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On Quests

Quest: A word all too familiar to any MMO gamer. Quests are a, if not the, core element of gameplay in all modern MMOs. They can be used to guide the player, to flesh out the lore of a given area, to distract the player, and to dangle a carrot, pushing the player to keep going just a bit longer for that nice reward. Today I want to talk a bit about these quests we all know and love (or sometimes hate) and what I think works and what doesn’t.

I’ll try to break the types of quests down into categories to make it easier for both of us. Let’s go:

Slaying Quests

We’re all definitely familiar with these. Probably the most common quest in MMOs such as WoW and EQ2. It simply involves killing X amount of a certain type of creature, or killing a specific named mob.

While probably the most uninteresting (except in regard to the nameds, which I will get to in a moment), slaying quests are easily the most necessary to have in an MMO. I mentioned earlier that quests could serve as a distraction to the player, and slaying quests do just that. They keep you from realizing that you’re killing mobs over and over again for XP. In the EQ days, we would sit in a camp and grind on mobs all day long without a thought. That’s just how it was. Would it have hurt to have the gypsies of Oasis ask us to kill 25 orcs for them to lessen the threat to their camp? Not at all. It would have been great, especially since we were definitely slaughtering those orcs anyway. There are a few keys to a good slaying quest:

• If at all possible, have a slaying quest mesh with other quests in that area. For example, if you are giving the players a quest to collect gnoll hides, give them a gnoll slaying quest as well. If quests in the area send the player through a bog infested with Trolls, give them a quest to slay some so they have some fun on the way. Simple!
• Make it lore relevant. Explain it. Why do they want you to kill the gnolls? Flesh it out. Don’t have a random guy in a camp tell you to go kill 10 moss snakes halfway across the forest because he doesn’t like the color green. While that may sound ridiculous, trust me, it’s far too common in games right now. Quests are one of the best ways of showing players how rich your world is, make them want to read the quests instead of just hitting accept immediately.
• Have the slaying quest lead into other quests occasionally. And no, I don’t mean when you run back to tell the guy you killed the gnolls he says “K, now go kill 10 more of these harder gnolls.” That’s just annoying. Make it something interesting, maybe one of the gnolls was carrying a map with a marking on it and you recognize it as a map of the next zone over. What could be at the marked spot? You’ve immediately hooked the player on wanting to see that next zone or area and tied the two together with the lore, though the player will have to find out how on his or her own.
• Whenever lore allows, add in a named to the slaying quest (and make it drop loot). No matter the type of gamer, every player loves to fight a named. People in EQ2 run around dungeons all day just looking for named to kill. Why can’t this be just as fun in quests? WoW has countless slaying quests with a named attached, but it’s never interesting. It’s a slightly harder version of the other things you killed, and it never drops anything good. Make the named drop something just as good as the quest reward. Make it exciting.
• Don’t make the player travel too far back and forth. If the quest has multiple stages, put the questgiver near the mobs in question, such as a small caravan too afraid to continue on for fear of Giants in the hills ahead.

Easy enough, probably the most basic type of quest along with gathering quests. There is less to say about them other than what I have because every MMO does them the same way, and they do it decently. My biggest complaint is probably that it is overused, especially at lower levels of play.

Fetch Quests

Another familiar simple one. Fetch me 10 decaying bone femurs. Or 20 bear teeth. Man, there are some real crappers in this category in most every game. Essentially this is just another distraction to get the player to kill mobs, but allows players to feel like they are doing something different from the slaying quests because they are retrieving items. What makes a good fetch quest?

• It doesn’t have to be so boring! Apples, hides, tails(?), you name it, there’s probably a fetch quest for it. I’d like to see something a little more exciting. This isn’t necessarily a problem with fetch quests themselves, but the design of the games we’re seeing right now. We need a push towards making the player feel heroic and powerful much earlier than they do right now. Why at level 10 should I have to go kill wolves and gather fur? Send me into a Gorgon lair to collect snakes from their heads to be fashioned into magical whips for dark elven mistresses. Done and done.
• Again, lore relevancy. I guess this is going to apply to everything I say about quests, but it gets ignored in fetch quests probably more than anything else. Tell us what the NPC needs these items for, and why they need us to get them instead of doing it themselves. Give us opposing NPCs sometimes that want the same thing brought back, and make us choose who to help.
• A good drop rate. We realize this is to distract us from grinding mobs, but don’t get ridiculous. Players need to feel progress as they go, if you want us there longer, make the required amount higher.

It’s also worth noting that I think EQ2 handles these fetch quests the best as far as mechanics go. Often times you don’t actually have to take up inventory space collecting physical items for the quest, but instead it will simply confirm that you got one and update your log. This is fairly convenient, but I guess it could be argued that it is less challenging (though inventory space as a challenge is dumb). Unfortunately, while they have a good mechanic for these quests they are one of the prime culprits for overusing it and making them as bland as humanly possible.

Escort Quests

Finally something to rant about. Man, I hate escorts. Hey guys, let’s follow Slowest-walker-ever-to-walk-slow Man around while random mobs pop out of nowhere and attack him. If we’re lucky, he might randomly run off after one (the only time he moves fast) and make us fail the quest. It’ll be a blast.

Escorts suck. But, they could be fixed. It may be an issue of technology at this point, I’m not sure, but a good first step would be:

• Non-retarded AI. If this dude I’m helping escape needs my help to do so in the first place, I doubt he’s going to charge in at the incoming mobs and start pummeling them with his bare fists. Depending on the character, make them cower behind the player and his group, or maybe they do have some martial skill and are able to help you fight, but will obey commands you give them (like a pet).
• Normal player movement speed, or close to it. I don’t care if you want my grandma to be able to do the quest so you make sure the NPC moves at the same speed she does. Most players can more than keep up with an NPC running around, and when you make them walk slow it’s just a huge annoyance and a waste of time.
• Don’t make them too long. The Mana-Tombs escort is an example of one that is too long. You’ve just spent nearly an hour clearing this dungeon, and then you have to walk all the way back through it with Ethereal Slowbie, fighting more trash. Meh. Make it fast, and therefore more exciting.

If it were me, I would use the escort quest very sparingly, at least until AI improves. There is potential for some cool things using them, but it’s just not there yet. I would like to see something similar to the Durnholde escort in WoW, where a very powerful character from the lore joins your party. Except instead of sucking like Thrall, the guy would be a complete badass and your party would be basically unstoppable with him around. You could go through a dungeon area with him just owning everything in your path and giving your party crazy buffs, etc. At the end he could be mind-controlled or possessed by the boss somehow and you have all those abilities he used turned against you. Add in some mechanic where you can either kill him + the boss or break the spell and then kill the boss, resulting in different loot. End of story, epic awesomeness. Oh well, maybe someday. Until then, we get slowbies.

Mystery Quests

Mysteries: my favorite type of quest. This one may have you confused because I basically just chose a term to call this type of quest because it seems to be the most fitting. Mystery quests have all but disappeared from modern MMO gaming in favor of the informative quest journals and mini-maps. I’m talking about the quests of old – the quests of EverQuest.

I call them mysteries because in EQ, you had little to no direction or guidance on how to solve a particular quest. Often times you would come across an item and not even realize it belonged to a quest out there somewhere. Quests were all around you, and yet it was oftentimes impossible to find where one ended and another began. I still remember how the Rogue community solved the entire Epic quest chain before the Monks even knew who their starting NPC was. Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m not condoning this type of design. At least, not exactly. I do, however, think mystery quests should make a return in a more user-friendly way, though not as friendly as normal quests.

The point of a mystery quest would not be a distraction from killing mobs, or a dangling carrot (ideally, the player would not even know what reward, if any, they would get!) but instead simply encourages them to get out there and explore. Not only go and explore the world, but the community as well. Maybe the Wizard forum community has figured out what that glowing blue orb you found in the depths of a dungeon is for. Or maybe you will be the first to figure it out. These types of quests can add a huge amount of variety and depth to a game and it’s unfortunate that they have been all but phased out today.

How can we design mystery quests to be more user friendly than the EQ impossibles?

• Make things a little less random. In EQ, a quest item could drop halfway across the world from the NPC you needed to hand it to. Speaking of which, randomly handing things to NPCs is just a little over the top. If we reign it in a bit, we can reach a nice middle ground. For example: say you’re in a dungeon killing some undead spirits. When one of them dies, it says, “We can never rest until…”. Okay, until what? Later on you kill another type of spirit and realize it has a different message, “the Sun sits in its rightful place.” Okay, we got the rest of the message, but it’s still pretty confusing. Only the next thing you know (or maybe even earlier in the dungeon) you’ve gotten a strange drop called “A Brightly Glowing Sphere”. Now all you need to do is explore the dungeon and find it’s rightful place. Simple, confined to one zone, and yet fun to experience and figure out for yourself.
• Give plenty of indicators without spoiling it completely. If a player finds a magical object that they believe is tied to a mystery quest, maybe they could take it into town and have a lore-master or some other type of mage look over it. This NPC could give the player a vague clue as to where to look next. Similarly, if the player is close to the next step of their quest, maybe the item in question could have some type of emote showing a reaction. A mysterious sword may start humming quietly as a player approaches what looks like an ordinary stone. They then notice a small slit in the rock, just wide enough for the blade to fit in…

I hope MMO developers will give quests like this a chance again, and realize that a huge number of players dislike having their hand held all the time. These types of quests have the potential to be the most fulfilling of all.

What are your thoughts on the different types of quests? What do you like or dislike about them? Do you agree or disagree with my suggestions on how to improve them? What do you think of the Mystery Quests? Leave your answers in a comment!

Prologue

As an avid player of MMORPGs since 1997, nearly half of my entire life, it is no surprise that these games have had a particularly strong influence on nearly every facet of my development as a person; socially, mentally, and emotionally, these games were as important a factor in my upbringing as my own home environment and real life activities.

Having always been entranced by stories of adventure and heroism, it was impossible for me to resist the call of such a game that would allow me to go beyond the pages of my favorite books, beyond film and single-player games where I could only allow the story to unfold before me, a spectator and nothing more. In these worlds, I could be the hero, or villain, that would have tales recounted about him for ages to come.

And so it was, at the tender age of 12, I purchased what many consider to be the grandfather of MMO gaming: Ultima Online.

Seconds after logging in for the first time, I was completely enthralled by this living world I had come into. I remember it clearly still today – the forest of Yew; the kind lumberjack I befriended who taught me the ways of fletching so that I could become self-sufficient in the wild as an Archer. The music, the ambiance, the realization that all of these people around me were living adventures of their own – it was one of the most incredible experiences in my gaming career.

It’s hard to say where that free-spirited innocence went after the first year or so. Before long the game was only about maxing skills, PVP wars with rival guilds, griefing other players just for fun and looting their belongings, even breaking into their houses if possible. “Own” became a staple of my vocabulary. This is not to say it was a bad thing, my time in UO was greatly enjoyable and I look back on it fondly. It is simply interesting to for me to look at the changes in myself as the game went on, and how it relates to today’s MMO scene, where WoW dominates and can be much more easily related to the latter half of my time in UO. Back to that in a moment.

In 1999, a game was released that had an even greater effect on me than UO ever could. It was of course, EverQuest. Still to this day, in my opinion, the single greatest game ever made. EverQuest allowed me a brief return to that childlike state of imaginative curiosity and wanderlust. A whole new world had opened up to me (in 3D this time, no less) and the fact that it was heavily inspired by the classic DnD worlds made it all the better. Again, from the get-go, the music, the atmosphere, just everything about it was perfect. The lore was absolutely incredible, even just reading excerpts from the manual made you want to get in game and see these places for yourself, or find out what other mysteries there were to unfold. It made you feel like the world was real, and far bigger than it actually was. In your mind, Norrath went beyond what you could see in front of you. There were no exclamation points to force you on a railway to max level, no maps or mods, no guidance except for your own ambition. It may not have been the perfect way to design an MMO, but damn if it wasn’t fun. Some of my greatest memories are things that seem so silly to me now as an EQ veteran: getting lost in the Greater Faydark fearing that at any moment I would meet my end to some powerful creature and forever lose my corpse, traveling across the Oasis and gaping in awe at all the high level players gathered at the docks awaiting the boat, delving into the dungeon Guk and actually being afraid of going too far in.

As always though, with greater knowledge and experience, I no longer feared anything in the world of Norrath. It’s mysteries became known to me, and I only sought ways in which to advance myself quickly and efficiently. Soon only the raiding scene mattered to me, getting those upgrades and progressing further as fast as our guild could manage. When not raiding, it was all about grinding out those AA’s for whatever boost in power we could get. Again, we cannot look at this as a bad thing since it is not like the game became less fun or lost any value to me, my view of it simply changed. It seems to be just the way MMOs progress as they age. Is it something that is impossible to avoid? Is there a way to give even veteran players that fresh feeling and excitement of the unknown? That is a discussion for another post.

I continued to play EverQuest for many years, up until the release of World of Wacraft. Here is where my reminiscing may change tune a bit, because while WoW was extremely fun gameplay wise, it did not capture my imagination and inquistiveness in the way that previous MMOs did. Perhaps it is because in WoW you are told what to do and where to go every step of the way, you feel you are simply going along a preset path the entire way. This, I believe, caused me to fall into the latter stage of MMO gaming much sooner, and all I cared about was gaining another level, getting upgrades in gear, and what my next talent point would be spent on.

That was all okay though, because where WoW fell behind in lore and immersion, it more than made up for it with gameplay. No one will argue that WoW is not the most fluid, stable, and simply playable MMO ever made. They took a genre that was fairly known for being clunky, non-user friendly, and overly difficult and really opened it up to the masses. They also did their research and learned what worked and what didn’t in past MMOs. This what I appreciate most about World of Warcraft. It raised the bar. Because of WoW, all MMOs that we see succeed in the future will have to be as polished and at least as playable as WoW. This is a very good thing for us as gamers.

I spent a fair amount of time in WoW, as I’m sure most have. I grinded my way to 60, PVP’d a bit (could never bring myself to do the GM/HWL grind, rough stuff) and participated in my servers first Raganaros kill. I leveled a bunch of alts (what else is there to do after a certain point) and played happily up to and through the release of The Burning Crusade.

TBC is where Blizzard somewhat started to lose me, I guess. I was as excited about anyone else about the expansion, and when it came out I thought it was the greatest thing since Fuzzlecutter Formula 5000. But after a time, I realized how much the game was shrinking as a result of TBC. Blizzard chose to do a hard reset with the expansion, and catch everyone up in gear so that all players would be in Outland instances and raids together. To clarify, this was sharply different than the standard EQ had set, where players had to progress through previous content – sometimes even years old – before they would be powerful enough to tackle the new stuff. Whether this was a good idea or not is debated still constantly, but I’m of the opinion that it was a bad idea. As I said earlier, the game world started to shrink in a way. If you were level 70, all of the former world of Azeroth (with the exception of the main city of your choice, Caverns of Time, and Karazhan) became pretty much obsolete. You had no reason to go there. Not only that, but even lower level players found themselves skipping as much content as possible in a rush to get to Outland and 70. I am currently on a break from WoW, and I will probably remain away until the expansion.

Great, why are you telling me all this? or Okay, I skipped to the bold stuff.

So, you’re wondering if all that rambling and reminiscing served any purpose at all other than to waste your time, right? I don’t blame you.

I felt like I needed to preface this blog with a brief (yes, brief) recounting of my MMO background. You need to know where I’m coming from and what kind of gamer I am to understand some of my views and opinions. It also serves as a warning to some of you who may be against those old school EQers who like to wax nostalgic all day long – I’m definitely one of those dudes. I will be writing a lot about design concepts for MMOs as well as discussing the current state of the MMO scene and games that are on the horizon. If you didn’t know much about my background, you might see no reason to listen to what I have to say.

As I said in my opening, MMOs are a part of who I am. I don’t just play them, I live them. Simple as that. This blog was started because I have too many thoughts bouncing around inside my head to be confined to message board posts and chats with friends. I had to have somewhere to get those thoughts out there, and this is it.

I hope you will return in the future for more ramblings from this wandering Rogue.