When i read online about mmos I'm interested in playing, i often come across reviewers and players saying the questing in this game is dreadfully boring. Its 2015 and other mmos have come a long way when it comes to questing while this mmo still thinks its 2005.
Well my question is which are these new breed of mmos that have come a long way in questing? Because i have yet to find an mmo which has questing that isn't killing and collecting. So please enlighten me which are these NEW breed of mmos with superior questing so that i can right away start downloading it because i am so incredibly bored with questing system in mmos.
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I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been -Wayne Gretzky
And in the more sandboxy games you just do the same thing over and over to gain XP/Skill in whatever you're trying to level.
It all comes down to which formula works for you personally, because in the end you can always break it down to "collecting stuff and killing stuff". Hell, you could do that with just about every movie out there too. ("They need to recover/collect a nuke and kill a lot of terrorists along the way!" xD)
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I need to build stone walls so that other people dont kill me when i sleep. Collect 100 stones. But during this I am thirsty. Go to river to fill waterskin. There I am attacked by Raptor... etc
You will see hours pass by without you even knowing
Personally I think presentation and storytelling is way more important. TESO does it superbly IMO. I rarely notice how little diversity there is in my quest-interactions, because a quest in this game is often a part of a string of small quests contained in a wellwritten story. This way my focus is on one long connected quest, instead of just 10 small quests of killing X of this and clicking X of that.
I love the way GW2 presented quests, but a lot of them were too contained in itself and only had few or just a single step. Where GW2 did it right was the quests that had lots of steps, and more importantly, steps you didnt know would unfold unless you followed a character to a destination after initial questcompletion. Or steps opening up if you stuck around listening to a former quest-NPC talking to another NPC, instead of just rushing on to the next questmarker on your map. Those types of quests were moving the whole genre forward. I just think there were too few of them.
Personally I've always thought about how a game would work, if it introduced GM's to control events and quests in real-time (mixed with generic automated quests ofcourse). Yes, I know this would cost a LOT of money, but if devs provided the tools and storytelling-templates (perhaps open pre-written quest strings) for questsbuilding on the fly, and had staff controlling it in real time you could get a hint of the pen-and-paper dynamics to shake questing up a bit. I fondly remember GM-events in EverQuest, and they usually had half a server in a questing frenzy. Yea yea, it's probably not feasible, but a guy can dream, right?
And where did EPIC quests go, dammit? Long strings of VERY hard quests, that followed you all the way from low levels to max levels with an amazing class-defining prize in the end. Something to work on while normal questing. Something that gave your hard work levelling meaning, and tied your story together in some large storylines that forced you to a bit a grouping, a bit of raiding and perhaps some crafting.
Ofcourse if the playerbase only have focus on getting maxed and getting to endgame, there is no need to make questing fun and engaging.
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I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been -Wayne Gretzky
Your circumstances should be the quests.
EQ Next , before it was killed tried to do something like that with Storybricks.
And Crowfall will have exactly such "quests"
In meaning there will be no NPC with question mark, or dynamic event. You will go into wilderness to gather resources, what hardships you encounter - be there MOB or Players - will be your quests
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The most important thing is to remove all quest helpers like the ! mark, map markers, and paths directly to where you need to go.
Remove the quest log as it makes it seem like a laundry list of trivial tasks to complete.
Build quests around actually reading or listening to what NPCs say. Basically make reading the quest and remembering what was said important in order to complete the quest. Don't make it so you can just follow various points or lines on a map.
Reduce the sheer amount of quests and focus on making fun quests that are more difficult to complete and more interesting overall.
Quests are really about exploration in a fantasy world more then anything. Any meaningful exploration is really taken away in most triple AAA MMOs. There may be some niche games that do it alright that I haven't tried.
A lot of single player games are guilty of this to. They add to many helper features that make completing quests literally a mundane list of simple tasks to complete.
You know that's not quest content.
I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been -Wayne Gretzky
Where themepark games try to hide that they are copying WOW, games like Mortal Online and Darkfall make no attempt to hide their inspiration
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LordOfDarkDesire
Played: EQ, EQ2, Vanguard, WAR, WoW, LoTRO, CoX, CO, GW2, FFXIV: ARR, AoC, Rift, TSW, SWTOR, TERA, BnS, ESO
More or less.
Instead of improving on quests by giving helpers to players they can be improved by having better thought out quests that are more descriptive in terms of how to proceed. I think developers took the easy way out with all of these quest helper tools. This made it so they didn't have to put much thought into the quests. Any quest can be easily completed without much thought if you can follow ! marks and lines. That seems to be OK except it also removes anything meaningful from the story IMO.
Basically I would like to see improvements to quests, but not in the form of helper tools.
My Problem nowadays is the amount of small quests without any context paired with all the helpers.
I also don't like the public events which started with WAR afaik (after it came Rift and now GW2). They are fun sometimes, but if everything is only public events this gets boring fast. It's also mostly a giant zergfest, where there are sometimes so many people that it is impossible to scale to the huge mass.
As already been said, I'm missing a MMO where there are less quests, but long questchains. Also chains who require you to do different things and go to different spots, not only at a certain questhub.
E.g. start at a town, kill some mobs there, go to another town to aquire the materials for an item you have to craft, go back to first hub, kill some more mobs to gather information, solve a riddle, get into a dungeon, find a key to boss room, solve another riddle, kill boss mob, go back to town, get told, that the boss mob was instructed by someone else, go to a city, find out where the principal lives, go to his house, find room with the evidence, solve another riddle, have the choice to tell it to the police or make a deal with the boss....
This chain should be the only one or one of very few in this levelrange (alternatively there are 2-3 other long quest chains in this lvlrange), respectively questhub and should give you enough xp and loot. So it is more like playing an adventure, not as it is now, do 5-10 quests simultaneously go to next quests hub do the next 10 quests without any meaning.
Also give us more choices, how to do the quests, don't force us to kill quests. If I need information about something I should be able to steal them, kill people to get them from them, bribe someone, ...
1997 Meridian 59 'til 2019 ESO
Waiting for Camelot Unchained & Pantheon
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Dynamic events though is evolving pretty fast from WARs PQs to the dynamic chains in GW2:HOT and it will evolve far more in the future. They are far more than just a quest with a timer that everyone in the area do already, the linking of DEs and working together have huge potential. Now, if there just was a good way to make them more varied so not the same place will get the exact same chain over and over we woulöd get somewhere interesting.
There is a limit to what you can do with a feature like questing and it have evolved a lot from catching rats in moat of Meridian 59 with instances, phasing and so on. We even seen quests when you have to interrigate criminals to find the guilty and such.
The future might be dynamic events or something else but questing will be the same until people tire of it.
But in a nutshell, quests are still kill/collect. Whatever you may think of can pretty much be called kill/collect as it will inevitably it comes to these mechanics.
Steal= collect item
GW2 has various way in which you can complete hearts.
I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been -Wayne Gretzky
And, for that matter, you can convey story through dynamic events just fine, quite a few event chains in GW2, with quite a lot of voiced over interludes, too bad most of people never got to see them since they just rush off the moment after event is done and they get their shiny. Again....MMO crowd. Conditioned since 1999.