Quests: Now With More Grind
The supposed solution to the tedium of mob grinding was the implementation of huge numbers of quests. The best example of this, of course, is World of Warcraft. Every new zone or town has one or more “hubs” with merchants and quest givers. The quests then cause you to move about the zone doing this or that task, killing X of Y mob, gathering A of B items, and the like. The idea was to give players a story and a reason behind all of their actions, rather than just running from place to place killing every mobbie they saw.
EDIT: The discussion of this original post inspired me to rework it, add to it, and publish it as a huge article on Bright Hub. I invite you to check it out here:
New Grind, Just like the Old Grind: Quest Heavy Advancement
Your comments inspired me to examine the issue in even more detail. I hope the new article will inspire even more analysis from the readership.
I think, for me, it is not the grinding so much that is horrible. It is the fact that the games are gearing more towards solo play. This takes away the entire point of playing an MMO. Why play an MMO that is like a single player RPG? I could just go play Zelda on the Wii.
Y’know, I’m all for making MMOs be unique games with social potential, but I’m often a solo player. I play these games because I like the mechanics and setting. I play offline solo games for much the same reason. MMOs can be many things to many people, and should be designed as such.
Just as an example, Bioware is top notch in single player RPGs. They are dipping their toes into MMO design. I’m interested in the worlds they will be crafting, but not necessarily in playing them purely as multiplayer beasties. To me, one of the great things about an MMO is that it can be both a multiplayer and solo game.
That said, I do think that Bioware’s SWTOR would probably be better off as a single player game. *shrug*
Game design went from one extreme to another. In EQ, not grouping was outright silly. In WoW, grouping outside of instances is silly. The ability to explore the world alone and do at least some quests, fight some monsters is important to me. This is why I usually pick chars that can do that.
But what happened is that MMOs turned almost into singleplayer games, and that grouping has negative consequences on your loot and XP. -> and suddenly the whole game turns into an anti-social loot lust grindfest.
Guild Wars has NPC Henchmen and Heroes (customizeable Henchmen) that allow you to do most areas of the game totally on your own. This has some advantages, you do not have to wait for the missing part of your group, the healer or another key player. But it will also discourage grouping – people will play with their few friends and fill up with henchmen. The positive term ANet coined for this is buddy gaming.
WoW has many quests that make grouping nearly impossible, the whole game rewards selfish item grind, and solo play is basically what you do while levelling up.
I am all for giving players the option to do some things without other players, but to discourage grouping, even punish it, is definitely wrong, agreed.
“This takes away the entire point of playing an MMO.”
There is a pretty sizable community that plays these games in order to fight eachother rather than group with eachother. The common suggestion to these players is “Go play Quake”, but mmos have alot of things that these players want that Quake doesn’t have. Character customization and character persistancy. Advancement. “Meaningful” pvp where victory actually amounts to something. Randomness. Natural conflict that forms over some in game resource rather than capturing a flag. MMORPGS have a collection of features that are pretty unique, and there’s tonnes of people that want to compete with eachother in such an envrionment. Alot of these people have very little interest in pve grouping, thus they get alot out of solo content.
I only thought I felt this way about WoW, as everyone else seems to love the game. I like WoW but have always felt “alone” – which I thought I certainly should not feel while playing a MMORPG!
I am the kind of person who loves the social interaction in games – its why I play WoW, yet often come away with the feeling that I’ve just grinded that whole level alone.
My main character at the moment is level 74 and so far I have done 70-74 alone apart from a couple of instances and 2(or 3) Group quests. The other day I even managed a Group quest alone!
I know this idea doesn’t get around the whole Questgrind/Mobgrind issue but if you have played WoW you will know they have Standard difficulty instances and Heroic difficulty instances.
A Heroic instance is the same as a standard one except there are more Mob spawns and the Mobs are tougher. This is encouraged as you also get a higher grade of gear drops from a Heroic instance than its Standard counterpart.
To complete a Heroic you need higher skills than you do for a Standard (skills are questionable) but most importantly you need better gear.
A heroic raid knocks a standard 10man raid up to a 25man raid. It is that much harder.
Anyway, I’ve sidetracked from my point – My point is I think having a difficulty for quests would be a good idea. You set your difficulty by right-clicking your portrait. Questing in Heroic mode would make Normal quests into “Group quests” resultly in a higher XP gain from the quests and better rewards.
Ofcourse with this idea there is one main problem – If you change your questing difficulty to Heroic the mobs will be turned into Elite mobs and people who arent questing in Heroic will also see the elite mobs. The only way I can see to get around this would be to make Quest mobs instanced – but this limits player interaction outside your group.
Any ideas?
Catastrophe, add different mobs to a zone, some tougher, some weaker. Some would require two players, a lair a whole party.
Get away from the quest obsession, let people loot and conquer what they want, instead of giving them much better rewards for doing this or that quest that a guy with a ! over the head gave them for their to-do list.
“Hogger” required a group as WoW was released. Now they nurfed him so that a single player without good gear and any effort can kill him. They have basically given up their whole low level content, added more rewards, made levelling faster… as we all know, the only game is the endgame.
OK, I am getting cynical again. So I will stop here.
For as much as I love soloing, I completely agree with this, Longasc:
“I am all for giving players the option to do some things without other players, but to discourage grouping, even punish it, is definitely wrong, agreed.”
Make grouping attractive, and optional, and let players sort out what they want to do. Top down mandates in design (”thou shalt group”) are just as wrong headed as executive driven game design.
Well said. That is indeed a major problem. It is part of the transformation of MMOs away from virtual worlds and simply to giant worldish matching lobbies. Its like the old Diablo 2 lobby but you can run around inside of it.
Along with that we have lost all the wonder, excitement, and uniqueness that came along with simulating a WORLD. It is the world simluation facet that attracted academia, economists, etc.
Tangentially, it’s exactly that “single player” nature that is one part of why I’m disgusted with the sub model. Why pay recurring fees for what should be, by design, a single player game with a single price tag? *Balefully eyes SWTOR and Bioware, daring them to screw up.*
If these worlds were more organic and dynamic, I could swallow the concept behind a sub fee a lot more easily. I’d still probably have trouble with the time/month aspect with my constrained schedule, but at least the concept and design would match the monetization, which is what I thought these MMO things were all about in the first place.
[...] time to pontificate a bit on mission-based MMO design. Muckbeast has blasted the degeneration of quest-based MMO design lately… but what if we embraced the inherently chunky (mission based) gameplay of the [...]
I agree that breadcrumb systems like this segregate people throughly from one another. Moreso than server shards and levels with steep power curves.
@ Longasc
Jade Quarry is one of the most active outposts in Guild Wars now, as it’s the fastest faction farm. People go where the riches are.
Nice, Bryan! You did not only read my posting, you are also playing Guild Wars!
After playing it for 2-3 years, I am burned out and waiting for Guild Wars 2. How is it these days, Jade Quarry one of the most active outposts… incredible! How about Fort Aspenwood, what do people do these days?
Tell me a bit please, asking on Guru or GWOnline usually does not yield satisfying results. As does asking friends of mine who still play GW. *grumbles*
Heh, GW2 is massively underhyped. I thought more people would be stroked for it – A central character server, so no amateurish sharding, the grind us mice love to run for our food pellets, no subscription fee that only pays for a raid treadmill, and jumping!
Anyways, Fort Leechywood is about 1/2 as active as it was. There were adjustments there (turtles remove an enchantment with their siege attack) but it’s still a tug of war where who has the fewest leeches and the most monks will usually win. Except for the rare times they let me sneak into their base and kill The Guy solo. Those times are awesome.
The Quarry guys seem to have come from people who were repeating quests for faction. There are a few gimmicks there (Ray of Judgment Monks with paragon speed boosts, N/A teleporting suicide bombers) that kind of bring things down.
Alliance Battles are my living nightmare. You remember when they changed the battle line to move in a back and forth kind of pendulum, so we’d get to play the castle maps? Well, since there are fewer Luxon players than Kurzick, it takes far longer to acquire enough wins to move on to their Ancestral Lands. So, the alliance battle map is stuck on Grenz Frontier at least 80% of the time. My most hated of all Frontiers.
Domain of Anguish seems to see a lot of action. Mesmers and Cry of Pain with Arcane Echo seem to be the main thing there. 140 damage each cast to In The Area range..
Myself, I’ve been grinding the Luxon title track to power up the overpowered linked PvE skills. And made myself a GW millionaire in the process. Scrolls and Zaishen Keys.
If the storage expansion in April is big enough, I can spend my riches on some armor to make my guys into pretty princesses. I’ve bet a bit of money against my guild mates that it’ll be twice as much storage or more. I’m surprised more of them didn’t want in, since it’s such an absurd number, it’s like free money right? Maybe old age has made them less adventurous…
Ah, I really like how none of this makes any sense to anyone who hasn’t played the game. It’s like all those times I read people go on about earning dragon kill points in Everquest by raiding Dread Lord Reallyscarybigguy and his entourage of Stinky Oozes.
I am not sure about the storage upgrade. Will they finally give in and give us much more storage than before, larger bags, larger whatever, basically twice or more the storage we have nowadays?
I gave most of my collected upgrades/runes/insignia to friends and still have tons of stuff that is still worth a lot of platinum. And I am constantly struggling with storage space – one tab is completely filled with weapons of choice for my warrior and his heroes use two handed weapons to carry his spare shields in their unused slot…^^ +10 versus every element in STR and TAC version is a must, a zealous/furious/sundering and at least some elemental mods for different swords, axes and hammers, too. The current GW storage cannot handle that. If you have some extra armors, you hopefully have an armor mule to carry them around… sigh.
I would not bet on ANet doing a major upgrade to storage. Most likely a storage tab for books or something like that. Or finally an armor tab to switch/store armors on character. Or they could really give in and just give people more storage space.
BTW, what killed GW in the end for me was me and all of my friends doing nothing but “farming” for this or that title.
And I really hate the drunkard (macroing), party and sweets titles. It is still bugging me that I am missing these 3 titles for the God Walking Amongst Mere Players… but I already commented on the old Muckbeast page that I usually find achievements a rather questionable additions to games, as they too often promote grindtastic styles of gameplay when the game has already run out of steam.
I agree that GW2 is underhyped. GW was a huge success. Why isn’t there more news about GW2?
Tesh: You are totally right about the single player thing.
. And honestly, I am very worried about Bioware going into the MMO industry. They are one of the last remaining companies making top notch, non-MMO RPGs.
Re: GW2 News
I suspect it’ll be like how the first game went. The first real news we’ll see, is getting to play the game itself. Like the E3 for Everyone event – best publicity stunt ever.
Re: GW Storage
They explicitly said it’d be an increase to the bank and per character. The last storage upgrade added material slots and increased the bank storage 4x; I reason that considering the backup space they’ll need in case of a rollback, that it won’t be a superficial bump.
Those GW titles are the worst. Several months of being in the same place or doing the same behavior; WoW achievements are like picking flowers compared to that.
I once said WoW is in some regards less grindy than GW nowadays, good to hear that I am not the only one with this impression.
I really hope for Guild Wars 2. They have great plans, quadruple A+ game, revolutionary, fee-free and all that.
I always believed in ArenaNet and their will to innovate the genre. I have no doubts that they plan a lot for Guild Wars 2, but just see how long it took them to make the line move in the Faction wars at all, or to make people go to the Jade Quarry.
Eye of the North had great innovative features, but it also felt rushed at times. It was partly scrapped “Utopia” content, after all, and the Polymock minigame could in hindsight also have been removed. You play it while levelling up and then its done. The dwarven boxing mutated into a beer-farming run, at least this is somewhat funny as beer and dwarves goes well together.
The overall direction for GW2 sounds a bit like “back to the standard MMORPG roots”, e.g. more races, classes and the mentioned larger instanced areas where you can actually meet people. Meet them inside an “open instance”, then go down in your personal dungeon.
I am not convinced about the City of Hero style sidekick and the unlimited levels idea. It sounds more like an eternal grind on a super flat power curve to me.
Ah well, I hope they manage to retain the magic that made me play Guild Wars for years. What I always found super funny is that I hardly played PvP and especially “Guild Wars” in Guild Wars. The original idea was PvP to become the “fun, neverending endgame content”.
The old line “there might not even be a level cap at all!” that every developer always says but never means is pretty good for a laugh. It translates to “50 or 60″ almost without fail.
A flatter power curve is something I’ve mostly viewed as a good thing. Climax’s version of Warhammer was going to have everyone usable in theory – getting hit by a sword was getting hit by a sword, whether it’s a Slayer or Ratcatcher swinging it.
[...] had some reason earlier to link to Muckbeast’s Blog, I think it had to do with the whole Virtual World topic. Check it [...]
[...] In August of 2008 I wrote an article that challenged the quest centric paradigm of current MMO design as popularized by Blizzard’s World of Warcraft. Recently Muckbeast at Bright Hub’s MMO channel and commenters on his personal blog have picked up the torch and have dared to challenge this sacred cow with some superb insight. [...]