A different way to portray and use quests in a mmorpg?

Games
1

I typed this as a reply to this other thread but decided to branch it to not troll/derail the thread about LOTRO.

You aren’t alone. (click the linkie to win a Koontz quote! You know you want it!)

1- Transform passive, ‘extra’ text as subject of the gameplay and not as just an inflated backdrop that the players would rather skip so they can go back at “playing the game”

2- Recover the interest and fun in “reading”, bringing back that special flavor from the old RPGs that seems now lost for good

3- Detach the “functional” purpose of the questing from being just an artificial excuse to add some bland variation to grindy treadmills and level-up mechanics

4- Reward those players that read and ‘explore’ actively the game this way

That I tried to deliver and concretize with this suggested list of "no more"s:

  • No more advancement through quests, all the player’s skills should increase through a natural use and new skills and powers should be learned through realistic means such as: discovery, exploration, training etc… Everything happening “in” the game, meaning not directly directly spawned by a non-immersive element, like the UI itself, a “ding. grats!” or another abstract game mechanic.

  • Quests or “journeys” (a “journey” is a chain of quests) to learn new spells, acquire new powers, discover other zones, find your way through the world, learn about it.

  • No more logbooks or journals, no objectives, no exclamation marks hovering NPC heads, no coordinates or waypoints. No abstract mechanics such as “quest levels” to deliver content.

  • Dialogues with NPCs made through branching trees and multiple choices. No more one-way text. No optional, “filler” text.

  • Different NPCs all talking and offering more informations about the same quest paths. No more isolated quests and unconnected, oblivious NPCs. No NPCs standing one next to the other and knowing nothing about each other.

  • No more NPCs sitting in one place and waiting to be clicked-on like cheese dispenser. Every NPC should have and follow a simple schedule. The NPCs should go sleep at their homes during the night and their existence in the world should be always “motivated”. No more just a “service” for the player or for a strictly artificial purpose. The NPCs should be there for their own life and motivations, not just for you. You are there to learn about them, discover their world, not just to use everything as your own tool. The world is the pivot, not you.

  • The PvE areas and instances should have no maps (possibly with the exclusion of in-game drawings manipulable by the character). No more radars, or on-screen compass. If you have a compass or a map, it’s an item in the game, used by your character.

  • More quests should have the purpose to grant access to new areas and develop the story. So questing should be mandatory to progress in PvE. All the areas and the instances should exist with the only purpose of enacting stories and immerse the player.

(dated December 2005)

2

Does “Armchair Game Designer” pay very well, I wonder?

3

As much as Armchair Quarterback, but with fewer physical requirements…

4

Roughing the dreamer after the post, ten yard penalty.

5

HRose everything you’re suggesting is objectively great…for single player CRPGs. And in fact several of them have had just the features you’re describing. In a single player game devs have the ability to add these features (albeit with some additional time and effort) without affecting the fun factor. I think the burden is on you to demonstrate that these features would make an MMORPG better.

I think that WoW, especially BC, actually has some of the features you’re looking for (the ones that don’t decrease the fun factor that is). I was leveling up a lvl 12 Human Mage in Azuremist and I noticed that the quests featured much more interesting storytelling than I remembered. Obviously there’s still exclamation points but I don’t want to have to spend hours talking to every single NPC in the game just to see whether they have something for me to do the way I would in Oblivion or Gothic.

The suggestions you are making would be certain to make the game take longer and be less fun. The vast majority of people out there that are willing to play an MMO aren’t interested in your “damn fool crusade” to make them more immersive. They’ve got two precious hours a night to play WoW before they have to go to sleep so they can wake up and go to a cubicle again so they don’t want to spend a lot of time having over-complicated conversations about boring topics.

They’ve got wives for that.

;)

6

Well, congratulations on creating the world’s most tedious and frustrating MMORPG, I guess.

The only way to make an MMO more immersive is to make it dynamic (no more timmy falls down the well for every single player), or allow the players to drive the world, a la Eve. What you’ve outlined is a straight up single player RPG that would be very little fun when playing in a static world with thousands of other people.

7

Perma death, item stealing, capturable towns, no 100% safe-zones, world altering events…

Put the FEAR back into MMOs.

8

I don’t agree with perma death (in practice you can’t rely on it due to things like lag and disconnects), but everything else is a must have, and thankfully, it’s all in Eve! Well, maybe not world altering events as planned, but player wars are essentially the same thing.

9

What kind of game mechanic is this? What does that mean, no more advancement through quests? You mean no skill gains through quests? So killing 10 of X is still cool as long as we don’t talent/skill/etc rewards for them?

  • Quests or “journeys” (a “journey” is a chain of quests) to learn new spells, acquire new powers, discover other zones, find your way through the world, learn about it.

You don’t think WoW does this now? At the very least for the first 20-30 levels, it leads on to the next area when you’re ready to move on. WoW does that really well.

  • No more logbooks or journals, no objectives, no exclamation marks hovering NPC heads, no coordinates or waypoints. No abstract mechanics such as “quest levels” to deliver content.

I was thinking MMOs are just too easy. I definitely want to make each quest as annoying as possible.

This is an MMO. Each and every quest will be documented online with weeks of them existing, if not sooner. This only makes it harder in game…which is kinda of the opposite of fun.

  • Dialogues with NPCs made through branching trees and multiple choices. No more one-way text. No optional, “filler” text.

I’m not against this, but MMOs designed as single player games will become tedious real fast. MMORPG != CRPG. They can’t be. You can learn from the CRPG, but you can’t just copy it.

  • Different NPCs all talking and offering more informations about the same quest paths. No more isolated quests and unconnected, oblivious NPCs. No NPCs standing one next to the other and knowing nothing about each other.

This is a nice idea, but even in CRPGs this doesn’t happen a lot. It’s a lot of work. I’m all for it, but it’s a lot work, especially the bigger the amount of NPCs.

  • No more NPCs sitting in one place and waiting to be clicked-on like cheese dispenser. Every NPC should have and follow a simple schedule. The NPCs should go sleep at their homes during the night and their existence in the world should be always “motivated”. No more just a “service” for the player or for a strictly artificial purpose. The NPCs should be there for their own life and motivations, not just for you. You are there to learn about them, discover their world, not just to use everything as your own tool. The world is the pivot, not you.

Again, this is a CRPG mechanic. How is this going to work for people playing that can only get together at 8pm EST every night to play with their group? They can’t do a quest because they only time they can all play together is not at the same time the NPCs are awake? This just doesn’t carry over well.

I get what you’re trying to say here. Make the world alive, make it not seem so static and baren. I get that, and I I’m all for it, but this particular idea isn’t going to work out I’m thinking.

  • The PvE areas and instances should have no maps (possibly with the exclusion of in-game drawings manipulable by the character). No more radars, or on-screen compass. If you have a compass or a map, it’s an item in the game, used by your character.

Oh yeah, please make finding things as absolutely hard as possible. I love being frustrated by the little things in my MMO. Remember EQ? Remember how often you had to hit Sense Direction to even know which way of North? That wasn’t awesome (I’m lying).

  • More quests should have the purpose to grant access to new areas and develop the story. So questing should be mandatory to progress in PvE. All the areas and the instances should exist with the only purpose of enacting stories and immerse the player.

This is a nice idea, but give some mechanics that include everyone involved without everyone walking all over each other doing the same quests, having something happen to the world for one player, but not for the others, and keep this a MMO?

(dated December 2005)
Heh, nice date mark. :P

Overall, I think these are weird complaints. What’s the focus? Some of them seem aimed to get the player more involved in the world at the expense of ease of use, but others seem aimed frustrate as much as possible.

MMORPG aren’t CRPGs. That’s the big point I think your over looking. I know you want more CRPG in your MMORPG and while I agree with that in theory, I don’t think just adding in CRPG mechanics wholesale is going to solve anything.

10

I think mmogs in general are becoming too much like their crpg brethren. I don’t think more convoluted quest trees are necesserily the answer. My dream mmo would have virtual theatre like the dynamic campaign in Falcon 4 in a fantasy setting. The AI would prosecute it’s war over the land and quests and missions would be dynamically generated according to need: Defend this village, supply this village, attack this enemy encampment, etc, etc. Battles and other disruptions would cause various fauna <read RATS and monsters> to be displaced and emerge where they are not wanted.

Have crafting ‘missions’; to help supply the war effort and you pretty much have all the mmo bases covered. Throw in your pavlovian trinkets like gear and other shiny stuff, have rankings to strive for and you’re all set.

Dynamic campaigns in simulation games have been around forever, so at least to me it is suprising that a genre that is supposed to be represent ‘virtual’ worlds ends up being so predictable and painfully static.

I’m sure it’s a lot harder though than it sounds. ;-)

11

It’s hard simply because the balance in a dynamic and living system like that needs to be tweaked over a long period of simulation, and it also has to be able to dynamically compensate for player actions.

The biggest issue is less about difficulty and more about the computing requirements. You’d want humongous worlds, and that would require monster cpu, bandwidth, and ram.

12

Not really the intent.

Those bare quotes lack context but what I was proposing there wasn’t to take WoW’s questing system and remove all the "aid"s.

I know that they have a purpose, both for usability and accessibility. I wouldn’t promote a game that takes back usability or accessibility, so I agree with those concerns about those points I quoted.

But my idea isn’t that one. I had in mind a “paradigm shift”, a different way to conceive quests and their purpose and use in the game. So whether you rely on waypoints and quests logs I was thinking to compensate that through more detailed dialogues and the possibility to question multiple NPCs about your task.

The idea is that you don’t grab a quest and then left alone figuring it out, but you can dig it, ask around for more informations, ask for directions and so on.

The increased interaction and feedback was supposed to compensate the removal of artificial aids through more immersive mechanics.

The other point is that I wanted PvE to focus and pivot around the world, as an explorer, instead of pivoting just around your character, where the world is a passive tool for you to rack on power (see the original link where I analyze System Shock and Ultimas):

The PvP is about a game where the players make experience of each other and relate to each other. It’s the social layer. The players are brought together, the collective effort. Something bigger is being built. It’s the starting point for emergent content.

The PvE is about a game where the players make experience of the world and what it has to offer. Where you narrate a story to them and to that story they will belong. It’s the journey toward something you do not expect, the exploration. It’s about the surprise, the discovery, the fear. This is the roleplay where you impersonate the character and live a story with him.

My opinion is that in today’s mmorpgs there’s a lack of real “world” to explore. Things are designed as just player’s tools.

And yes, the original title was “back to the roots”. Because I think there’s a lot we lost that I’m convinced is still valuable today, even in a mmorpg.

I’m not against other ideas about a dynamic world, but I clump that in PvP stuff, where dynamic content can deliver the most. That post instead was strictly about PvE.

13

So basically, you want a virtual environment unhampered by the ridiculous game mechanics used to satisfy the player desire for frequent rewards (usually gained by killing things). Ideally, actions would also have consequences and persistence.

Personally I’d like to see a MMOG based on a Thief or Operation Flashpoint system, where character “level” isn’t important, and combat is a terrifying and dangerous affair.

  • Alan
14

And make sure the “Uninstall Game” button is very accessable.

15

This proved to be one of the single most annoying things about EQ1 as you could never figure out what you did last and weren’t sure what to do next. What about if you are away from the game for a few weeks? Am I required to whip out pen and paper beside my computer in order to play this game?

  • No more NPCs sitting in one place and waiting to be clicked-on like cheese dispenser. Every NPC should have and follow a simple schedule. The NPCs should go sleep at their homes during the night…

Which causes people on different schedules to get pissed off that they can’t do anything because of their Real Life schedule doesn’t match the game’s schedule.

The NPCs should be there for their own life and motivations, not just for you. You are there to learn about them, discover their world, not just to use everything as your own tool. The world is the pivot, not you.

I am wondering what the dev cost would be to do this for about 10000 individual NPCs?

  • The PvE areas and instances should have no maps (possibly with the exclusion of in-game drawings manipulable by the character). No more radars, or on-screen compass. If you have a compass or a map, it’s an item in the game, used by your character.

No maps usually allows people to get very, very lost. And as soon as you allow the exclusion of player drawn maps, then everyone will just simply download all the good maps from the internet, defeating the purpose. This is what happened with EQ1, basically.

16

Those I listed are overall principles to try to achieve. If in the practice it’s too hard to compensate them with immersive mechanics then there should be concessions.

I wouldn’t be against an automated diary like in Baldur’s Gate.

But the point here is that a quest log and a journal strictly define and encase the scope of a story, while I wanted to keep the interaction more blurred. Instead of a bunch of unconnected quests, the idea was to have “one” story that branches out in every direction. The story should form in the mind of the player, it should be emergent. Roleplay. Every dialog with every NPC should be part of the same picture, you don’t just read dialogs and repeatedly press “next”. But you converse with them, interact more deeply.

The idea is that one player who returns after a week, or a month, or more would get back into the game just by talking again with NPCs he meet. Conversations should compensate the lack of logs, give you back informations and all that.

If you can press “L” to check your quest log you can also go ask NPCs and have them refresh your mind.

Which causes people on different schedules to get pissed off that they can’t do anything because of their Real Life schedule doesn’t match the game’s schedule.

This is one problem I listed in the original post, so I acknowledged it and have some ideas to solve it that still need work.

One is about making day cycles quicker, so that in a couple of hours you can get rid of the problem. But that’s just a band-aid, not really satisfactory.

Another is to give players the possibility to “camp”, sleep at a tavern and continue the day later. Impossible in a persistent world, but this kind of PvE drift I’m describing here was intended to be instanced ;)

I think this part need work, but I believe that good solutions can be found with enough brainstorming.

No maps usually allows people to get very, very lost. And as soon as you allow the exclusion of player drawn maps, then everyone will just simply download all the good maps from the internet, defeating the purpose. This is what happened with EQ1, basically.

I just wanted maps to be in-game objects. If there’s a quest that looks frustrating to track the NPC could hand you a custom-made map.

Even here I believe that it’s possible to use immersive means. It’s just that designers haven’t tried hard enough. Signposts, landmarks, roads, informations you can ask to NPCs…

I think it’s possible if there’s the desire to achieve it.

I don’t know if it’s clear enough, but my goal was to imagine something completely immersive. Take it like a challenge: design a game as immersive as possible, but without losing accessibility.

17

You want instances to be isolated enough to be temporally out-of-sync with the rest of the universe while still encompassing enough of the world to allow that freedom you want?

It sounds like you want NWN, not WoW.

18

Well, instances are usually that isolated.

The concept I keep using is still the same, Michael Moorcock’s Multiverse. So worlds and dimensions are encapsuled already. I was even imagining worlds where you become someone else, lose all your equipment and so on. You would never know what to expect.

19

Thanks, HRose, that actually cleared up a few points for me.

20

These aren’t artificial aids, at least most of them aren’t. If someone tells me something very important, I write it down. If I complete something on my todo list, I put a check next to it. These things aren’t artificial. They are automated. There’s a big difference. The latter is a very, very good thing.

I understand what you mean – attempting to move the experience away from a rigid, artificial set of quests – but adding confusion is probably not what you want. They are ways to extend/alter these tools to serve your desire a bit more.

Speaking of, not having a map sounds artificial to me. I can sit around for 5 minutes and realize I’m not the first person entering uncharted territory. Why the hell can’t I get a map? I don’t drive around Pennsylvania without a map. Why wouldn’t I ask a vendor for a map? It would certainly be in demand. Wouldn’t it be cool if you could buy them and, in some small ways, they were incorrect?