, once you defeat Kevin Poe, it's on to the next room. Here again, there are two prisoners, and then Frank Zaretti and Zoe Loft. Except that often, Zoe Loft is in a ditch that appears to be there so that if a prisoner does get out of his cell, he's likely to fall into the ditch and be unable to escape. Zoe Loft seems to have done exactly that. And while you can go down there and fight her, it turns out that you don't have to.
Anyway, you can attack either Frank Zaretti or Zoe Loft first. Both will despawn at the same time. Sometimes they wait until you kill one of them, and sometimes not. When they do despawn, they both give a voiceover--at the same time. There aren't that many voiceovers in the game, but two of the ones that they did go to the effort to put in are invariably played at the same time. Zaretti's is unremarkable, but Zoe Loft's, "Take us to Hi Pan now" is completely stupid. We'll come back to this later.
Anyway, once you defeat Frank Zaretti and Zoe Loft, again, two Cult of the Red Banner henchmen break in and attack you. This is pathetic for the same reasons that it was in Kevin Poe's room.
So you move on to the third room, where there are two prisoners that you defeat, and then Ludwig. Unlike the previous gang bosses, Ludwig doesn't despawn in the middle of the battle. He does, however, turn invulnerable, and then jog to the jail entrance. Sometimes he waits until he's at 0 HP and should be dead before he does this, but usually it's in the middle of the battle.
Or at least usually he runs to the jail entrance. Sometimes he gets stuck and stops, in which case, the quest cannot be completed. The player will have to leave the instance, stay outside for 30 minutes, and that will reset it and let the player restart it.
If Ludwig does make it to the jail entrance, then Hi Pan enters, and there is a cut scene where they talk to each other. Why Zoe Loft was in such a hurry to despawn so she can go to Hi Pan, elsewhere in the jail, is not explained. Ludwig says that he kept his part of some unexplained deal, and wants Hi Pan to do the same. Hi Pan promises that Ludwig will be safe, and then Ludwig despawns.
It takes a bit of background to explain why this is absurd. Ludwig is a Qularr space alien, trying to leave Earth. In the mission where you defeat him, "Bit of the old ultra-violence", Ludwig says that Hi Pan promised him a power core that will let him leave Earth.
Ludwig's demand is not merely to get out of jail. He's standing at the jail entrance. Indeed, he got there by running through two doorways that were locked until you unlocked them and left them wide open as part of the mission. So if all he wanted was to get out of jail, he could simply walk out the door. Ludwig wants to get off of Earth entirely, and Hi Pan doesn't address this.
Except that, as the cut scene plays, the player wouldn't know all of this. Before Let's Stop a Riot!, Hi Pan has appeared in exactly one quest. He made a cameo appearance in the level 7 quest Thick as Thieves, and only during a cut scene. He disappears when the cut scene ends, and is never named during it. Hi Pan isn't named in the cut scene in Let's Stop a Riot!, either. He is only mentioned in Ludwig's line in "Bit of the old ultra-violence" and Zoe Loft's voiceover in Let's Stop a Riot!
Indeed, the only way that the player is ever given to determine that the character in the cut scenes is the same as the character briefly mentioned the two other times is that after the cut scene of Ludwig and Hi Pan talking, Hi Pan takes about two seconds to despawn. The player can select him and see the name tag in that time. The player is never given any chance to fight Hi Pan, nor to see him with a name tag in any other mission. If the player doesn't happen to select Hi Pan, rather than Iron or Gold, immediately after the cut scene ends, he'll never discover this.
Anyway, during the cut scene with Ludwig and Hi Pan talking, Hi Pan asks the two bosses Iron and Gold to come into the prison and fight you. If it's a mystery why Kevin Poe is in prison during the quest, it's also a mystery why Iron and Gold weren't already there. The Westside mission Metals of Dishonor asks the player to find and defeat them, so presumably they should have already been captured. Also curious is why they enter the prison to fight you, after everyone of consequence has already left. So I guess they get recaptured for being terminally stupid.
Iron and Gold are both labeled as super villains, but also as "weak". Now, to explain this, a super villain in Champions Online is basically a boss that is soloable. Lower tiers such as villains and henchmen aren't any real threat in a 1 on 1 battle, but a fight against six henchmen or three villains at once could be a significant threat. Super villains are storng enough to be a threat in 1 on 1 battles, and some can actually be a considerable pain to defeat 1 on 1 if your build doesn't match up well with theirs.
The game also gives a handful of mobs the "weak" or "tough" modifier. "Weak" means a character has less life, does less damage, and so forth. "Tough" is the opposite, and is mainly for the mobs in 5-man lairs. So the game labeled Iron and Gold as super villains, who are supposed to be strong, but then also as "weak" to make the fight trivial. I'm not aware of any other "weak" super villain in the entire game. This apparently also deprives them of the lightning reflexes passive skill that made them a pain in Metals of Dishonor.
So after you defeat Iron and Gold, the quest is marked as complete, and you return to MCPD Chief Surhoff to turn it in. And the quest completion text makes it clear that MCPD Chief Surhoff has no clue what just happened in the quest.
Apparently he thanks you for capturing Iron and Gold, whom you may have already captured before the quest. The gang leaders all escaped by randomly despawning, including the ones you killed before they despawned. How they got out is not explained. I guess that's what happens when you unlock and open all of the doors of a jail and evacuate all of the prison guards.
But apparently the police were able to interrogate the Cult of the Red Banner henchmen who broke into the prison to attack you, as if trying to get captured. And the gang members said that the gang leaders who just escaped are going to work together to summon something powerful. And they told the police where it's supposed to happen.
But MCPD Chief Surhoff apparently doesn't want your help with it, as he doesn't offer a follow-up quest. This, apparently, is a bug, as he's supposed to offer a follow-up quest, but Cryptic mysteriously made the follow-up mutually exclusive with another quest that you may have previously done.
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So, let's count the ways in which the quest is an abysmal failure.
Its storyline assumes that you have done other quests that you probably haven't. Conversely, it also assumes that you haven't done other quests that you likely have. Apparently Cryptic forgot about quest prerequisites that could have prevented this from happening.
The basic goal is to ensure that prisoners safely locked in prison stay there by making all of the guards leave, unlocking all of the doors, and leaving them wide open. I can't think of any other quest in any game I've ever played that asked the player to do something that idiotic.
The events of the quest itself contradict both the starting and ending quest text.
A boss often spawns in a ditch that basically removes her from the fight. But often she doesn't, so whether she's supposed to get stuck in the ditch or not, often it's wrong.
Mobs spawn and despawn seemingly at random, with no reason given as to why this happens. Most games don't ask you to fight a boss, then make the boss despawn in the middle of the fight without explanation, and expect you to continue as though nothing had happened.
Significant portions of a voiceover are completely unintelligible. Well, other than Ludwig's, which seems to be intentionally gibberish.
Sometimes the quest bugs and becomes uncompletable, and requires a player to wait half an hour for it to reset and then start over.
There are quite a few other "well that was stupid" moments, as explained above, too.
And this is all just one quest. It's not even an especially long quest. And all of these problems are unique to this particular quest, not of the "this bug affects 100 quests, including this one" variety.
You know how some quests look like an employee spent half an hour to put it together a year before release, and no one at the company has looked at it since then? This is not one of those quests.
This quest looks like Cryptic put quite a bit of work into it. There is a full cut scene, and several other voiceovers. Very few quests in the game have a cut scene, and not many have any voiceovers, either. There are no fewer than ten named characters, most of which have their own custom graphics unique to that particular character, and not shared with any other character in the game.
Which makes it bizarre that they put so much work into concocting a quest this awful.
And then they decided to make it prominent, too. A few months ago, going from zone chat, the most unpopular portions of the game were Westside and Lemuria. So Cryptic lowered the level on Westside, and created contact quests to guide players toward it, so that it would be the first zone most new players see after the tutorial. That's the exact opposite of trying to make a highly polished newbie area, as a lot of games do.
Now, I'm sure there are other horrible quests in other games. But can you top this, for a quest that is so uniquely awful for so many different reasons?
Comments
I'd hate to be "that guy", but could you maybe sum that up a little?
Worth the read
Practice doesn't make perfect, practice makes permanent.
"At one point technology meant making tech that could get to the moon, now it means making tech that could get you a taxi."
I can't really think of one specific quest that was quite so bad. There is however a series of quests in LOTRO which ticked me off to the point of quitting the game entirely, in fact (lifetime sub notwithstanding).
In a nutshell, it tasks you with going back to the exact same area no less than 6 times. Now, this area is a small bandit camp which happens to be across the entire zone from the quest hub, with a TON of mobs to aggro on the way. You will get kncoked off your mount several times during the journey. What makes this even worse is that the area is up in a mountainous section of the map, meaning you can't simply ride cross-country, oh no. You need to approach it in a very specific way which takes even more time, and forces you to deal with some fairly strong magic using wisps. The quickest I've ever gotten there from the quest hub was 15 minutes.
When you get there, you are required to kill the exact same mobs several times. You literally kill them once for 1 particular item, ride back, turn in, then go back and kill them again for a different item, etc.
Once I picked up the 4th quest for that area I quit in absolute disgust. It is by far the absolute worst area design I've ever encountered in an MMO, maybe even in a game period.
Shame on you Turbine. SHAME ON YOU!!
tl;dr sorry next time maybe hehe.
About worse quest well Darkfall where i have to kill around 400 mobs several quests had this ammount, some quest took me year to finish aahhhh:(
Games played:AC1-Darktide'99-2000-AC2-Darktide/dawnsong2003-2005,Lineage2-2005-2006 and now Darkfall-2009.....
In between WoW few months AoC few months and some f2p also all very short few weeks.
Jobe Scientist + Yutto's quest in AO.
Basicly two extremely long quest chains which require running from on end of the zone to other multiple times and revward is ofthen minimal and for some professions something which is purely for other's convenience...
http://www.ao-universe.com/main.php?site=knowledge&link=2&id=270
And after that:
http://www.ao-universe.com/main.php?site=knowledge&link=2&id=271
Just extremely tedious and overly long quest chain...
I can believe thats a terible quest yes im already disgust and i only read about it:P
But i remember turbine making some awesome quests with complex puzzles in AC2 they can make great quests but your quest seems realy bad indeed lol.
Games played:AC1-Darktide'99-2000-AC2-Darktide/dawnsong2003-2005,Lineage2-2005-2006 and now Darkfall-2009.....
In between WoW few months AoC few months and some f2p also all very short few weeks.
The ones that have always pissed me off are the quests that pretend to be a chain quest with a bunch of random collection quests that require you to collect a certain amount of items for each "leg" of the quest to finally complete the main objective or quest. What makes it so tedious is that the drops are not guaranteed and you can in fact even end up with several of the same exact page or item instead of the additional pages or items you need to complete the quest. Not to mention how much room in your inventory these different pages, items, etc. take up until you complete the"quests".
Or as I lovingly refer to them the STV quest since to my recollection that was the first one of these abysmal suckass pieces of filth I encountered.
SInce then it seems every mmorpg has to have one or more of these tedious chains that far as I can tell no one seems to enjoy and takes forever to complete unless you're extremely fortunate in drops or you say "fuck it" and buy the items you need to complete them off the ah. They always tend to have their drop rates increased over time because eventually developers give in to the amount of customers that complain about these quests. Not a big deal when a game has ben out for a long time but when a game is new it tends to be a royal pain.
Or in some cases they even get rid of them completely. Although it is guranteed that least one will be around at launch.
WoW had it in Stranglethorn Vale.
LotR had it in Angmar - on a side note I believe this same chain an earlier poster is referring to is the same one that crosses my mind.
TCoS had an abundance of these.
FE has a few of these in the book collections.
RoM had almost an exact replica of WoW's STV quest chain.
etc, etc, etc.
Simply one the worst design choices I encounter in the majority of these games at least once or more per game.
1. For god's sake mmo gamers, enough with the analogies. They're unnecessary and your comparisons are terrible, dissimilar, and illogical.
2. To posters feeling the need to state how f2p really isn't f2p: Players understand the concept. You aren't privy to some secret the rest are missing. You're embarrassing yourself.
3. Yes, Cpt. Obvious, we're not industry experts. Now run along and let the big people use the forums for their purpose.
I dunno about the worst ever...but I remember in Vanguard, the Ankh of the Fungus King you turn in for swamp armor had the exact opposite effect it should have and flip flopped my faction 180 degrees from where it should have been. I was super pissed....the GM fixed me up relatively fast, but if you just followed the dialog I was doing the right thing and got the opposite effect. My faction went from 2500 to -2500. I was not happy.
Tyrust - EQ
Proximo - EQII
Proximo - Warhammer Online
Fogerty - Vanguard
An entertaining read but it's the sort of thing that I'd much rather see on YouTube with a narrator explaining everything that's wrong with the quest.
Sound like a 15 year olds game to me. They don't give a hoot as long as it has kill, kill and hooters. How many you think actually read or even listened to the quest?
If you are interested in making a MMO maybe visit my page to get a free open source engine.
A long one. but worth reading.
I read all the txt and games like Morrowind ive also read all books and scrolls in that game hehe.
Games played:AC1-Darktide'99-2000-AC2-Darktide/dawnsong2003-2005,Lineage2-2005-2006 and now Darkfall-2009.....
In between WoW few months AoC few months and some f2p also all very short few weeks.
Yes...LotRO was very good for that...
...and that is why I quit as well...
PLAYING: NOTHING!!!
PLAYED:FFXI, LotRO, AoC, WAR, DDO, Megaten, Wurm, Rohan, Mabinogi, RoM
WAITING FOR: Dust 514
In SRO they had a three part quest were you had to kill a flower 2000 times for each part. After the 6000th time you just wanted to go into a corner and commit seppuku.
Velika: City of Wheels: Among the mortal races, the humans were the only one that never built cities or great empires; a curse laid upon them by their creator, Gidd, forced them to wander as nomads for twenty centuries...
Thinking of bad quests I'm reminded of old-school EQ. You could get quests with vague instructions that sent you to (sometimes far-off) places you had little or no chance of surviving in for a totally useless reward.
Example: The Kelethin drunk's quest if anyone remembers that
What a great post. I want to applaud the OP for taking the time to write up such a clear and thorough review of this quest. A good read indeed. This sounds like a sarcastic post, but it isn't. I'd love to read more narratives like the first one describing moronic quests.
Eh... Quest isnt the same as early day of AC. It became more dumb-down easy exp later on to copy other mmorpg games. Early AC days's quest is the best EVER designed
Kain_Dale
The best quests were the ones in the early MMORPG's which relied on spoken keywords. You knew exactly what the NPC wanted you to say in terms of general concept, but the quest writer would invariably pick some enormously awkward turn of phrase to say.
And there were no gamefaqs guides about it or wowhead to consult.
When I say spoken keywords, I mean things you actually needed to /say to trigger an event. Imagine playing RIFT, WoW, LotRO or whatever your chosen flavor of PvE(+P) quester is. You walk up to a quest NPC. No shiny exclamation mark. Instead, you see another player standing in front of him, babbling like a lunatic.
Yeoric says, "beer flagon"
Yeoric says, "flask of beer"
Yeoric says, "mug of beer"
Yeoric says, "beer tankard"
Yeoric says, "beer cup"
Yeoric says, "bottle of beer"
And it would continue ad infinitum until somebody came along to clue him in. Half of the reason "community" was so strong in these early games was because players were engaged in a fight for survival against the questionable design decisions made early on the industry.
worst quest ever
hard to decide with all the walking at the start of lotro so ill combine every one of them
every lotro quest without mount!
threat everywhere
Ah. It was my first quests ever. I logged on to Meridian 59 for the first time ever, I started out in a inn in some small crappy town. Just outside the inn stood some dude with a quest marker. He told me to go and kill 10 rats (really, 10 rats). It was something about collecting the tails or some other lame excuse.
The funny thing is that I done this quest thousands of times since then in all f****** games.
@ Original Poster;
I always like your threads but most of the time they are such a long read :P You would do us a great pleasure if you stick to at least 3-4 paragraphs.
The worst quest I have ever tried personally was the epic quest for clerics in EQ before they nerfed it to make it more reasonable.
When I performed the quest, you had to camp a rare spawn on a 14 day random timer. The rare spawn then triggered a raid caliber dragon that you had to HOPE your guild could muster for quick enough to take it before the 5 other clerics watching the spawn could get their guild there.
On top of this hellish camp, you had to clear several raid caliber giant spawns on a 1 hour timer that guarded the chamber of one of two existing world dragons. If the dragon spawned on you you would likely die and have to wait for some guild (often on a rotation and in not particular hurry) to raid the dragon before you could retrieve your corpse (unless you had some very talented monk friend that owed you a favor).
This was the last step in a lengthy quest involving rare drops from boss mobs in various raid zones that were also on week long timers and horded over by the more powerful guilds in the game.
The water sprinkler of nem'anhk was the prize of a rediculously long and painful quest that you had to be dedicated enough, skilled enough, patient enough, well enough liked, and lucky enough to ever even HOPE of accomplishing.
I was all of those things and got my sprinkler ... one week before they made the quest a cake walk... two months of my life i will never get back =(
for me the worst q ever was a q i did in Aion where u had to GRIND 100 feather for a boot that u can't live without
10% move speed was it ? ........
any way it was the worst grind ever coz the mobes were elite and u had to kill 100 wich needed a party = 6 ppl wich means every 6 elits killed would give u 1 feather
= killing 600 elite for 1 q
it can easy be 650 coz ther's some none elite mobs who dosn't drop it and u'll have to kill them any way and, with ur luck ur loot would be none elite one :P
so i think that q made me see how empty this game was and leave it for good
Which Final Fantasy Character Are You?
Final Fantasy 7
A poster mentioned EQ quests above, and it resonated with me. EQ quests were somehow simultaneously the worst and the best quests ever. Finding quests was a quest in itself. And becuase there was limited contextual feedback regarding quests you were never sure if the quest was just broken or if you hadn't yet found some secret 'key' to unlock the next stage. The game was rife with mythology surrounding certain 'dead end' quests. Some people were purported to have finished them while others couldn't, and no one knew why.
Me and a friend used an old exploit to get our Fairy language skill up to 100 so that we could talk with the Fairy Queen in Lessar Faydark. Supposedly she had a quest but would only talk to someone with a certain faction, and perfect command of her language, on a certain night of the year. A whole series of unknown variables. We never were able to unlock it, and to this day I don't know if it was just broken or what.
A similar quest existed in High Pass with the leader of the city who was supposedly some nefarious creature. To make matters worse there, High Pass had a series of hidden doors and passages, some of which were apparently inaccessible. But that didn't stop the speculation and mythology.
If I could ask some of the old EQ devs one question, it would be whether these quests were broken or not, and if not, what was the sequence of steps needed to unlock.
edit: and by exploit, I mean: I say a few words to you in a language to get your skill up +1, you do the same to me; We zone, and repeat the process. Do this 100 times (or whatever the max was, I forget now). Otherwise, language increase would take you months to raise.
I didn't do this quest, but I remembered reading about it years ago and was able to find it.
http://everquest.allakhazam.com/db/quest.html?quest=116
The part in question that stuck with me is that he discovers a clue that leads him to realize he needs to kill orcs in Dagnor's Cauldron. There's one orc camp with 3 orcs at it. Every six hours a 4th orc spawns, a plain old Orc Scout. After days of killing this orc, the named finally spawns, which he kills to be able to continue the quest.
The poster also mentions using a Ghoulbane sword while completing the quest, which looks significantly better than the quest reward he finally gets.
"Gamers will no longer buy the argument that every MMO requires a subscription fee to offset server and bandwidth costs. It's not true you know it, and they know it." -Jeff Strain, co-founder of ArenaNet, 2007