Quest Grinding, You Are in Denial
I want to revisit a favorite issue of mine. New Grind, Just like the Old Grind: Quest Heavy Advancement.
When people read that article, they often get the wrong idea. I don’t hate quests (or missions). I don’t think a 100% mob grinding game is the way to go. What I hate is when a game simply replaces mob grinding with quest grinding and actually thinks it did something noteworthy or worthwhile.
Replacing one mindless grind with another ultimately solves and accomplishes nothing. You will simply piss off and alienate a different set of people. You will still alienate everyone – just at different rates and to different degrees.
Champions Online, a game I generally like, is a full on quest grinder. Mob xp is almost worthless. This simple design mistake creates a cascade of problems that many of you are probably already predicting: what happens if you run out of missions? And yes, right now, that CAN happen in CO.
The key, in my view, is to provide multiple, alternate paths to character advancement and development. When someone wants to grind mobs, they can. When someone wants to do quests, they can. When someone wants to defend or assault bases (Tabula Rasa had a brilliant implementation of this), they can. When someone wants to PvP, they can. The holy grail is to create these different ways to advance and develop a character and make them available to people at all times (or nearly all times). The sooner we realize that as developers, the better.
As always, I look forward to your thoughts on the matter.
It took me a few years, but I’m starting to agree with you on this one. Every time I try a new mmo these days the quests bore the heck out of me. I’m not sure if mob grinding would do it for me either though. The killing would have to go faster and with larger groups of enemies than is standard for mmos. The typical “pull one or two mobs out of a spawn and beat them down” routine is even worse than quest grinding. If I’m grinding and I see a bunch of mobs, I want to wade in and kill every single one of them, City of Heroes style.
PvP levelling is where it’s at for me. I had alot of fun with it in Warhammer. All you need to do is maintain short queue times for the lifetime of the game. Screw server pride, make your battlegrounds cross server so people can get into them as quickly as possible. People will cry about server pride and meaningful battles, but none of that crap matters if you are only pvping for 15 minutes out of every hour.
Some games have become to-do-lists. Think of the new hot thing, achievements. Like quests, they tell you to do things in this or that order at this or that place. They are basically putting players to work for some NPCs, and I wonder how many people are soon fed up by this guided design experience. Sure, it is great to give players a hand, but it also puts a limit on their freedom to explore the virtual world at their leisure if all that counts is doing what they are told to do.
Actually, both quests and achievements are poor “true” content substitutes and while quests are nice for some really epic storylines, they have become mundane tasks through overuse and often rather bland objectives and storytelling.
P.S.: Looking forward to pet breeding in Primordiax. My cat apparently wants to breed right now, too…^^ – sorry, could not resist to end with such nonsense…^^
Achievements. Daily Quests. Both of those concepts have basically taken aspects of cubicle farm workplaces and turned them into game elements. Frankly, that’s kinda sick. Achievements can be kinda neat if they happen organically as you play the game. But grinding out insane achievements (defender of ascalon!) is just taking things way too far.
The best content comes from players interacting with each other. Role playing, politics, economics, and PvP. The rest can be an interesting diversion but only if real effort is put into the story.
I’d take it further. Make the game fun to play (in many different ways) and toss “advancement” out the window. The grind is firmly rooted in the almost pathological need to see numbers go up. The subscription model is rooted in addiction and habit. Neither is healthy.
While I think you can make fun games without advancement, I do not think it is a coincidence that pretty much every RPG since the dawn of time has had advancement.
People like to level up – even in real life.
I really think MMO FPS type games have the best advancement model to follow (Planetside for example). Characters still level…but the focus is on giving them more options rather then more raw power. A new player can jump into the game and actually enjoy themselves. Advancement is enjoyable when it comes as a nice surprise rather then a mandatory barrier to overcome.
And that’s all that traditional leveling is in MMORPGs, a mandatory barrier you need to overcome before your character is considered worthy of really “playing”. Traditional MMOs love rubbing this in too…all the cool stuff in the game is “endgame content”.
Ultimately I think more focus needs to be put on improving player skill, then doing repetative mindless activities to watch numbers on the sheet go up.
Really? From what I have seen, the MMOFPS genre has been a repeated failure. There are so many client/server and latency issues right off the bat. And I really don’t think the appeal is there for an MMO type experience. But who knows. The beauty of games is that if the GAMEPLAY is good enough, perspective, graphics, etc. end up not mattering as much.
The end game focus is an example of advancement taken to a bad place. Before WoW, people did not obsess over “end game” anywhere near as much. The term never even came up in MUDs.
I forgot to mention: MMOs definitely need to get back to rewarding PLAYER skill a lot more versus so much emphasis on CHARACTER skill.
But how to reward player skill? Any ideas?
Age of Conan tried to make combat more interactive, at least for the melee classes. The combo system, requiring players to stand still, is still a problem, even after they streamlined and simplified it.
But I quite liked the “shields” and getting rewarded from the exposed side, or goading mobs to expose their flank and then executing a high damage skill on the now exposed side.
Sadly, casters and rangers still had the target&click interface which was more efficient.
Even if AoC does a lot of things very wrong, the wish to change combat to be more rewarding proper positioning, a bit player attention and all that was there.
I like the idea that players have to AIM in MMOFPS games, but I think LATENCY is a huge problem. It is not only latency, if people feel they should have hit the mob, but it was not there, de-sync is much more of an issue than in a classic click&target system.
PROGRESSION/ADVANCEMENT is a strong spice, but a good cook knows the right dose. We need to stop the extreme vertical progression. The new buzzword is horizontal progression. New options to the player without making him by default more powerful.
Guild Wars has a lot of focus on tactics, at least early on. They caved in and added skills that were by default VERY strong and became better through repetitive actions of the not so fantastic kind. Basically, peopl e found the easiest mission to provide the most points and repeated this till kingdom come to maximize the skill.
Which was then so strong that you could throw special builds or organized teamplay out of the window. Basically, you opened the door with a M1 Abrams cannon shot instead of luring the guards out, tricking this guard, distracting the other one, and then quickly overhelming the remaining guards. Note, this is no actual GW gameplay example, just an analogy to show that any kind of progression is difficult in a very balanced environment with little progression.
The more common analogy would be to run the Scarlet Monastery at level 70/80 – all effort, tricks and tactics are overshadowed and made superfluous by just overpowering the opposition.
The “endgame” is also a concept that needs to be dealt with. Nowadays it is all focused on the very end, where progression based games are notoriously weak! If people would not be so addicted, they would stop right there. Raiding and faction grind as the only form of endgame activity is almost the declaration that devs ran out of ideas what to do at max level, too.
Gordon at We Fly Spitfires wrote a blog entry regarding this, and people agreed that the early WoW had people repeat low level instances and that it was fun. Try to find someone doing Maraudon or the Wailing Caverns nowadays. The Scarlet Monastery, probably one of the most fun instances ever created by Blizzard, still shows that it is a great instance. Even if people get run through it by high levels. But instances that don’t have so much flash and appeal by their scenario were also not that bad, but relied more on a challenge and fight. Which simply is not wanted nowadays, as every content before the max level cap is seen as something one has to skip and get behind as fast as possible.
Latency is more an excuse for bad game design and non-interactive combat then anything else. I played Planetside for near on two years, even with hundreds of players latency wasn’t much of an issue…no more then in an average 64 player FPS.
Planetside was quite sucessful, I”d say just as much as SWG…what killed that game like SWG was bad decisions on the part of SOE. And I think the traditional “MMORPG” experience doesn’t have much room to grow at this point – aside from specific IPs such as starwars fans.
Longasc: great post. I agreed with most of it. Horizontal advancement/development is definitely important imho.
Mauradon and Scarlet Monastery were my two favorite instances in all of WoW. It really is a shame that nowadays most people probably never even bother with them.
Serith: Planetside was a neat game that had a nice niche, but considering its budget and marketing, it was a bit of a bomb. The problem with MMOFPS is that the MMO part really suffers, and at that point people ask themselves “why am I playing this instead of a real FPS?”
Longsac: Yep I totally agree, horizontal development can go a long way towards making any game more interesting. That’s one of the areas I reference MMOFPS type games as a success.
Muckbeast: Exactly, I think there’s probably more players interested in large multiplayer games with persistence then there are interested in traditional “MMORPGS” but as you said they are divided into niches.
So yes you won’t have 500k players odds are, but those niches aren’t really developed yet. Better odds then competing against the likes of WOW or legions of F2P games. Aside from traditional subscriptions, I can see a station pass style system or what guildwars did working well with “alternative” MMO style games.
When it comes to Quest Grinding, I believe you are in denial. Discuss!
Quest Grinding, You Are in Denial
Aion is doing well in this. You can advance equally well with either questing or grinding mobs.
That’s encouraging Adele. I have heard that Aion is basically group required if you want to earn xp at any kind of decent rate. I wonder if that is full groups, or do duos and trios count. I really miss games where even a duo was considered a “group” and could find fun, challenging, and rewarding stuff to do.
[...] made the loot and level upgrade treadmill as slick as possible to get you on and keep you going. Some would say it’s designed to be so slick you don’t realize that you’re on just another [...]
If I have the choice between a game with EQ-style MOB grinding or WoW-style quest grinding I’ll take the quest grinding. Primarily because the quest grinding gives me more of an illusion of progress. I can play for 30 minutes, finish a quest, and feel like I had a productive play session. With MOB grinding, playing 30 minutes and killing X number of creatures may net me the same XP gain but I don’t get the same feeling of accomplishment.
That said, you’re on the right path calling for multiple paths of advancement. The games I enjoy most are all about having options, option, and more option. If I have time, I want to group, but if I don’t I want to solo. Once I hit max level, I would love to be able to roll and alt and progress through the whole game on an alternate (but new) content path.
After some thought, I came to the conclusion that quest based advancement has a higher cost in terms of MMO games then I first thought. The way most MMORPGs are designed it pretty much costs you any feeling of a real “game world”.
All the traditional MMOs I’ve played on don’t even feel like worlds, it seems like the space was designed around “we need x quests in y level range + 30% white space”. And the feeling of one “world” is really a huge part of what drew me into MUDs/MMORPGs in the first place.
The OP mentioned quest heavy advancement discourages players from going off the beaten path. In my experience it’s worse then this there IS little to nothing to find off the beaten path…or if you do find something it’s useless unless you have the quest for it.
Blue, why is it a choice? Making quests is extremely labor intensive and costly. Supporting grinding isn’t. So if you already spent a ton of money paying people to craft 5,000 quests, investing a little time to have a viable grinding option is a drop in the bucket.
And I do not think it can be ignored how quest based gaming affects the virtual world aspects of games, the exploration aspect, etc. There is no point in exploring in a game when nothing will happen unless you had the quest in advance from some hub. Or as Serith notes:
“The OP mentioned quest heavy advancement discourages players from going off the beaten path. In my experience it’s worse then this there IS little to nothing to find off the beaten path…or if you do find something it’s useless unless you have the quest for it.”
When I read your article I realized that you are very right.
When you can choose between grinding mobs and grinding quests, I prefer the quests though. I guess the problem to your mentioned alternate paths to leveling is the balancing. In most games one class is better in grinding mobs for example. Will this class level faster than the others?