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.
Is it not interesting to see that Wolfshead came to similar conclusions in late 2008? Maybe it is time to apply the lessons to a new MMO. I voiced some concerns on his page that future MMOs either have to be similar to the guided bus tour experience of WoW or will have to live with by default lower subscriber numbers. Maybe better for the players and the games, but not for those interested in MMOs as $$$ cows.
It’s hard to say what will happen, but WoW has set a business standard that may not even be attainable for a game focused on creating a virtual world. WoW is more or less a part of popular culture, and so any MMO that cannot accrue a similar number of subscribers will be viewed as a failure. Why make the customer happier if they’re going to pay your sub fee regardless. As sad as it may be, games are generally a business first, and entertainment second.
“Why make the customer happier if they’re going to pay your sub fee regardless”
I’ve argued this for a while now. It’s part of why I see subs as encouraging bad (or at least lazy) design. It makes sense from an ROI beancounter standpoint, but it’s very short term, and effectively withdraws goodwill equity from the brand name to milk more money.
Happy customers give you money. Customers who feel milked don’t put up with it for long.
http://www.shacknews.com/featuredarticle.x?id=1096
Jeff Kaplan has spoken. About “quest christmas trees” lighting up (quest hubs) and how it is better to deliver the content slowly and in small doses for a guided experience.
Wah. You know, he basically meant after doing Quest A, you are given Quest B, then Quest C… and not A,B,C at the same time.
Almost worth a new topic, but it is already covered in the article: Muckbeast’s wife did not do Quest A,B,C and thus cannot start the D,E,F quest sequence yet.
I wonder if Kaplan goes away from Quest guided content delivery in the ominous nextgen MMO. But most probably I fear he will rather reduce READING. He has a point when he says every medium delivers a story differently, even must deliver it differently.
But his conclusion is wrong. People do not like reading the quest text because the writers have to make up crappy texts for Kaplan’s tons of awesome shitpile-collection quests… yes, he loves players to collect poo in every form. No kidding. :>
I just wrote on this a bit at Wolfshead’s (http://www.wolfsheadonline.com/?p=1479&cpage=1#comment-7670) but I think that Kaplan meant guided design as in: developing the story of the town (quest hub) away from the to-do list it is now, not throwing you into a trench.
As I also wrote at Wolfshead’s, I get the distinct impression that WoW is supposed to be a story-driven single-player RPG that you just happen to be able to play with other people. It’s just an MMO, not the Virtual World that a lot of us would like MMOs to be.
I can’t remember where I wrote it, but somewhere (perhaps on Muckbeast’s old blog) I wrote about the difference between an MMOGame and an MMORPG (Virtual World). If I’m confusing anyone please just ask and I’ll explain- or just write up a post for my own blog and link you.
WOW style questing actually makes the grind several times worse by forcing you to spend large chunks of your gaming time running back to turn the quests in. Time you could have spent just killing mobs or doing something you wanted to do ingame.
I think the best questing blend is a combination of open ended repeatable quests such as towns putting bounties on monsters, and the ocassional deeper story arc you need to find. The open ended bounties, caravan guarding missions ect encourage grouping and since rewards could just be dumped into your bank logically they don’t involve a ton of unecessary travel.
As for quests with actual storylines, 10 well written engaging ones are better then 1000 attempts to write a story about why you need 200 bear hides. But like raiding the biggest problem lies in companies wanting to appeal to players who DON”T want a mindless game experience.
[...] take a look at questing and “grinding” from my own point of view. The topic was originally a post on Michael’s blog. Wolfshead also linked to a discussion he had last year, which he later [...]
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