There's actually a great quote in the dungeons master's guide in (gasp) fourth edition Dnd: "Kill ten monsters of your level" isn't a quest, it's a recipe for advancing a level. "make harrow's pass safe for travelers" is a quest, even if the easiest way to complete it happens to be killing ten monsters of the player's level. In other words, a quest needs context for the activities you are doing.
I actually like the idea of "unmarked" quests. Fallout 3 and New Vegas have quite a few of these, often times given out by literally just finding something. One that comes to mind is the Keller Family Transcript from Fallout 3. There were 5 recorded messages from the time of the great war (the nukes dropping) and each contained a message (some of which are just plain depressing to listen too) and a number to a passcode to get into a secret bunker not marked on the map. When you located this bunker, you now had access to a terminal which opened it, and it contained 2 secrets: a feral ghoul, and a weapon. It is heavily implied through a recording that the father of the family searched daily for supplies amongst the radiation despite his limited anti-rad drugs, and thus he was ghoulified, went feral, and murdered his family. Pretty dark, and it showed how truly awful the early days of the apocolypse were. The weapon you find, however, is the dumbest thing ever made. It is the Experimental MIRV(emphasis on the mental). It fires 8 mininukes at once, dealing up to 12000 damage and often killing the player in the process. That quest is one of the most satisfying in the game to complete, yet grants no xp, new dialogue, achievements or anything, just a harrowing story and a stupidly overpowered and impractical weapon.
The first quest of Morrowind, returning Fargoth's ring, is still one of my favorites. It isn't labeled as a quest, and you don't know you're doing it (the first time), but it instantly made the world and people in it feel more real.
The E-MIRV is still the best thing ever, despite there being only 40 or so mininukes in total in the Capital Waste... And the normal fatman kills the player a lot of the time.. But what's as satisfying as atomizing everyone at Tennpenny towers?
Back in 1999, EverQuest had neither a questlog nor any maps at all. Everything had to be tracked by the player, most often in a journal or binder. And players drew maps themselves that they shared with each other online. And that was cool. Too often games these days want to hold the player's hand. Imagine you design a jigsaw puzzle like the ones we used to assemble as kids. Then you think hey, this might be too difficult. So you make it so the puzzle assembles itself. Not only is that more work for you, but it cheapens the puzzle so it's not even fun to figure out anymore. I'm not saying we should do away with maps or questlogs. But come on, let the player make their own mistakes and choices. MMOs are only 50% about the game, the other 50% is the players interacting with it and each other.
Fallout 3 and New Vegas were some of the few games that I 'loved' exploring. Whenever I found a Vault I'd dive right in just to see what kind of freaky experimentation or story went on within its depths. It led to some of the most disturbing gaming moments of many years. Like the Gary Vault and the one with the hallucinatory gas that you don't realize you are breathing till you are neck deep in the place.
Okay, new idea - how about the player gets given a camera, and when they find something out of place, like a dead body in the woods, or a giant gnarled tree, the player has to take a picture and show it to the right person - the dead body to a policeman, which leads to a quest about finding where their family lives and tell them they died, or the tree to a guild hall, who open up a quest about discovering the giant monster that destroyed the tree through it's other acts of destruction and showing them to a detective, where you later will find the monster and have to defeat it. I don't know, but I feel like a camera in an MMO could lead to some interesting quests that make the world feel alive.
I kind of liked the "Blood on the Ice" quest from Skyrim. If you follow the quest arrows and just do what the NPC's tell you, you finish the quest, but get the "bad ending". On the other hand, if you actually recognize the mysterious amulet you picked up and talk to the supposed prime suspect before arresting him, you get a chance to do things the right way. In a game where plenty of quests boil down to "follow the arrow", it was a really refreshing change of pace.
I would like if the quest just hint you what to do more than point you where to go and drag your nose around. Lot of games in this era really took an easy way out.
I actually got that quest yesterday and I can't complete it because I accidentally went out of order. Just going near the victim's house made an objective pop up to gain access to the house. So I get the key from her (the victim's) mother (I think it was her mother) and go inside and investigate the house. I find the amulet that you're talking about. Now, I guess I was supposed to talk to the steward of Windhelm first and he gives me like honorary detective status. Because after I talked to him I got an objective to investigate the victim. Only problem with that is she's sealed in an un-open-able stone coffin. I realize it's my fault and I'm stupid. My latest save (other than the autosaves) was from about nine hours before, playtime-wise and I didn't want to have to play those nine hours over again. So, while I agree that quests like these are fun and a nice change of pace, you have to take into account idiots like me who fuck them up and can't complete them because we went too much out of order. You can stop reading here, but in case you're wondering... Why did I just get it yesterday? Well I got the Legendary Edition of Skyrim on Steam for like $20.00 a few months ago and I've sort of just been picking at it since then. My first, personal, main objective was to find all the dungeons/towns etc. and I finished doing that three days ago. I did quite a few side missions while I was running around exploring but now that I've found most of the areas, (there are probably a couple that I missed, I'm pretty sure I didn't but) I'm just cleaning up the scraps before continuing the main story line.
Some of Runescape's quests were pretty unique back when I played. It had the standards, but then it had some that were very lore-intensive for a specific character or group of characters. It was what shaped my expectations of MMO's, but I've since become more of a Minecraft or Civ player.
Runsecape's quests have only gotten better over the years. They even have a task system similar to the one talked about in the video. Though the game has changed a lot, it still might be worthwhile for you to give Runescape a second chance.
Runescape quest were always one of the more better quest design, it was really immersive and felt like you were a character- a person in the game. It's amazing.
Pretty sure that "level up without dying" achievement was done first in the original Guild Wars. It awarded the Survivor title. Making it to level cap without dying once became a pretty major deal among some players, at least back in my day. And you could display a monument to that title (and others) in a physical location in the game to earn points that unlocked cosmetic bonuses in Guild Wars 2.
Elder Scrolls Online has the most immersive questing / leveling experience I've felt so far. The mere fact that it's part of a living story, everything voice-acted etc. already helps a long way... Then add treasure maps, puzzles, riddles... and it becomes awesome.
The only thing about that quest though, is how you have to look up information outside of the game in order to solve it. The problem with that, is that it encourages some gamers like me to just say "screw this, the hints cannot be figured out with information in the game, time for a GUIDE!" and then spoil the entire thing. The fact is every clue has to be solvable within the game for it to really be immersive or interesting. If all of the information is in the game, the player is far less likely to use a walkthrough and far more likely to actually solve it legitimately. When a quest requires a guide or even just information out of the game, it's called a "Guide dang it!". Not everyone reads the bible :/. It's the main thing that, honestly, drove me away from the game. I like solving quests in game with information acquired in the game. And the moment I have to open up a web browser to look up anything is the moment immersion is ruined for me.
+LaughingAlex In Secret World you still solve the quests in the game, via you're in game browser (you could say your characters smartphone) since the game is our world in the near future twisted by conspiracies etc, all the details are the same. So when you have a quest like this you can pop open you're smartphone and google a way in game. True that sometimes the quests can go from fairly simple to omfg wtf is this shit, but still i never had more fun in any MMO game when questing than in Secret World. By making the world part of the quest, and requiring player to actually read the quest find the context and think about it you can give much more immersion. If you want to play an mmo to just blast through all levels instead of enjoying it through all levels it's wrong IMO. That's a big problem with many current MMO's that they just make lvling a chore that you have to do in order to get to the end game content, that's why secret world shines so much and rewards those who actually care about the game world. Ofc you can just pop a guide to every quest you find, but that'll only cause you to get bored with the game, because when you solve the quest yourself it gives you soo much more joy than those empty Xp and cash numbers after turning it in.
But the difference is the world you are playing is our world so the Internet and past up to this point is the same. Thanks to this world setting it doesn't break immersion even though you are googling stuff.
It's not about immersion, it's about the fact that I still had to look online for the answers to the riddles, as the game flat out tells you to. So it just makes me say "well Guide DANG it, I just as well use a walk through!". Because the game didn't include the clues in the game. Its instead breaking the fourth wall and saying "use a guide".
I was absolutely floored when I learned some MMOs had quests be just "kill X things". I've played RuneScape for 18 years (never touched any other MMO) and the quests there are all lore-intensive. Some more than others (*cough*Clock Tower*cough*), but you learn about the world as you quest.
notoriouswhitemoth Yeah I suppose it's all about what mindset you go in with, if you know you could get references like these, I think I'd piece it together aswell
+Vizthex There are a metric CRAPTON of quests like that in TSW. I remember one quest that had you track down a morse code transmission... which then tasked you... Yes... you the player... not you the avatar.... to decode it. I was lucky enough to have a father who did that kind of thing in his ye olde military days...I got him to help me decode it & he actually had a good time with it. XD
This has got to be one of the best videos Extra Credits has ever done. After watching both parts to this little series, I feel like I understand the design of MMO quests on a level I didn't even know existed. Fantastic work! I'll be referencing this video a LOT in the future. Thanks so much!
Again, this would have been a perfect time to talk about Runescape. Some of the biggest quests they have out are the steeped in lore and the combat has a puzzle aspect to it. I'll take the example of The World Wakes, a really big quest that started a whole new canonical age (a period of time that is differentiated by a large event during or at the beginning of said age), this one being the sixth. I won't be spoiling anything because literally everyone in the game knows about it because of how Jagex basically told everyone that it happened through events and other quests. But basically, the most powerful God that is normally asleep and keeping all the other, more dangerous Gods out, is killed. The implications of that are massive and you really need to play the game and do a ton of other quests in order to get it, it makes you WANT to do those other quests if you haven't already.
Danjal Veskandar That's a fair enough point, but Runescape is one of the few examples of a (at least partly) F2P game that does quests that aren't just grinding.
Not to mention that the same quest has a puzzle that you can succeed/fail at to various degrees, with success making later parts easier, and total failure permanently killing off a certain npc.
Guild Wars 2 has actually done some of what your talking about, you don't get "quests" in towns you find them by exploring the world which is NOT shown to you until you actualy explore the area, until then its covered in like a "fog of war" type thing on the mini/main map of the world. Not to mention a lot of the "tasks" can be completed multiple ways (aka most quests/tasks have a "kill mobs" part, but it can be completed with say, watering plants, or finding lost pets, chopping down trees, ect, ect) and the major towns are safe spots, but there are no quests givers there, only an exploration option to gain some quick XP, find more "fast travle" spots, Points of intrest, and generaly gain more "world completion" points from said town. I cant understand why GW2 got so much hate, I got the game THE DAY IT CAME OUT and Im still in love with it simple due to the fact that while there is some grinding to it, it never really feels like a grind unless you always go for the "kill mobs" option of a quest(which might I add awards LESS XP for it most of the time) not to mention how many "events" happen around the game's world wich give you bonus XP/game currency depending on how much work you put into aiding the npc/stopping the enemy/ect. there is also the fact that every month or 2 there is new content, and I don't mean "new textures" or "new re-balance patch" I mean one month the Flame Legion and Dredge team up to take over the black citadel, then the next Scarlet is on a rampage in Lions Arch(a town that almost everyone in the game enjoys hanging in, which in turn pisses us off at scarlet far more then if she attacked Holberack or the Rata Sum and makes killing her ssssssooooo much more meaning full)
In LOTRO I reached Lv20 without dying for EVERY class. If my character died before 20, they were deleted. I only deleted my original character. Had a really close call with my Elf Archer one time, it had 2 HP at the end of battle. Man I was nervous during that battle.
Ooooh, before I finish the video, I was going to bring up the obvious fact that many people, when presented with confusing or very lengthy quests, simply look up playthroughs or guides giving them all the answers they need to simply finish the quest and move on. I know if I were to be presented with that church quest, I would simply view it as being atypically complicated, and therefore, go online to find how to do the whole thing.
It should be noted, that in The Secret World, that those quests literally have their own category called "Investigation"s with a different color quest icon and all. So you can totally avoid them if preferred. It is satisfying working through a large portion of the quest without a guide, though using a guide is pretty common for the harder parts.
Yeah, and that's partially why I feel MMOs are struggling so hard. You feel pressured by the people around you in a very indirect but very powerful way. If you're having trouble and struggling you're seen as a noob and written off :/ It's a race of efficiency and you'll be left in the dust if you don't look up shit or know what you're doing. It's part of the reason why I strongly prefer singleplayer games now unless their very nature is the competition.
Yeah that's sort of the problem with lore quests. In the game Ni No Kuni you have several side quests that require you to read and decode the ingame language to figure out the answer. I could not really do that. Translating it directly I accomplished but arranging the letters to form a logical word was far too much a hassle. So I just looked it up. A lot of people would just look it up you'd have to be crazy into the game and or exceedingly clever and stubborn to do otherwise.
I have a good task idea. There could be a simple town, but it is very secure. You want to get into the town, but you need to find a way to get around the guards. There would be multiple ways to do this. You could bribe the guards, but it takes a LOT of money. You could kill the guards, but there are too many to kill in hand to hand combat, so you'd need to assassinate each one, you could also ask some NPCs to help, ( you can ask about the town using a certain command) who might give some info about which guards are where at any point in time, or help you by helping you go incognito, or finally, work through a area of a dungeon that was useless to the player before, but has a secret passage to multiple parts of the world if you figure out how to use a scroll in the dungeon, which would give that place more meaning as an actual place in the lore of the world, instead of just a dungeon.
I think my most memorable "quest" was from playing Metal Gear Solid: Twin Snakes. I got stuck on the part where I need to get Meryl's frequency and I had to find it on the back of a box. I had to go through every damn box in the area and couldn't find it. Wasn't until months later I was organizing my game shelf and I looked on the back of the package, upset on how hard it was to find, just to then suddenly notice it in one of the screen shots.
I know this might have nothing to do with MMOs, but I strongly feel this is one of the strong points of one of my most beloved games ever: Arma... yes that clunky, unfinished game for mil-sim lovers that make them hate it for its arcadey elements. In Arma, at least in my case, it was never "Oh great, more enemies to kill in an area... wonderful". It was more a case of "Shit, I need to think this through, plan my movements". Each firefight in Arma is a new experience in it by itself. Enemies may act in ways that they didnt before, you may die prematurely or advance further, you may have allied support, enemy reinforcements... What Im trying to say is that, in a game like Arma, the most mind-numbing "task" is always in some way different than before, even if you try to replay it in the same fashion, "something" will change your experience. And Im not talking about just MP. The game is just as open in SP. ... Dont know why I wanted to write that, but there you go
A) Now I feel like I have to play Secret World, and B) This reminds me of the exploration bonuses in Guild Wars 2. Maybe the most fun I had with that game was trying to get on top of mountains. Reminded me of Morrowind in that way.
you know I never thought of it before but a game I used to play called runescape (and honestly still play occasionally) has apparently good quest design, it's unlike quests in any other mmo, in that they're very rarely kill quests (unless its on main baddie) and rarely ever fetch quests (excluding one that is a series of fetch quests for teh lulz) the quests actually drive their own individual storylines.
Warlance You'll notice also that there are a number of ways that Runescape implements a task system. Aside from the story-driven quests, it also features a skill dedicated to pushing a player through the grind (the Slayer skill, which can be summed up as "Doing 20 Bear Ass Quests") AND a set of achievements for doing various things in the course of the game (anything from "Find the highest point in a city" to "Earn a pet through a boss rush and set it against a dragon the size of a city.") I definitely recommend Runescape to anyone looking for an MMO, but I can also say that there are a number of flaws to the game and the community surrounding it which may quickly drive players off. I'd offer more information in that regard, but anyone who wants to jump into Runescape will get a chance to see them.
This video has made me really think about they quests we used to make up in my old D&D group: Usually there's some major storyline like "a monster is hunting people in town" or "Raiders are attacking carrravans between locations A and B" or "apparently that thing you were sent to steal is actually a powerful magic artifact and a multidimensional supervillian wants you dead for some unrelated reason." The side-quests" are given in the form of "environment quests", or quests related to specific party members or the players more often than not will just decide to ignore the plot hooks and go cause trouble for soemone. Usually what develops is the players stake out one town or city as their base of operations and then clear out all threats to the area while accruing enough money, favours and goodwill that they basically become the local sheriff/superhero. Then at some point they get called up to the "Big Leagues" by some royal emissary, prophet, extraplanar creature, or get in some Big Bad's way. The rest of the game is spent taking out ever bigger Big Bads until most of the players feel like tearing the sandcastle down and starting over. I once even had a group of players that just up and quit being heroes one day and let "someone else" deal with a major global crisis while they focused on building a huge fortress where they could retire and train other heroes. We played out entire in-game YEARS dealing with construction, training, and near-continuous visits by Kings and Archmages begging the players for aid and advice as entire civilizations in my game-world collapsed from the aforesaid crisis... ...Then we started an Epic Campaign about the first class of graduates from said Hero Academy. There's a REASON World of Warcraft has never been able to hold my interest for long...
The quests and tasks kind of remind me of Runescape. The quests in Runescape were usually actual quests where you had to solve riddles and puzzles in order to further yourself into the Lore of the game. Also later on they added Tasks which is pretty much the same as you mentioned in the vid. Little tasks than included killing and x amount of monsters, or cooking and x amount of fish, crafting an x amount of leather, mining an x amount of ore, etc..Also a lot of the quests would further your character into the game, and make them stronger. Making them worth doing. For example the F2P quest Dragon Slayer, enabled players to start equipting Rune Chest Plates. Or other members quests like Desert Treasure which opened up the horizens for magic spells and what not. I think this is very important and the newer MMOs still haven't figured it out. What is also important is making quest locations visitable (if that's even a word) after you do the quest. A lot of MMOs are what I believe are called Theme Park MMOs. Where you go from point A, to point B, to Point C, and so on.. and rarely are any of the areas even worth revisiting. This is a major flaw because it causes large portions of the world to become obsolete. Ways to fix this is by making a resource needed for crafting or smithing exclusive to that area. So like a mob that drops a specific pelt, and a specific plant needed for making a stronger potion. I'm not saying to make every area have pure exclusive items but at least a couple so players end up coming back. Not only that but make landmarks that are worth revisiting. For example in Runescape there would be maybe a mine that maybe had an ore more abundantly than other areas, or a forest with trees that are more abundant than other areas. Or maybe a more convient stove or furnace that would make cooking/smelting trips shorter. Or making maybe a mini game or an exclusive PVP/PVE area that would have revisitbility. Like for PVP an exlusive arena, or fighting ground that might even have exclusive rewards in that specific area. Or a boss that drops a specific item or is just challenging, and is worth fighting again. Or a minigame like ClanWars (which was where you could go to the White Portal and it would be a safe-zone free for all, the Red Portal where it would be an items dropped on Death free for all, or the Purple Portal you could host/join a clanwar). Or Fist of Guthix where it was kind of like a see how long it you could survive with only a stone (aka hiding or just going to the hot spot that gave more point but left you vurnerable) The minigames would also sometime provide you with items so it had unlimited replayability and you didn't have to go out are refill your items. I used Runescape as my main example because it's the MMO I've spent the most time on and now that I'm starting to explore other MMOs I realize a lot of the features that Runescape had, I took for granted, and even though it's an old MMO I believe it could teach a lot of the newer companies how to create a successful, everlasting, self-sufficient world. Of course it had it's flaws which is one of the reasons I no longer play it.
I remember part of a side quest in SWTOR where you have to summon a beast by activating five runes in the order that they are referred to in the Sith code. I thought that was a pretty cool way of integrating the game's lore into a quest.
Interestingly enough, I think this concept can be applied to real life. Often times, we just see our lives as moving one place to another, sort of like "work, eat, sleep, repeat". Just like it's wrong to create quests and see the game world in such a singular fashion, I think it hurts us to think of our environment and life in that way. Can you imagine what kind of people we could meet, unique quirks about our home town, stories and items we could discover in our world? If we explored our world like we do in good mmorpgs and did create/did "better" quests, I think our experiences in life could feel more enriched, more meaningful and, in turn, more productive. Wow, it makes me want to explore my community and have fun adventures instead of just going from point A (home) to point B (work) and back everyday. This is a great reminder to treat your life like an adventure. Be productive, have a purpose and have fun adventures along the way.
I think one major point that needs to be remembered here is that in TSW every quest end point also will usually have a new quest within sight. Ao that you never have to do the return to town stuff that Is so annoying. Its one of the most clever design choices of the game.
Borderlands 2 has an achievement system that is similar to that. It encourages you to play and explore for a minor permanent bonus. It's one of the reasons I'm STILL playing Borderlands 2.
shunkwugga The thing is, giving them character by ways is not enough if the mission is still boring. Meaning it still is lazy mission design even if you add a character to mix it up. Mix it up? That is hardly mixing it up. It is just wording missions differently and expecting no one noticing it. I'd much rather have innovation done to them, in forms of actually truly mixing things up. Let's say, you do this but as a consequence something happens. Or you have a timer to it, or anything really but not just differently written same old mission we've seen before. Innovation and creativity is what we are looking for here, not good writing.
I would agree with what you are saying. I really felt that the Witcher 3 did all of this. I could run into a random npc and get a quest, I could grab a random item/book and grab a quest. I wish more rpg's did this. I also liked how most of the quests in the game were better than most stories in the games we play today.
Hey guys. Just so you know, The Secret World also has "tasks" for nearly every monster. Once you complete it, you get a title, exp, and sometimes even free ingame clothing. :)
One related topic I'd love to see is how to do side quests in single player RPGs without breaking immersion. The general setup of a lot of RPGs is that main storyline takes up about 50% of the game and the sidequests take up the remaining half. That's fine, but the quests can't just involve collecting twenty basilisk hides while some demon lord is destroying the world. Side quests don't necessarily have to tie into the main plot, but there should be a reason that the hero is willing to invest time and effort into them. I'm kind of experiencing this with Dragon Age: Inquisition. The side quests actually are fun and well designed, but it feels like the Inquisitor is just running around in the wilderness doing errands for every random stranger she sees. The more I think about it, the more I like Mass Effect's side quests. Every mission you went on had a clear purpose that tied in with the story: either it was a main quest, a companion quest, or you're following a lead that can give you a slight advantage (ie. capturing a Cerberus starport, which means you'll have Cerberus fighter craft to use against the Reapers). While there were certainly favours-for-strangers quests, you didn't have to go out of your way to do them; it was more like, "hey, did you happen to find any interesting intel while you were clearing that mercenary camp out? Great! Here are some credits for your efforts" I realise that there are constraints. ME2 and 3 didn't really let you go off and explore (ME1 kind of did, if you count those Mako expeditions), which meant that you couldn't just go off the beaten path and stumble upon a side quest. DA:I, on the other hand, emphasizes exploration, and it did so by filling every area up with quest givers. To make DA:I side quests more like ME2 and ME3's, you wouldn't be able to have those massive areas and the exploration aspect would have to be de-emphasised; something that probably wouldn't sit well with people who enjoy taking in the scenery.
+Phlebas This is one of the reasons why people found the WoW expansion Wrath of the Lich King so epic. Every quest you did actually felt like it was the next stepping stone to confronting the Lich King. Every medial task eventually revolved around doing _something_ to help the war effort, even if it was collecting 8 of some plant in some area to be used to heal soldiers wounded in battle, fighting the Scourge. You were still helping your faction reach the end goal. And in Wrath of the Lich King, you always knew where the end was going to be. Everyone know eventually that they would have to storm Icecrown Citadel and fight the Lich King at his throne. This is where other expansions like Cataclysm fell short, because while you had a sense of who the bad guys were, you didn't really know how it was going to end. In Cataclysm, you knew you were going to have to fight Deathwing eventually, but there just wasn't a build up to that battle that made it feel epic. You always felt like you were just pissing around the new zone until end game then battling through a few loosely tied dungeons and raids before killing Deathwing. There was no seat-of-power that you were pushing toward. This is why I feel like big bads should always try to have an established lair or central headquarters. When the player knows WHERE their end goal lies, it helps put them in a better direction to actually care about the path to it, rather than wandering confused, killing stuff until you level up.
+Kaitlyn Amanda WotLK is definitely the pinnacle achievement to date of the theme-park, MMO-on-rails genre. Most of the people who played through that period loved it. The problem is: what do you do once the Big Bad of your world is dead? WotLK was really the natural end of the ride. But nobody wants to just say "ok, that was fun, time to shut down the servers." (I would also say there was a lot of content not particularly related to the Lich King: Ulduar, Nexus/Oculus/Eye and Utgarde Keep were all well grounded in Northrend but had little to do with the Lich King.)
The Secret World is fairly ridiculous in this sense, and the first area of the game is incredibly well-crafted. There are NPCs around, their stories tie together, there are all sorts of things going on, a disturbed town, people distributed around, mysteries both modern and ancient which tie into what is going on in the world... it is just a gloriously well-made place, and full of very interesting quests. The main problem with The Secret World is that, like all MMOs, combat is kind of boring. The big attraction of the game is the story - every major quest is associated with a character with a unique personality, who also has other things to talk about to fill you in on the world - and the investigation quests, the quests which are purely about solving puzzles (though some non-investigation quests have aspects of such) are the best quests I've played in any game of its kind. They are really, really hard in some cases, but some of them are completely genius (though some are a bit tedious, like the one where you have to decipher Morse code - it is cool that you do it, but deciphering Morse code is a lot of busy work). The combination of the characters and the world is very engrossing, and you feel like you're doing interesting things. Unfortunately, the rest of the game is not as polished as the first three zones, and PvP in the game feels completely inappropriate to the tone of the setting.
One of the quests in TSW actually made me sit down for 30 minutes and learn musical scales in order to progress through one section. Another had me translating Hebrew. After TSW, it's pretty impossible to go back to games that only offer "kill 10 goblins, then come all the way back to town" a thousand times...
Minor spelling error: "James the Undeated" instead of Undefeated. Really good points overall, I think these kinds of quests would be an absolute gem to have in a game. What's more, almost any game could pull it off, lore and setting is pretty inconsequential to this type of quest giving, it's just that people ended up trying to churn quests out faster because it gave the illusion of "more content".
I think The Elder Scrolls Online does quests pretty well for an MMO. I remember looking around Stros Mkai looking for a hidden treasure by following the clues of finding "a finger carved in stone that points you trough the broken ship" or something like that. But not only that, the characters and story of the main quest zones are very interesting and you can really get invested into the stories which also expand the lore.
During this whole video, everything they kept mentioning made me think, "Didn't Guild Wars 2 do something similar or better than that?" Either they didn't feel that the way GW2 did things was different enough from the stuff they were talking and didn't mention it or I've just been playing GW2 too much and my overall opinion has become jaded (i.e. I'm becoming a fanboy... and if that is true I need to go scrub myself because I really don't want that to happen :S).
No, I was thinking the exact same thing! Guild Wars 2 has a Heart system that feels holistic and the way events pop up can break up the pace of the grinding. Not to mention that since you're rewarded for even zones you outlevel, map completion never feels like a waste of time. It's a great game and I was going to mention it if you hadn't.
I was thinking the same so you're not alone here. I'm now so used to the way the hearts work that I can't stand games with NPCs with exclamation points over their heads and quest logs.
Andreanne Lamothe Where I agree that GW2 is doing something a bit different doing "AoE" style quests, I think they're focused more on how involved players are with the quest lore, and how engaged they feel when exploring the world, which can be boiled down to taste. They also probably haven't played GW2, so it may be they just didn't put it at the forefront of their mind. A LOT of people like The Secret World as much those of us who play GW2 like GW2.
Orzene Tyranni Well they also were talking about how restrictive a central area hub can be and how quest design can either encourage or discourage exploration. GW2 does a pretty good job of encouraging exploration or not making the player feel obligated to go anywhere they don't feel like going.
Yes GW2 improved the old quest system with theiry events that pop up all over the map, that give you new tasks to complete but many many events are still a kill-grind. Defend this town against the centaurs by killing most of them until their moral fades. Invade the enemy camp and kill their leader. But this is still not really meaningful in the world as the developers promised it to be. They said: "If you don't defend the town it will be lost to the players and you can't interact with any of the people in this town since they will be dead." What really happens is: "Oh no the centaurs killed everyone! Well, let's wait 5 minutes for the event to pop up in which i can defeat them and everything will be okay again." I think this is just another face of the old "kill everyone"-quests. Also, the hearts are really just another symbol for the WoW-exclamation mark. Instead of "kill 20 orcs" they have a bar you have to fill up by killing enemies, or collecting pieces of a certain machine or something. Please don't get me wrong, i enjoyed many many hours of GW2, but i think it's not as different as many say it is from other MMOs.
I really like Guild Wars 2's renown quest system, aka heart quests. Half the time you might not even realize you're doing a quest, because they're often actions in an area that just seem logical to take. Not only that, but most of them can be resolved either by combat or through non-combat means. Centaurs laying siege to a keep? You can either fight them off yourself, OR, help patch up the walls, run ammunition to the defenders, steal the centaurs' battle plans and bring them back to the commander, all sorts of things without raising a weapon.
Possible Spoiler Warning for The Secret World ---------------------------- One of my favorite quests had me trying to communicate with the deceased, eventually I was led to a van that had run off the road and its lights were flashing and stuff was broken and everything, it looked like a disaster - as I investigated further I noticed that there was a definite pattern to the flashing headlights, and I got the ghostly message via morse code. It made me feel so smart for figuring it out, that game was awesome.
I've found in a few games, especially where there are alot of quests, that they start to break immersion. Skyrim for instance; a villager asks you to go get something, and you look at the map and it's on the other side of the world. Random villager guy never would've gone there. It's better when the quests fit the profile. And don't even get me started on the, "You can be the leader of every single guild in the entire world and none of them will notice you're their sworn enemy."
One of my favorite quests from WoW was the Eel quest from Cataclysm. If you kill any random eel you get a quest from your character encouraging you to kill many eels because "They're terrible"
Runescape quests are another example of good quest design. There are only quests with intricate storyline. Take, for example, the King Arthur quests. You actually end up becoming a part of the legend. You get to fight morgan le faye's nephew, meet the fisher king, and locate a magic whistle. I know i didnt explqin it correctly, but can any runescape fans reply with a better example? Thanks.
OK, here is the entire quest series. First, you have to save Merlin from a Crystal. Second, you have to go locate Galahad and find the Fisher Kingdom by locating the 6 mysterious statues and seeing where they connect and bring Sir Percival (after saving him from some goblins) back to the kingdom where he becomes king and hands you the Holy Grail. Third, Arthur and his Knights are captured, and you have to go save them by defeating Morgan Le Faye's nephew and defeating the Sinclair family from another quest. Additionally, you find out later on King Lathus of Ardougne hates the knights and is preparing something against them (within Plague's End).
i liked the quest meeting history and its a good example of how quests should be made. for those who don't know, the point of this quest is to gather items to put in a museum to showcase the history of Gilinor (or the Runescape universe). this isn't your run-of-the-mill fetch quest. you end up finding a magic key that let's you travel back in time to the time where the very first humans arrived in Gilinor. you can use the key that brought you here to travel between two different points in early history,as well as back to the present. you are able to do things in the earlier past to influence the later past to help the first family survive, all the while documenting this experience. that document ends up in the museum, telling the story of the first family of gilinor, and the mysterious stranger (you) that helped them in time of trouble
Jeremy DeRuiter Yes I remember Meeting History, I enjoyed that quest a lot. When pvp world servers were available I thought it would be funny to lure someone to fight me at one of the key locations and then in the middle of the fight use the key to escape into the past. Meaningless and stupid and I never did it, but I thought about it.
[Apologies to those who don't like rezzed posts ...] I really loved the mission design in The Secret World, but I think it did need one addition to the investigation missions: a hints system. They do give you an in game browser, which is great, but had a couple of flaws. One was that the search results almost always came up with walkthroughs at the top ... which is not the same as a hint. The other is that sometimes you found things that you weren't sure had anything to do with the mission. I had that happen with the white ravens quest. I found a video from a band called the White Ravens and the locations looked like hints to locations in the game ... but it all turned out to be my own personal red herring. The upside was that it led to some great immersion ... but at the cost of me just getting frustrated and looking up the solution. I think there is a great in-game solution they could use to do hints. I mean, you're supposed to be doing these missions for a secret society ... what if you could call them up and request help with a quest? The game could use some metrics to tell how far you made it on your own (maybe certain things that you found and clicked on ... or where you'd been) and use that to give you a hint to help you get over the hump where you're stuck. There could be a delay from the time of request to the time that they call you back. That time could increase with more hint requests, and decrease over time. The advantage to me is that it's a diagetic solution that doesn't feel like "cheating". In addition, it makes it would make you feel like you really are part of a secret society ... like this is a two way street and not just a one way mission spigot.
I remember doing this quest during the Secret World Beta. I actually found it quite nice that a quest made me think about the world of the game and even my own. I did not ever complete the quest, but the time I spent with the beta was fun. I have not touched the game since it went out of beta. Perhaps now is about time I give it a visit.
I play a lot of The Old Republic and I have run into this as well. Most of the quests are kill quests and fetch quests, but I don't really mind at all because I enjoy the subject material. It's much more of a single player mmo anyway.
+Logan Hollis yeah, the problem is, that the fully voiced quests are mostly just go there and kill 10 of these...you could say that they actually wasted this powerfull and expensive tool for story telling on those shitty kill quests, so that the real story telling gets drowned in unimportant NPC rambling.
TSW also has some of the best named items I've ever seen. Nearly every single piece of dungeon loot has some kind of story behind it. The Hell dungeons specifically have some fantastic item names, seriously, google the names and you will find all kinds of extra lore. Eg: Melchom's Writ. The flavor text is "The paymaster knows to never be late when one holds the coins of demons." Google Melchom and you find out that he was the paymaster of Hell.
Vindictus (or Mabinogi Heroes) had some fun to be found in titles. The quests in it weren't all that amazing from what I remember, but there were a lot of smaller tasks and titles associated with them. I proudly presented myself as "Kobold Archer Nemesis" for killing a ridiculous amount of them with throwing spears. I never saw anyone else using that title, so it really made me feel special.
The titles in that game were actually really interesting, now that I think about it. You could get titles from kicking, grabbing and using the varied secondary weapons (like throwing spears) on enemies, but not always with every method for every enemy. So it encouraged to try every different thing you could do to try to defeat every new opponent to find out if there was a title available for it because the game would tell if you started making progress to a new, previously undiscovered title. Doing this would also possibly lead to discovering what would be the most effective method in fighting an enemy.
I think that you missed an opportunity here to discuss the quest design of Runescape, which in itself has several problems to be sure, but it has one of the best collection of story-driven quests i've seen.
This really opened my eyes, I used to play Borderlands 1 & 2... way more than I should. But their quest design is like that of an mmo. although it's an Rpg and a First person shooter, melded together. Hold on to your butts, this is gonna be long. Starting off with Borderlands 1, you always had the option of doing sidequests to level up, each quest had intro text to give you something to care about if you decided to... but the main missions would usually trigger one of the characters talking and commenting on something you just did. So let's say, you complete one of the early story missions and unlock the car station, as you jump over a nearby ramp, the mechanic will comment on it. The game also had little tasks you could do, though they were just experience lumps, Kill x amount of enemies with a certain weapon, fire x number of bullets, explore this zone, make it so your car doesn't land for 5 seconds... the list goes on. And as you gained experience to level your character with quests and tasks, it also leveled up your proficiency with a gun type, increasing the damage or fire rate slightly. which in turn, makes you want to complete the tasks and grind. And these bonuses only applied for that character Borderlands 2 on the other hand, replaced this with an interesting approach. They added more tasks and gave the tasks more meaning but ripped out proficiencies. Whereas killing 25 bandits would normally give you 500xp, it now gave you a "badass rank" which would then accumulate until you reached a certain amount and you were rewarded with a token that you could only redeem on one of your many stats. need more melee damage? Sure! want your headshots to really sting? Go for it! but it gave you a reason to do things that while completely mundane or strange with a clear reward. Even the quests were changed, when you selected a quest in your log, the "source" of the quest would give you a brief description as you moved toward the objective. This made side quests easier to care for because you didn't have to cut gameplay to know what you're supposed to be doing. BUT I will say that at one point during the game, you get flooded with quests which could serve as a daunting task to finish them all. But they all were somewhat interesting despite being mostly kill quests and gather missions. **SPOILER EXAMPLE** The side mission where you have to hunt bullymongs because the quest giver doesn't like the names, the manner in which you have to interact with them changes as the names visibly change above their heads. Bullymong to primal beasts and such.
***** They are first person shooters in which you level up and collect gear like an RPG. You have skill trees have meaning and weight like an RPG. But the core gameplay is that of a shooter. In a sense it could be classified as both genres. But gearbox, the company that made both games, sums it up on the back of Borderlands 1. "Borderlands is the first 4 player co-op Role Playing Shooter..." It's worth a check if you want to see what i mean in regards to both the quest design and in this strange mixture of genres. I think they get as low as $10-20 for the game of the year edition on steam.
***** Well, yes. Yes it is. It is a FPS in the fact that you are in First Person View and Shooting. Yet it has Character Advancement through RPG elements and a Story Structure like a Traditional RPG. Genres can absolutely mix.
***** I'll have to look up the mixing genre episode, hadn't seen that one yet. I want to really incorporate RPG into a Moba. There would only be one Champion/Hero/Character... yourself. You'd start as a Tabala Rasa, a clean slate. Everyone would start with the exact same Stats, completely balanced. You'd but Items, just like in DOTA2, LoL and Smite... but you'd ALSO buy your Skills. So you could completely customize your Abilities. We'd have Q Abilities, W Abilities, E Abilities, Ultimate Abilities and Passives. Most Q Abilities would be Damage or Direct Heal Abilities. Most W Abilities would be Gap Closers and AoE Damage/Heals. Most E Abilities would be Shields and Self Heals, and other Buffs. However, there would be a small amount of each in everything (say you wanted to have Q, W and E all be Ranged Damage Skill Shots... that would be possible). Ultimate Abilities would all be very powerful... some would be big stuns (solo or area) others huge damage (ranged and melee, Magic and Physical) while others would be Heals and Buffs. Passives would help fine tune your build and would just be a layer that you wouldn't have to actively use. The 'stronger' the Ability is considered, the more Currency it costs to unlock it. So you can jump out early with a weaker Ability, but you'll have an early advantage as you HAVE an Ability and your Enemy doesn't... he plays safe and waits and when he gets his Ability it's way better than yours, but now you have 2 or 3 Abilities to chain. So far, all that is Standard Moba with the twist of having to In Match Buy your Abilities to 'Craft' your Role. The RPG element would come in your Leveling to Max (for instance, 30 in LoL)... where you acquire Base Stat Boosts. So you walk into Team Chat and people decide their Roles, and this time you draw 'Tank/Support/Initiate'... so something like a Leona or a Thresh, Braum or a Blitz, or Taric for LoL Fans. Now you take your Base State Boosts to hit the Stats that need to be Boosted to make you a good Tank (HP, Armor, HP Regen... maybe Mana/Energy to be able to use more Abilities). Also adding to the RPG is while you are Leveling yourself overall (again, the 1-30 in LoL) you have to Unlock/Buy the Abilities for you to use In Match. You may focus on AP Range Damage because you want to be a Mage... and that's fine, but when you don't get your Role you will be wishing you had some variety. Of course WHEN you get your Role, you will be more well equipped than others as your Abilities will perfectly compliment your Role. I would want some Abilities to be Unlocked due to certain Individual Achievements and others to be Unlocked due to Team Achievements and others to simply be 'passage of time' Achievements, like 'Congratulations, you earned Level 2... you have unlocked X Ability'. I'd also have Multiple 'Clones' for the Player, so he can focus on putting those Base State Boosts that makes sense into say each of his 10 Clones (which he can Permanently Name, and Design the Look of with our Create-A-Champion Process). So instead of a Champion Select at the beginning/draft, you would have a Champion Build. We could still Ban, but we'd Ban Abilities... what 3 Abilities out of Hundreds do we want to keep out of this Match? Anyways, just an idea I've had. No more restraints by what Champions are Available, you are free to build how ever you like. The only thing that can be OP is how you combine your Build... no more 'Champion X is OP, NERFHAMMER!'.
***** Any thoughts would be welcomed. To be honest, the idea is in infancy and I don't have a Code/Design Team to actually start any real 'Game' work... it's all paper and pencil right now.
Actually, when I think about it, pretty much every quest in ESO is quite interesting and immersive. Their quest always have multiple steps and you only get the reward at the very end.
I was hoping that you would talk about the Guild Wars 2 quest systematic as it makes the world feel very alive. The quests pop up organically and affect the state of the world as a whole.
Agreed. I love that, in GW2, you don't ever have some list of quests that you accrue other than your next main story quest. You just see whatever events are near you, and there are even many in-depth quests where you simply need to follow the clues in the world which eventually leads to a chest or an achievement. Like you said, it definitely make the world feel organic and helps to build the lore of the world around you.
My favorite TSW quest was "Signal Effect" which had 4 signal towers you had to interact with. They each listed off a bunch of data in different format (binary, hex, ASCII numbers, and I think Unicode). When you decoded each message you got 4 garbled messages. When you lined those garbled messages up, you realized they were each a fourth of the completed message, which was a puzzle that you had to solve. If you solved the puzzle and went to the right place on the map, you got a quest complete. Took me and my friends a solid four hours of collaboration to figure out.
In Cataclysm, in Grizzly Hills in Northrend, the primary Alliance quest chain was exceedingly cool. Your PC had to complete various ordinary kill quests and escort quests, pretty ho-hum stuff, plus few NPC fetch quests. But what made it different was that you were effectively engaging in diplomacy, brokering needed marriage. And just to cap it off, your character was the best man or bridesmaid at the wedding - and had to perform the original duty of the best man and bridesmaid: emergency bodyguard. By this point, I at least was so invested that my immediate reaction was "Oh, no! You are not wrecking this wedding!"
That sewer cap quest would have bothered me a ton; most of the time the orientation of a sewer cap depends on how the crew randomly put it back last time there was maintenance to be done. Even if the city planners were hard core Illuminati wishing to encode a message in the streets (why??), that message would only last a few years at most till one or more of the clues got rotated the wrong way. So I never would have looked at that triangle as an arrow, and instead I would just have been stuck there until I looked up spoilers and got mad.
Except right before that, the guy says "the sewers will point the way" or something like that. When laid out as it is in this video, it sounds incredibly arcane. I think most people could get through that quest if they gave it some effort, but it still felt like an achievement when I did it.
this is why i liked the world explorer achievement in wow. first of all, no one told me to do it, i just did it because it sounded fun. as i got into it i started thinking about azeroth in new ways. the low level zones werent useless to me anymore i got to see a lot of places i hadnt been to. as a horde player, this introduced a lot of new challenges on me, as i had to learn the alliance ship routes, figure out where i could repair my gear or find the closest mail box if i needed to as i couldnt use the nearby flight points, and i had to sneak into a lot of places where i werent really meant to go. i bought a rifle to kite guards individually (this isnt something a warrior usually needs to do) and clear paths into more tightly guarded areas. a few times i went in with a large raid group of horde players, and other times i teamed up with my mage friend because his slow fall spell created shortcuts and back entrances to some areas. once i had to hide under a bridge to avoid being spotted by a group of alliance players, and when i realized my weapon was poking out i had to clear bag space on the fly to remove it. there isnt a single quest i remember better than this achievement, and it makes me wish more quests had unclear or unexpected solutions to them. the only contender is the Linken's sword questline. if youve read all this, look it up.
I really liked the quest designs in TSW, but I felt like after you got out of the starting area they tended to lose their creativity. But that first town, damn it was full of wonder! I still occasionally play TSW, but I'm getting near the end and the quests just don't seem to have the same "wondermunt" factor. But yes, the quest described in this video was the one that really got me hooked. I'd never imagined that such detail could be incorporated. Then there's the quest where I had to download a Morse-Code translator on my phone and use it to figure out a clue.
I guess it's hard to keep up the same level of creativity throughout! Like Extra Credits said on one of their other videos "You have to ship at some point, you cant work on your game forever" I'm betting something ridiculous like 70% of the time they spent making towns and quests was used on that first town, then they were like oh man this is taking forever to place such detail!
Mauro Tamm I know of one that keeps the content consistent throughout most of the leveling, but I won't say the name because people here the name and start ranting. My point is that it can be done, not all mmos fade after starter regions. Now I'm not saying that they won't later fade in their design quality at some point though. Sometimes the quality is good up until you reach the end of the content that was created pre-launch.
More on quests please!!!!!!!!!! That was so amazing but short and left me wanting more, only having just given a glimpse of what makes players like a quest. Keep up the great work!!
I appreciate what TSW is trying to do with more out of the box quests, but the example you mentioned sounds more like crazy adventure game logic. If that was a puzzle in an adventure game, people would (rightfully) berate it for "how was I supposed to figure this out".
The game encourages you to google people and clues to figure it out, like names of historical figures and stuff like that. There's even a built in web browser for it. So it's definitely not crazy adventure game logic, you just have to stop for a moment and think about what to look for.
dragonbrad98 the problem with this is some people may be under educated or even not educated in the proper field related to said quest. i have encountered a few of the quests and was able to complete a few of them through looking online, but a lot of the rest was so far off of what i know in my head that i wouldnt have finished them without looking up a specific guide to the quest.
dragonbrad98 Of course, the problem with the fact that TSW wants you to Google stuff in game, and uses really obscure references is that you have to actively avoid spoilers. Every single puzzle quest I've ever tried in TSW had the first page or so of Google results be quest walkthroughs. And that's not Googling the quest name, just the quotes or names from the hints.
In LotRO, I really liked the Titles associated with the tasks. With the way my mind works it was actually more rewarding for me to get the "Scourge of the Barrow Downs" or whatever Title than the minor bonuses. It gave the feeling that my character's accomplishments existed after I was done with the task. And with all the titles you had available, you don't see 50 people in town using the same exact title (*cough*GW2DungeonMaster*cough*). It helped your character feel unique.
+victor zeng He has actually never referenced a game that did so many fucking things fantastically, quests, combat, skilling, lore that was formed over 15 years and that every high end players knows by heart and a world so beautifully crafted, the game was in all intents and purposes a fluke, it was so basic is style that it could fit an absurd amount of content seamlessly into the world while turning basic systems like combat pvp into a skilled game of chess and quick reflexes. Wish I could had sunk some of the 10 years I played into WoW but being 8yo+ RuneScape was far more accessible and wallet friendly. Sad to see the old boy crumble to its knees due to some poor decisions made by JaGex, sadly a lot of the people who quit wouldn't touch another MMORPG for the rest of their lives :\
This was a very good episode. It made me realize I should be thanking the whole team for their hard work and powerful insight. Thanks, everyone who works on Extra Credits. :)
That Secret World quest sounds like more like a riddle or an oldschool adventure game puzzle. Doesn't seem to fit the flow of regular MMOs, since you wouldn't be able to solve it without leaving the game. However would like to see a different kind of MMO that went entirely in the puzzle direction, where players mostly discussed over the chat how to solve a problem, like a tabletop RPG. Doubt it would work though, sooner or later someone would just ruin it with gameFAQs
But you can. Secret World has an in-game browser with fake websites made to give clues about the areas you visit. Secondly, investigation missions are clearly marked so you know it's gonna require investigation. All of the invest missions are pretty difficult.
BenRangel the problem with that is that there'd have to be many new puzzles or people would jsut figure it out and people would stop caring. imo, the closest thing to this i know of is probably fallen london; a sorta browsery game thing with puzzle ish elements. my whole problem with the secret world model is that nobody is going to care about the puzzles because they require effort that most people would consider wasted. i mean, don't get me wrong, puzzles are great, but how many people do you think will stand around and ask for the solution to the puzzle because they're lazy? contrast this with the other secret world thing he talked about (the highly leveled monster thing) and you get a thing that i think is much better: a puzzle with multiple solutions, maybe. unless it's much more straightforward than i give it credit for, you're probably going to find multiple ways to sneak around the mook, which will provide some needed variety to how you solve the quest. you might (jsut maybe) find people in chat going "what's the BEST WAY to do this quest" instead of "solution plz". speaking of, that's what gets me about enviromental quests too; at worst people are just going to see these as unneccesary walking filter ( unless you allow the player to fly there which is in and of itself a bad decision (because players will just never experience the world)) and at best people will make pilgramage there in droves and it won't be a special thing also idk that's just my take when i'm really tired
thats the problem with gamers these days ...they want everything to be told to them ina game already >_< gamers seem to not be able to enjoy finding out something ina game rather than knowing it already haha
I think a better way might be for a puzzle solvable more easily if you read the optional in-game lore. Like if one of the random books in Skyrim had how some other hero solved a problematic quest.
MrMilkyCoco I think the key words are "in game". When a quest relies on you having to go outside of the game to reference things that are not common knowledge, you may be making your quests a bit too difficult. It's not that people want to be told everything (though there are undoubtedly people who actually do) but rather that people want to actually be provided with the tools to solve quests without having to go hugely out of one's way just to obtain those means. Presenting a complex riddle steeped in the game's lore, but not providing access to that lore except in a single book found halfway across the map in a large library? Bad. Presenting the same riddle but providing a number of differing sources of information within the same area? Much better. I admit that my examples here aren't EXACTLY relevant to the problem at hand, but I think they illustrate what I'm trying to say rather well.
You know if the answer's in such an obscure place in the game, like a specific book, you know what I would do? look up the answer online on a walkthrough. At which point it becomes either a fetch/collect quest, or I miss out on lore cause it's in the way. So I think it's very clever that Secret World forces you to do just that, allowing you to use lateral thinking. However, I do agree that quest example is very complex-I would have no clue how to do that. But the idea of using outside knowledge to complete a quest sounds like a very cool
A lot of people are complaining about Skyrim in the comments, with regards to its massive amount of quests. But I think the quest system in Skyrim is a hell of a lot better than just "get a bunch of quests and do them". For instance, when walking into the Riverwood Trader, you hear the trader and his sister arguing, and so of course you are interested and ask him "What was the argument about?" You don't need to do this, but through indirect interaction you are suddenly interested in what is going on. That gets you the Golden Claw quest, which you later realise is connected to the Dragonstone and the return of the dragons. This is great because you realise that some seemingly random retrieval quest is related to the whole province of Skyrim, and you suddenly feel the connection between yourself and the world. There are plenty of other examples I could give, I just wanted to throw that particular one out there.
If the missions being doled out are as real as mentioned in the beginning of the video, then the rewards (and more important, the entire game) has to be precisely as real. If I'm going to spend that much brain power in figuring out *one* quest then it had better be damned important and lucrative. If this quest was given to me in a game like wow, where I have to do 30 quests simply to level once, I would easily abandon the mission entirely. You have to match the missions to the game. Now, if this were skyrim (or some other sandbox, highly open, customizable rpg) then I would probably be more inclined to do that quest, because I'm having fun with my character and figuring myself out. In an MMO that is not the case, sadly. It's all about the grind.
There are no "levels" in The Secret World. You accrue skill and ability points, rather quickly, and with no limit on how many you can accrue. If you play enough, one character can be good at everything and have all abilities.
It's a very hard question to answer from a design standpoint. I mean, that kind of quest enables players to seriously game the system. If you have progression of character power/abilities of any sort, you absolutely NEED the player to not want to power through to higher levels and improved skills as fast as possible. You NEED to convince them to just enjoy being there, as a character, in that world. And in a genre where that's usually not the case, players are coming into the game already thinking the wrong way, and they are going to game the system. So as a designer you end up having to choose between making these quests reward players with the assumption that they took the time to figure things out themselves, or gimping the reward because you know people are just going to look up the solution and blaze through.
They address this : limit quest numbers. By proxy, this should also make quests worth more. Instead of doing 50 "Kill 10 Boars" quests to level up, it would only require 5 or 10 of the quest chains like the example given. Or just make each step of the puzzle its own quest (follow the sewer covers *quest complete* Find the town hall *quest complete* find the painting *quest complete*) You'll have a dozen or so quests complete by the time you finish the chain, and it's a lot more fun than a dozen or so mob grinds. Of course, if you don't want to do the thinking part, you can almost certainly just google the answer. But games should allow for organic gameplay. You should be able to play the game within the game, as much as possible. Going to WoWhead (or whatever) to look up the spawn point for each quest mob isn't engaging. It's a crutch, and we should at least TRY walking on our own.
I encountered a quest like that in Ni No Kuni. It required you to take a look at the world around you, and even though it may not have been as hard or as complex as the one you talked about, I think they did a good job.
Actually, I don't think it's that similar. It's even better! You pretty much make your own quests and decide where you want to go and how you want to do it. I'd love to see an MMO adopt this kind of gameplay. It would be tough (or maybe impossible), but imagine how cooool it would be! An organic sense of progression and freedom WITH A SLEW OF OTHER PEOPLE!! (Sqweeee!!)
exactly, my skyrim playthroughs often boil down to get as many quests as possible and just start at the closest one and work my way around the map, picking up more quests as I go along
In Oblivion, they introduced the instant travel map and leveled dungeons. That was a TERRIBLE IDEA. They made it a bit better in Skyrim, but I still prefer the Morrowind quests. They felt more real because they didn't arbitrarily send you roaming around the map. They were local, like the people. It made the people feel more real and the place feel more real because both worked off of each other. In a particularly bad example, the "Missing in Action" quest in Skyrim, your goal is all the way across the freaking map! Why? In what reality would the bad guys take a single prisoner to another country, through wolf-infested woods, to some random fortress in the wilderness? It makes no sense and it breaks the flow of the game. Skyrim is supposed to feel vast, but if they make long trips a regular part of quests, then the world feels more like a clunky interface than an actual place. Morrowind had much less "landmass." But, I had to think about how I traveled in it, and then do actual traveling, so it felt bigger. Games continue to get more and more 'realistic,' but anyone who has ever traveled through actual wilderness knows that it is a challenge. If Skyrim is an untamed wilderness, then that challenge is broken.
Russell Richard I have to ask why would you not take a prisoner into an area like that, what hope would he have of getting back home? I think it's necessary to have a variety of distances in quests to make them more dynamic and make you plan for them, and only having fast travel areas, like only being able to travel from one city to another, not the middle of the woods to a city
brandon carter Yes, I could definitely agree with that. Variety is good in just about everything, including quest travel distance. But, I suppose that if the quest takes you a long way across the map, there should be a good reason for it, or it should at least be acknowledged. Someone in some conversation needs to mention that the journey will be long and arduous and filled with danger, because it would be if the developers want to convince me that Skyrim is a real place.
Daniel Jones LOTRO is pretty amazing. Combat and perhaps even quest-wise it's not very special or different. But the way they incorporated the books lore and events and the attention they gave to detail, atmosphere and roleplay is amazing and made the time I spent with it worthwhile. Be warned though, it's a very unfriendly free to play if you're not considering subscribing or paying a bit. At least when I tried it you basically got to level 20ish and then you have to buy quest packs to actually have quests on the higher level zones. You can buy them with currency you get from grinding but it sort of breaks the rythm.
that's a thing I like about tree of saviour. It's a cute little mmo which one could consider pretty simple and it has only these normal generic quests. But only on the surface. I think it was half a year ago or so someone who didn't skip all dialogues and then went off never speaking to the npc' s again found something interesting. hidden quests. hidden quests which requires to actually listen to the npc and when you finish that quest you get a new class(which has something to do with the tos class system but I don't really wanna explain it xD). These quests are specific to one of the 4 ground classes so you can't become a rune caster or a miko while being an archer or a swordsman and the players are all over the place trying to find new quests and new classes and it's so awesome to just see new quests discovered or meet a player who has a class u never saw before and interacting with them learning how to get there. It's a great way to implement other quest types and bringing the community together.
The Secret World: Legends is the only MMO I've ever played where I didn't care if I was levelling or not. Now I know why, it is a great narrative and immersive experience.
I will definitely take these ideas to heart if I become a game developer. Those large ! icons above NPCs always annoyed me, not just because it was a lazy way of saying HEY, THERE'S A QUEST, PAY ATTENTION, but because it tickled the completionist. I really just want to get Hoth over with in SWTOR, but those damn missions lure me to spend hours worth of additional time here, even if I don't need more xp. I could do with less XP, because I'm already too over leveled to enjoy the combat
This get me to think about a game I'm currently working on, sadly I don't think it would fit the game, since the player isn't playing the RPG part, the computer is. Instead the player runs the town, and can set quests/tasks of what the town needs.
Gareth Brooks-Martin Yes, the player will build the town, and setup quests for the AI controlled RPG characters to do. It will all be in real time, I'm trying to make the characters get sentimental value to items or other characters, so they in turn can also generate quests. Like a character loses a ring, and request the player set up a quest to find it.
TERA is one game that suffers heavily from boring quests, because the combat system feels really good and rewarding and your choice of class really makes a HUGE difference in what role you take in a party, even between the different melee classes. Speaking of which, an episode on good design practice for character roles/classes would be nice!
The thing about Secret World's quest design too is that it treats each big quest as important, dividing them up into "tiers" that turn them into a series of tasks to be completed. The main story missions especially, trust that you'll take the time to do the big and small quests you encounter along the way to move you along and earn experience between tiers.
In the original Guild Wars, you had the Survivor Title and the LDoA title (Legendary Defender of Ascalon). The Survivor Title was, like in Lotr Online, for getting to a certain level without dying (although in this game the only survivor title that actually meant anything was for getting 13,370,000 xp). LDoA was for getting to the max level without leaving the prologue area, Pre-searing Ascalon
Great example, a friend and I actually spent a day figure out that quest in The Secret World beta and it was some of the most fun I've ever had in an MMO.
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There's actually a great quote in the dungeons master's guide in (gasp) fourth edition Dnd: "Kill ten monsters of your level" isn't a quest, it's a recipe for advancing a level. "make harrow's pass safe for travelers" is a quest, even if the easiest way to complete it happens to be killing ten monsters of the player's level.
In other words, a quest needs context for the activities you are doing.
SmugLookingBarrel got to give it to DND, they know what they are doing when it comes to rpg and quest building.
I actually like the idea of "unmarked" quests. Fallout 3 and New Vegas have quite a few of these, often times given out by literally just finding something. One that comes to mind is the Keller Family Transcript from Fallout 3. There were 5 recorded messages from the time of the great war (the nukes dropping) and each contained a message (some of which are just plain depressing to listen too) and a number to a passcode to get into a secret bunker not marked on the map. When you located this bunker, you now had access to a terminal which opened it, and it contained 2 secrets: a feral ghoul, and a weapon. It is heavily implied through a recording that the father of the family searched daily for supplies amongst the radiation despite his limited anti-rad drugs, and thus he was ghoulified, went feral, and murdered his family. Pretty dark, and it showed how truly awful the early days of the apocolypse were. The weapon you find, however, is the dumbest thing ever made. It is the Experimental MIRV(emphasis on the mental). It fires 8 mininukes at once, dealing up to 12000 damage and often killing the player in the process. That quest is one of the most satisfying in the game to complete, yet grants no xp, new dialogue, achievements or anything, just a harrowing story and a stupidly overpowered and impractical weapon.
Overpowered? Yes. Impractical? Yes. Awesome? Hell yes.
The first quest of Morrowind, returning Fargoth's ring, is still one of my favorites. It isn't labeled as a quest, and you don't know you're doing it (the first time), but it instantly made the world and people in it feel more real.
The E-MIRV is still the best thing ever, despite there being only 40 or so mininukes in total in the Capital Waste... And the normal fatman kills the player a lot of the time.. But what's as satisfying as atomizing everyone at Tennpenny towers?
Back in 1999, EverQuest had neither a questlog nor any maps at all. Everything had to be tracked by the player, most often in a journal or binder. And players drew maps themselves that they shared with each other online. And that was cool.
Too often games these days want to hold the player's hand. Imagine you design a jigsaw puzzle like the ones we used to assemble as kids. Then you think hey, this might be too difficult. So you make it so the puzzle assembles itself. Not only is that more work for you, but it cheapens the puzzle so it's not even fun to figure out anymore.
I'm not saying we should do away with maps or questlogs. But come on, let the player make their own mistakes and choices. MMOs are only 50% about the game, the other 50% is the players interacting with it and each other.
Fallout 3 and New Vegas were some of the few games that I 'loved' exploring. Whenever I found a Vault I'd dive right in just to see what kind of freaky experimentation or story went on within its depths. It led to some of the most disturbing gaming moments of many years. Like the Gary Vault and the one with the hallucinatory gas that you don't realize you are breathing till you are neck deep in the place.
Okay, new idea - how about the player gets given a camera, and when they find something out of place, like a dead body in the woods, or a giant gnarled tree, the player has to take a picture and show it to the right person - the dead body to a policeman, which leads to a quest about finding where their family lives and tell them they died, or the tree to a guild hall, who open up a quest about discovering the giant monster that destroyed the tree through it's other acts of destruction and showing them to a detective, where you later will find the monster and have to defeat it. I don't know, but I feel like a camera in an MMO could lead to some interesting quests that make the world feel alive.
+DiscoClam They have a horror game with this.
+DiscoClam Reminds me a bit of the camera Easter eggs in Zelda: Majora's Mask
They actually touched upon that a little in the Wind Waker, but not to the extent that you describe. That'd be a cool quest design!
and Disco Clam is hired
Punk Blooky so basically with the use of the camera from bioshock but with quests in an mmo?
I kind of liked the "Blood on the Ice" quest from Skyrim. If you follow the quest arrows and just do what the NPC's tell you, you finish the quest, but get the "bad ending". On the other hand, if you actually recognize the mysterious amulet you picked up and talk to the supposed prime suspect before arresting him, you get a chance to do things the right way. In a game where plenty of quests boil down to "follow the arrow", it was a really refreshing change of pace.
I would like if the quest just hint you what to do more than point you where to go and drag your nose around. Lot of games in this era really took an easy way out.
I actually got that quest yesterday and I can't complete it because I accidentally went out of order. Just going near the victim's house made an objective pop up to gain access to the house. So I get the key from her (the victim's) mother (I think it was her mother) and go inside and investigate the house. I find the amulet that you're talking about.
Now, I guess I was supposed to talk to the steward of Windhelm first and he gives me like honorary detective status. Because after I talked to him I got an objective to investigate the victim. Only problem with that is she's sealed in an un-open-able stone coffin.
I realize it's my fault and I'm stupid. My latest save (other than the autosaves) was from about nine hours before, playtime-wise and I didn't want to have to play those nine hours over again.
So, while I agree that quests like these are fun and a nice change of pace, you have to take into account idiots like me who fuck them up and can't complete them because we went too much out of order.
You can stop reading here, but in case you're wondering...
Why did I just get it yesterday? Well I got the Legendary Edition of Skyrim on Steam for like $20.00 a few months ago and I've sort of just been picking at it since then. My first, personal, main objective was to find all the dungeons/towns etc. and I finished doing that three days ago.
I did quite a few side missions while I was running around exploring but now that I've found most of the areas, (there are probably a couple that I missed, I'm pretty sure I didn't but) I'm just cleaning up the scraps before continuing the main story line.
@@FreedomFighterEx the new assassins creed odyssey has a more specifically for that
Some of Runescape's quests were pretty unique back when I played. It had the standards, but then it had some that were very lore-intensive for a specific character or group of characters. It was what shaped my expectations of MMO's, but I've since become more of a Minecraft or Civ player.
Runsecape's quests have only gotten better over the years. They even have a task system similar to the one talked about in the video. Though the game has changed a lot, it still might be worthwhile for you to give Runescape a second chance.
Runescape quest were always one of the more better quest design, it was really immersive and felt like you were a character- a person in the game. It's amazing.
This channels video game portion produces excellent videos. I'm happy that there's still good content on TH-cam
IKR
The rest of it is pretty good too, in my experience.
Arciel eleven *channel’s
I am that guy
6 years later this still holds true. Theres always a light in the dark
Pretty sure that "level up without dying" achievement was done first in the original Guild Wars. It awarded the Survivor title. Making it to level cap without dying once became a pretty major deal among some players, at least back in my day. And you could display a monument to that title (and others) in a physical location in the game to earn points that unlocked cosmetic bonuses in Guild Wars 2.
Elder Scrolls Online has the most immersive questing / leveling experience I've felt so far. The mere fact that it's part of a living story, everything voice-acted etc. already helps a long way... Then add treasure maps, puzzles, riddles... and it becomes awesome.
The only thing about that quest though, is how you have to look up information outside of the game in order to solve it. The problem with that, is that it encourages some gamers like me to just say "screw this, the hints cannot be figured out with information in the game, time for a GUIDE!" and then spoil the entire thing. The fact is every clue has to be solvable within the game for it to really be immersive or interesting. If all of the information is in the game, the player is far less likely to use a walkthrough and far more likely to actually solve it legitimately. When a quest requires a guide or even just information out of the game, it's called a "Guide dang it!". Not everyone reads the bible :/. It's the main thing that, honestly, drove me away from the game. I like solving quests in game with information acquired in the game. And the moment I have to open up a web browser to look up anything is the moment immersion is ruined for me.
+LaughingAlex I'm the same way. If it can be solved in game, I try my best to do so but if I have to go to the net, I just go to the guide.
+LaughingAlex In Secret World you still solve the quests in the game, via you're in game browser (you could say your characters smartphone) since the game is our world in the near future twisted by conspiracies etc, all the details are the same. So when you have a quest like this you can pop open you're smartphone and google a way in game. True that sometimes the quests can go from fairly simple to omfg wtf is this shit, but still i never had more fun in any MMO game when questing than in Secret World. By making the world part of the quest, and requiring player to actually read the quest find the context and think about it you can give much more immersion. If you want to play an mmo to just blast through all levels instead of enjoying it through all levels it's wrong IMO.
That's a big problem with many current MMO's that they just make lvling a chore that you have to do in order to get to the end game content, that's why secret world shines so much and rewards those who actually care about the game world. Ofc you can just pop a guide to every quest you find, but that'll only cause you to get bored with the game, because when you solve the quest yourself it gives you soo much more joy than those empty Xp and cash numbers after turning it in.
Your still using a browser and looking things up though. :P
But the difference is the world you are playing is our world so the Internet and past up to this point is the same. Thanks to this world setting it doesn't break immersion even though you are googling stuff.
It's not about immersion, it's about the fact that I still had to look online for the answers to the riddles, as the game flat out tells you to. So it just makes me say "well Guide DANG it, I just as well use a walk through!". Because the game didn't include the clues in the game. Its instead breaking the fourth wall and saying "use a guide".
7:14 James the _undeated_? Well, that's an impressive title!
The best part is you can keep that title even if you die constantly after you get it.
This was a great episode. Quests are something I could really get behind. Thank you.
I was absolutely floored when I learned some MMOs had quests be just "kill X things". I've played RuneScape for 18 years (never touched any other MMO) and the quests there are all lore-intensive. Some more than others (*cough*Clock Tower*cough*), but you learn about the world as you quest.
How did anyone figure out the quest?
By thinking things through and caring about the game enough to invest in it?
I passed it, I suppose I just care too much about the world I'm in.
+Vizthex I mean, ''the arms of time'' is all good, but almost noone has any clue about that bible reference lol
notoriouswhitemoth Yeah I suppose it's all about what mindset you go in with, if you know you could get references like these, I think I'd piece it together aswell
+Vizthex There are a metric CRAPTON of quests like that in TSW. I remember one quest that had you track down a morse code transmission... which then tasked you... Yes... you the player... not you the avatar.... to decode it.
I was lucky enough to have a father who did that kind of thing in his ye olde military days...I got him to help me decode it & he actually had a good time with it. XD
*****
uh...sure...wutevs u say
This has got to be one of the best videos Extra Credits has ever done. After watching both parts to this little series, I feel like I understand the design of MMO quests on a level I didn't even know existed. Fantastic work! I'll be referencing this video a LOT in the future. Thanks so much!
Again, this would have been a perfect time to talk about Runescape. Some of the biggest quests they have out are the steeped in lore and the combat has a puzzle aspect to it. I'll take the example of The World Wakes, a really big quest that started a whole new canonical age (a period of time that is differentiated by a large event during or at the beginning of said age), this one being the sixth. I won't be spoiling anything because literally everyone in the game knows about it because of how Jagex basically told everyone that it happened through events and other quests. But basically, the most powerful God that is normally asleep and keeping all the other, more dangerous Gods out, is killed. The implications of that are massive and you really need to play the game and do a ton of other quests in order to get it, it makes you WANT to do those other quests if you haven't already.
My only problem with Runescape is with Jagex. Runescape in an of itself used to be excellent
There's probably a dozen or more good examples that can be used. You can only use one so they picked this one.
Danjal Veskandar That's a fair enough point, but Runescape is one of the few examples of a (at least partly) F2P game that does quests that aren't just grinding.
Not to mention that the same quest has a puzzle that you can succeed/fail at to various degrees, with success making later parts easier, and total failure permanently killing off a certain npc.
Oh my God thank you. I have a Quest Cape on RuneScape simply because the quests are that amazing. There's so much storyline and lore.
Guild Wars 2 has actually done some of what your talking about, you don't get "quests" in towns you find them by exploring the world which is NOT shown to you until you actualy explore the area, until then its covered in like a "fog of war" type thing on the mini/main map of the world. Not to mention a lot of the "tasks" can be completed multiple ways (aka most quests/tasks have a "kill mobs" part, but it can be completed with say, watering plants, or finding lost pets, chopping down trees, ect, ect) and the major towns are safe spots, but there are no quests givers there, only an exploration option to gain some quick XP, find more "fast travle" spots, Points of intrest, and generaly gain more "world completion" points from said town. I cant understand why GW2 got so much hate, I got the game THE DAY IT CAME OUT and Im still in love with it simple due to the fact that while there is some grinding to it, it never really feels like a grind unless you always go for the "kill mobs" option of a quest(which might I add awards LESS XP for it most of the time)
not to mention how many "events" happen around the game's world wich give you bonus XP/game currency depending on how much work you put into aiding the npc/stopping the enemy/ect.
there is also the fact that every month or 2 there is new content, and I don't mean "new textures" or "new re-balance patch" I mean one month the Flame Legion and Dredge team up to take over the black citadel, then the next Scarlet is on a rampage in Lions Arch(a town that almost everyone in the game enjoys hanging in, which in turn pisses us off at scarlet far more then if she attacked Holberack or the Rata Sum and makes killing her ssssssooooo much more meaning full)
In LOTRO I reached Lv20 without dying for EVERY class. If my character died before 20, they were deleted. I only deleted my original character.
Had a really close call with my Elf Archer one time, it had 2 HP at the end of battle. Man I was nervous during that battle.
Ooooh, before I finish the video, I was going to bring up the obvious fact that many people, when presented with confusing or very lengthy quests, simply look up playthroughs or guides giving them all the answers they need to simply finish the quest and move on. I know if I were to be presented with that church quest, I would simply view it as being atypically complicated, and therefore, go online to find how to do the whole thing.
It should be noted, that in The Secret World, that those quests literally have their own category called "Investigation"s with a different color quest icon and all. So you can totally avoid them if preferred.
It is satisfying working through a large portion of the quest without a guide, though using a guide is pretty common for the harder parts.
Yeah, and that's partially why I feel MMOs are struggling so hard. You feel pressured by the people around you in a very indirect but very powerful way. If you're having trouble and struggling you're seen as a noob and written off :/ It's a race of efficiency and you'll be left in the dust if you don't look up shit or know what you're doing. It's part of the reason why I strongly prefer singleplayer games now unless their very nature is the competition.
I feel like playing with a group of friends or people who essentially won't judge you is required to play any MMO now.
Yeah that's sort of the problem with lore quests. In the game Ni No Kuni you have several side quests that require you to read and decode the ingame language to figure out the answer.
I could not really do that. Translating it directly I accomplished but arranging the letters to form a logical word was far too much a hassle. So I just looked it up.
A lot of people would just look it up you'd have to be crazy into the game and or exceedingly clever and stubborn to do otherwise.
I have a good task idea. There could be a simple town, but it is very secure. You want to get into the town, but you need to find a way to get around the guards. There would be multiple ways to do this. You could bribe the guards, but it takes a LOT of money. You could kill the guards, but there are too many to kill in hand to hand combat, so you'd need to assassinate each one, you could also ask some NPCs to help, ( you can ask about the town using a certain command) who might give some info about which guards are where at any point in time, or help you by helping you go incognito, or finally, work through a area of a dungeon that was useless to the player before, but has a secret passage to multiple parts of the world if you figure out how to use a scroll in the dungeon, which would give that place more meaning as an actual place in the lore of the world, instead of just a dungeon.
What does that stand for?
I think my most memorable "quest" was from playing Metal Gear Solid: Twin Snakes. I got stuck on the part where I need to get Meryl's frequency and I had to find it on the back of a box. I had to go through every damn box in the area and couldn't find it. Wasn't until months later I was organizing my game shelf and I looked on the back of the package, upset on how hard it was to find, just to then suddenly notice it in one of the screen shots.
I know this might have nothing to do with MMOs, but I strongly feel this is one of the strong points of one of my most beloved games ever: Arma... yes that clunky, unfinished game for mil-sim lovers that make them hate it for its arcadey elements.
In Arma, at least in my case, it was never "Oh great, more enemies to kill in an area... wonderful". It was more a case of "Shit, I need to think this through, plan my movements". Each firefight in Arma is a new experience in it by itself. Enemies may act in ways that they didnt before, you may die prematurely or advance further, you may have allied support, enemy reinforcements...
What Im trying to say is that, in a game like Arma, the most mind-numbing "task" is always in some way different than before, even if you try to replay it in the same fashion, "something" will change your experience. And Im not talking about just MP. The game is just as open in SP.
... Dont know why I wanted to write that, but there you go
Inundation of quests is one of my biggest hangups with Skryim
Yeah this series is just pointing out everything wrong with Skyrim to me
Skryim is the worst game ever. try Skyrim.
This got me thinking about Vampire: The Masquerade Bloodlines quests...
A) Now I feel like I have to play Secret World, and
B) This reminds me of the exploration bonuses in Guild Wars 2. Maybe the most fun I had with that game was trying to get on top of mountains. Reminded me of Morrowind in that way.
you know I never thought of it before but a game I used to play called runescape (and honestly still play occasionally) has apparently good quest design, it's unlike quests in any other mmo, in that they're very rarely kill quests (unless its on main baddie) and rarely ever fetch quests (excluding one that is a series of fetch quests for teh lulz) the quests actually drive their own individual storylines.
Warlance You'll notice also that there are a number of ways that Runescape implements a task system. Aside from the story-driven quests, it also features a skill dedicated to pushing a player through the grind (the Slayer skill, which can be summed up as "Doing 20 Bear Ass Quests") AND a set of achievements for doing various things in the course of the game (anything from "Find the highest point in a city" to "Earn a pet through a boss rush and set it against a dragon the size of a city.")
I definitely recommend Runescape to anyone looking for an MMO, but I can also say that there are a number of flaws to the game and the community surrounding it which may quickly drive players off. I'd offer more information in that regard, but anyone who wants to jump into Runescape will get a chance to see them.
This video has made me really think about they quests we used to make up in my old D&D group:
Usually there's some major storyline like "a monster is hunting people in town" or "Raiders are attacking carrravans between locations A and B" or "apparently that thing you were sent to steal is actually a powerful magic artifact and a multidimensional supervillian wants you dead for some unrelated reason."
The side-quests" are given in the form of "environment quests", or quests related to specific party members or the players more often than not will just decide to ignore the plot hooks and go cause trouble for soemone.
Usually what develops is the players stake out one town or city as their base of operations and then clear out all threats to the area while accruing enough money, favours and goodwill that they basically become the local sheriff/superhero.
Then at some point they get called up to the "Big Leagues" by some royal emissary, prophet, extraplanar creature, or get in some Big Bad's way.
The rest of the game is spent taking out ever bigger Big Bads until most of the players feel like tearing the sandcastle down and starting over.
I once even had a group of players that just up and quit being heroes one day and let "someone else" deal with a major global crisis while they focused on building a huge fortress where they could retire and train other heroes. We played out entire in-game YEARS dealing with construction, training, and near-continuous visits by Kings and Archmages begging the players for aid and advice as entire civilizations in my game-world collapsed from the aforesaid crisis...
...Then we started an Epic Campaign about the first class of graduates from said Hero Academy.
There's a REASON World of Warcraft has never been able to hold my interest for long...
The quests and tasks kind of remind me of Runescape. The quests in Runescape were usually actual quests where you had to solve riddles and puzzles in order to further yourself into the Lore of the game. Also later on they added Tasks which is pretty much the same as you mentioned in the vid. Little tasks than included killing and x amount of monsters, or cooking and x amount of fish, crafting an x amount of leather, mining an x amount of ore, etc..Also a lot of the quests would further your character into the game, and make them stronger. Making them worth doing. For example the F2P quest Dragon Slayer, enabled players to start equipting Rune Chest Plates. Or other members quests like Desert Treasure which opened up the horizens for magic spells and what not. I think this is very important and the newer MMOs still haven't figured it out.
What is also important is making quest locations visitable (if that's even a word) after you do the quest. A lot of MMOs are what I believe are called Theme Park MMOs. Where you go from point A, to point B, to Point C, and so on.. and rarely are any of the areas even worth revisiting. This is a major flaw because it causes large portions of the world to become obsolete. Ways to fix this is by making a resource needed for crafting or smithing exclusive to that area. So like a mob that drops a specific pelt, and a specific plant needed for making a stronger potion. I'm not saying to make every area have pure exclusive items but at least a couple so players end up coming back. Not only that but make landmarks that are worth revisiting. For example in Runescape there would be maybe a mine that maybe had an ore more abundantly than other areas, or a forest with trees that are more abundant than other areas. Or maybe a more convient stove or furnace that would make cooking/smelting trips shorter.
Or making maybe a mini game or an exclusive PVP/PVE area that would have revisitbility. Like for PVP an exlusive arena, or fighting ground that might even have exclusive rewards in that specific area. Or a boss that drops a specific item or is just challenging, and is worth fighting again. Or a minigame like ClanWars (which was where you could go to the White Portal and it would be a safe-zone free for all, the Red Portal where it would be an items dropped on Death free for all, or the Purple Portal you could host/join a clanwar). Or Fist of Guthix where it was kind of like a see how long it you could survive with only a stone (aka hiding or just going to the hot spot that gave more point but left you vurnerable) The minigames would also sometime provide you with items so it had unlimited replayability and you didn't have to go out are refill your items.
I used Runescape as my main example because it's the MMO I've spent the most time on and now that I'm starting to explore other MMOs I realize a lot of the features that Runescape had, I took for granted, and even though it's an old MMO I believe it could teach a lot of the newer companies how to create a successful, everlasting, self-sufficient world. Of course it had it's flaws which is one of the reasons I no longer play it.
I remember part of a side quest in SWTOR where you have to summon a beast by activating five runes in the order that they are referred to in the Sith code. I thought that was a pretty cool way of integrating the game's lore into a quest.
Very much appreciated the "Dear Sister" reference. You all have great Easter eggs in general, and I like your sense of humor.
Interestingly enough, I think this concept can be applied to real life. Often times, we just see our lives as moving one place to another, sort of like "work, eat, sleep, repeat". Just like it's wrong to create quests and see the game world in such a singular fashion, I think it hurts us to think of our environment and life in that way.
Can you imagine what kind of people we could meet, unique quirks about our home town, stories and items we could discover in our world? If we explored our world like we do in good mmorpgs and did create/did "better" quests, I think our experiences in life could feel more enriched, more meaningful and, in turn, more productive.
Wow, it makes me want to explore my community and have fun adventures instead of just going from point A (home) to point B (work) and back everyday.
This is a great reminder to treat your life like an adventure. Be productive, have a purpose and have fun adventures along the way.
I can't help but notice that undefeated was spelled "undeated" in the art.
I think one major point that needs to be remembered here is that in TSW every quest end point also will usually have a new quest within sight. Ao that you never have to do the return to town stuff that Is so annoying. Its one of the most clever design choices of the game.
Borderlands 2 has an achievement system that is similar to that. It encourages you to play and explore for a minor permanent bonus. It's one of the reasons I'm STILL playing Borderlands 2.
Exactly, though the quests themselves in that game were nothing to be smiling about, unfortunately so.
shunkwugga The thing is, giving them character by ways is not enough if the mission is still boring.
Meaning it still is lazy mission design even if you add a character to mix it up. Mix it up? That is hardly mixing it up.
It is just wording missions differently and expecting no one noticing it. I'd much rather have innovation done to them, in forms of actually truly mixing things up.
Let's say, you do this but as a consequence something happens. Or you have a timer to it, or anything really but not just differently written same old mission we've seen before.
Innovation and creativity is what we are looking for here, not good writing.
I would agree with what you are saying. I really felt that the Witcher 3 did all of this. I could run into a random npc and get a quest, I could grab a random item/book and grab a quest.
I wish more rpg's did this. I also liked how most of the quests in the game were better than most stories in the games we play today.
Hey guys. Just so you know, The Secret World also has "tasks" for nearly every monster. Once you complete it, you get a title, exp, and sometimes even free ingame clothing. :)
One related topic I'd love to see is how to do side quests in single player RPGs without breaking immersion. The general setup of a lot of RPGs is that main storyline takes up about 50% of the game and the sidequests take up the remaining half. That's fine, but the quests can't just involve collecting twenty basilisk hides while some demon lord is destroying the world. Side quests don't necessarily have to tie into the main plot, but there should be a reason that the hero is willing to invest time and effort into them.
I'm kind of experiencing this with Dragon Age: Inquisition. The side quests actually are fun and well designed, but it feels like the Inquisitor is just running around in the wilderness doing errands for every random stranger she sees. The more I think about it, the more I like Mass Effect's side quests. Every mission you went on had a clear purpose that tied in with the story: either it was a main quest, a companion quest, or you're following a lead that can give you a slight advantage (ie. capturing a Cerberus starport, which means you'll have Cerberus fighter craft to use against the Reapers). While there were certainly favours-for-strangers quests, you didn't have to go out of your way to do them; it was more like, "hey, did you happen to find any interesting intel while you were clearing that mercenary camp out? Great! Here are some credits for your efforts"
I realise that there are constraints. ME2 and 3 didn't really let you go off and explore (ME1 kind of did, if you count those Mako expeditions), which meant that you couldn't just go off the beaten path and stumble upon a side quest. DA:I, on the other hand, emphasizes exploration, and it did so by filling every area up with quest givers. To make DA:I side quests more like ME2 and ME3's, you wouldn't be able to have those massive areas and the exploration aspect would have to be de-emphasised; something that probably wouldn't sit well with people who enjoy taking in the scenery.
+Phlebas This is one of the reasons why people found the WoW expansion Wrath of the Lich King so epic. Every quest you did actually felt like it was the next stepping stone to confronting the Lich King. Every medial task eventually revolved around doing _something_ to help the war effort, even if it was collecting 8 of some plant in some area to be used to heal soldiers wounded in battle, fighting the Scourge. You were still helping your faction reach the end goal.
And in Wrath of the Lich King, you always knew where the end was going to be. Everyone know eventually that they would have to storm Icecrown Citadel and fight the Lich King at his throne. This is where other expansions like Cataclysm fell short, because while you had a sense of who the bad guys were, you didn't really know how it was going to end. In Cataclysm, you knew you were going to have to fight Deathwing eventually, but there just wasn't a build up to that battle that made it feel epic. You always felt like you were just pissing around the new zone until end game then battling through a few loosely tied dungeons and raids before killing Deathwing. There was no seat-of-power that you were pushing toward.
This is why I feel like big bads should always try to have an established lair or central headquarters. When the player knows WHERE their end goal lies, it helps put them in a better direction to actually care about the path to it, rather than wandering confused, killing stuff until you level up.
+Kaitlyn Amanda WotLK is definitely the pinnacle achievement to date of the theme-park, MMO-on-rails genre. Most of the people who played through that period loved it. The problem is: what do you do once the Big Bad of your world is dead? WotLK was really the natural end of the ride. But nobody wants to just say "ok, that was fun, time to shut down the servers." (I would also say there was a lot of content not particularly related to the Lich King: Ulduar, Nexus/Oculus/Eye and Utgarde Keep were all well grounded in Northrend but had little to do with the Lich King.)
turning your entire town into a scavenger hunt that includes elements from the real-world? (the Bible) GENIOUS.
The Secret World is fairly ridiculous in this sense, and the first area of the game is incredibly well-crafted. There are NPCs around, their stories tie together, there are all sorts of things going on, a disturbed town, people distributed around, mysteries both modern and ancient which tie into what is going on in the world... it is just a gloriously well-made place, and full of very interesting quests.
The main problem with The Secret World is that, like all MMOs, combat is kind of boring. The big attraction of the game is the story - every major quest is associated with a character with a unique personality, who also has other things to talk about to fill you in on the world - and the investigation quests, the quests which are purely about solving puzzles (though some non-investigation quests have aspects of such) are the best quests I've played in any game of its kind. They are really, really hard in some cases, but some of them are completely genius (though some are a bit tedious, like the one where you have to decipher Morse code - it is cool that you do it, but deciphering Morse code is a lot of busy work). The combination of the characters and the world is very engrossing, and you feel like you're doing interesting things.
Unfortunately, the rest of the game is not as polished as the first three zones, and PvP in the game feels completely inappropriate to the tone of the setting.
one of the quest in The Secret World actually makes you decipher morse code
One of the quests in TSW actually made me sit down for 30 minutes and learn musical scales in order to progress through one section. Another had me translating Hebrew. After TSW, it's pretty impossible to go back to games that only offer "kill 10 goblins, then come all the way back to town" a thousand times...
DeusVerve what if you are not baptist
Minor spelling error: "James the Undeated" instead of Undefeated.
Really good points overall, I think these kinds of quests would be an absolute gem to have in a game. What's more, almost any game could pull it off, lore and setting is pretty inconsequential to this type of quest giving, it's just that people ended up trying to churn quests out faster because it gave the illusion of "more content".
I'm pretty sure that LOTRO tasks really just encourage grinding.
I think The Elder Scrolls Online does quests pretty well for an MMO. I remember looking around Stros Mkai looking for a hidden treasure by following the clues of finding "a finger carved in stone that points you trough the broken ship" or something like that. But not only that, the characters and story of the main quest zones are very interesting and you can really get invested into the stories which also expand the lore.
During this whole video, everything they kept mentioning made me think, "Didn't Guild Wars 2 do something similar or better than that?"
Either they didn't feel that the way GW2 did things was different enough from the stuff they were talking and didn't mention it or I've just been playing GW2 too much and my overall opinion has become jaded (i.e. I'm becoming a fanboy... and if that is true I need to go scrub myself because I really don't want that to happen :S).
No, I was thinking the exact same thing! Guild Wars 2 has a Heart system that feels holistic and the way events pop up can break up the pace of the grinding. Not to mention that since you're rewarded for even zones you outlevel, map completion never feels like a waste of time. It's a great game and I was going to mention it if you hadn't.
I was thinking the same so you're not alone here. I'm now so used to the way the hearts work that I can't stand games with NPCs with exclamation points over their heads and quest logs.
Andreanne Lamothe
Where I agree that GW2 is doing something a bit different doing "AoE" style quests, I think they're focused more on how involved players are with the quest lore, and how engaged they feel when exploring the world, which can be boiled down to taste.
They also probably haven't played GW2, so it may be they just didn't put it at the forefront of their mind. A LOT of people like The Secret World as much those of us who play GW2 like GW2.
Orzene Tyranni Well they also were talking about how restrictive a central area hub can be and how quest design can either encourage or discourage exploration. GW2 does a pretty good job of encouraging exploration or not making the player feel obligated to go anywhere they don't feel like going.
Yes GW2 improved the old quest system with theiry events that pop up all over the map, that give you new tasks to complete but many many events are still a kill-grind. Defend this town against the centaurs by killing most of them until their moral fades. Invade the enemy camp and kill their leader. But this is still not really meaningful in the world as the developers promised it to be. They said: "If you don't defend the town it will be lost to the players and you can't interact with any of the people in this town since they will be dead." What really happens is: "Oh no the centaurs killed everyone! Well, let's wait 5 minutes for the event to pop up in which i can defeat them and everything will be okay again." I think this is just another face of the old "kill everyone"-quests.
Also, the hearts are really just another symbol for the WoW-exclamation mark.
Instead of "kill 20 orcs" they have a bar you have to fill up by killing enemies, or collecting pieces of a certain machine or something.
Please don't get me wrong, i enjoyed many many hours of GW2, but i think it's not as different as many say it is from other MMOs.
I really like Guild Wars 2's renown quest system, aka heart quests. Half the time you might not even realize you're doing a quest, because they're often actions in an area that just seem logical to take. Not only that, but most of them can be resolved either by combat or through non-combat means. Centaurs laying siege to a keep? You can either fight them off yourself, OR, help patch up the walls, run ammunition to the defenders, steal the centaurs' battle plans and bring them back to the commander, all sorts of things without raising a weapon.
Possible Spoiler Warning for The Secret World
----------------------------
One of my favorite quests had me trying to communicate with the deceased, eventually I was led to a van that had run off the road and its lights were flashing and stuff was broken and everything, it looked like a disaster - as I investigated further I noticed that there was a definite pattern to the flashing headlights, and I got the ghostly message via morse code. It made me feel so smart for figuring it out, that game was awesome.
Correction; that game IS awesome :)
I've found in a few games, especially where there are alot of quests, that they start to break immersion. Skyrim for instance; a villager asks you to go get something, and you look at the map and it's on the other side of the world. Random villager guy never would've gone there. It's better when the quests fit the profile.
And don't even get me started on the, "You can be the leader of every single guild in the entire world and none of them will notice you're their sworn enemy."
This should be applied to CoD/BF too. Now everything is grinding to get better weapons, perks or accessories.
One of my favorite quests from WoW was the Eel quest from Cataclysm. If you kill any random eel you get a quest from your character encouraging you to kill many eels because "They're terrible"
Runescape quests are another example of good quest design. There are only quests with intricate storyline. Take, for example, the King Arthur quests. You actually end up becoming a part of the legend. You get to fight morgan le faye's nephew, meet the fisher king, and locate a magic whistle. I know i didnt explqin it correctly, but can any runescape fans reply with a better example? Thanks.
OK, here is the entire quest series.
First, you have to save Merlin from a Crystal.
Second, you have to go locate Galahad and find the Fisher Kingdom by locating the 6 mysterious statues and seeing where they connect and bring Sir Percival (after saving him from some goblins) back to the kingdom where he becomes king and hands you the Holy Grail.
Third, Arthur and his Knights are captured, and you have to go save them by defeating Morgan Le Faye's nephew and defeating the Sinclair family from another quest.
Additionally, you find out later on King Lathus of Ardougne hates the knights and is preparing something against them (within Plague's End).
Cook's assistant and sheep shearer were way too intensive for me.
i liked the quest meeting history and its a good example of how quests should be made. for those who don't know, the point of this quest is to gather items to put in a museum to showcase the history of Gilinor (or the Runescape universe). this isn't your run-of-the-mill fetch quest. you end up finding a magic key that let's you travel back in time to the time where the very first humans arrived in Gilinor. you can use the key that brought you here to travel between two different points in early history,as well as back to the present. you are able to do things in the earlier past to influence the later past to help the first family survive, all the while documenting this experience. that document ends up in the museum, telling the story of the first family of gilinor, and the mysterious stranger (you) that helped them in time of trouble
Jeremy DeRuiter
Yes I remember Meeting History, I enjoyed that quest a lot. When pvp world servers were available I thought it would be funny to lure someone to fight me at one of the key locations and then in the middle of the fight use the key to escape into the past. Meaningless and stupid and I never did it, but I thought about it.
They didn't at the time, then later pvp worlds were removed. That might have changed by now though idk.
And now you have convinced me, a complete Tolkien fan who has been wary of the MMO, to give LOTR Online a try.
You do good work.
Clearly the makers of Destiny didn't watch this video.
[Apologies to those who don't like rezzed posts ...]
I really loved the mission design in The Secret World, but I think it did need one addition to the investigation missions: a hints system. They do give you an in game browser, which is great, but had a couple of flaws. One was that the search results almost always came up with walkthroughs at the top ... which is not the same as a hint. The other is that sometimes you found things that you weren't sure had anything to do with the mission. I had that happen with the white ravens quest. I found a video from a band called the White Ravens and the locations looked like hints to locations in the game ... but it all turned out to be my own personal red herring. The upside was that it led to some great immersion ... but at the cost of me just getting frustrated and looking up the solution.
I think there is a great in-game solution they could use to do hints. I mean, you're supposed to be doing these missions for a secret society ... what if you could call them up and request help with a quest? The game could use some metrics to tell how far you made it on your own (maybe certain things that you found and clicked on ... or where you'd been) and use that to give you a hint to help you get over the hump where you're stuck. There could be a delay from the time of request to the time that they call you back. That time could increase with more hint requests, and decrease over time. The advantage to me is that it's a diagetic solution that doesn't feel like "cheating". In addition, it makes it would make you feel like you really are part of a secret society ... like this is a two way street and not just a one way mission spigot.
YES, YES, YES. I SAW THAT HOMESTUCK REFERENCE. SOMEONE KNOWS ABOUT HOMESTUCK (Or knows the reference)
I remember doing this quest during the Secret World Beta. I actually found it quite nice that a quest made me think about the world of the game and even my own. I did not ever complete the quest, but the time I spent with the beta was fun. I have not touched the game since it went out of beta. Perhaps now is about time I give it a visit.
I play a lot of The Old Republic and I have run into this as well. Most of the quests are kill quests and fetch quests, but I don't really mind at all because I enjoy the subject material. It's much more of a single player mmo anyway.
+Logan Hollis yeah, the problem is, that the fully voiced quests are mostly just go there and kill 10 of these...you could say that they actually wasted this powerfull and expensive tool for story telling on those shitty kill quests, so that the real story telling gets drowned in unimportant NPC rambling.
Raussl I don't really care what the quests are because I play for the story.
TSW also has some of the best named items I've ever seen. Nearly every single piece of dungeon loot has some kind of story behind it. The Hell dungeons specifically have some fantastic item names, seriously, google the names and you will find all kinds of extra lore.
Eg: Melchom's Writ. The flavor text is "The paymaster knows to never be late when one holds the coins of demons." Google Melchom and you find out that he was the paymaster of Hell.
Vindictus (or Mabinogi Heroes) had some fun to be found in titles. The quests in it weren't all that amazing from what I remember, but there were a lot of smaller tasks and titles associated with them. I proudly presented myself as "Kobold Archer Nemesis" for killing a ridiculous amount of them with throwing spears. I never saw anyone else using that title, so it really made me feel special.
The titles in that game were actually really interesting, now that I think about it. You could get titles from kicking, grabbing and using the varied secondary weapons (like throwing spears) on enemies, but not always with every method for every enemy. So it encouraged to try every different thing you could do to try to defeat every new opponent to find out if there was a title available for it because the game would tell if you started making progress to a new, previously undiscovered title. Doing this would also possibly lead to discovering what would be the most effective method in fighting an enemy.
Isvoor yep. I remember when I found out about the kicking one and went through like 3 missions by just kicking. Best. Title. Ever.
I think that you missed an opportunity here to discuss the quest design of Runescape, which in itself has several problems to be sure, but it has one of the best collection of story-driven quests i've seen.
This really opened my eyes, I used to play Borderlands 1 & 2... way more than I should. But their quest design is like that of an mmo. although it's an Rpg and a First person shooter, melded together. Hold on to your butts, this is gonna be long.
Starting off with Borderlands 1, you always had the option of doing sidequests to level up, each quest had intro text to give you something to care about if you decided to... but the main missions would usually trigger one of the characters talking and commenting on something you just did. So let's say, you complete one of the early story missions and unlock the car station, as you jump over a nearby ramp, the mechanic will comment on it.
The game also had little tasks you could do, though they were just experience lumps, Kill x amount of enemies with a certain weapon, fire x number of bullets, explore this zone, make it so your car doesn't land for 5 seconds... the list goes on. And as you gained experience to level your character with quests and tasks, it also leveled up your proficiency with a gun type, increasing the damage or fire rate slightly. which in turn, makes you want to complete the tasks and grind. And these bonuses only applied for that character
Borderlands 2 on the other hand, replaced this with an interesting approach. They added more tasks and gave the tasks more meaning but ripped out proficiencies. Whereas killing 25 bandits would normally give you 500xp, it now gave you a "badass rank" which would then accumulate until you reached a certain amount and you were rewarded with a token that you could only redeem on one of your many stats. need more melee damage? Sure! want your headshots to really sting? Go for it! but it gave you a reason to do things that while completely mundane or strange with a clear reward.
Even the quests were changed, when you selected a quest in your log, the "source" of the quest would give you a brief description as you moved toward the objective. This made side quests easier to care for because you didn't have to cut gameplay to know what you're supposed to be doing. BUT I will say that at one point during the game, you get flooded with quests which could serve as a daunting task to finish them all. But they all were somewhat interesting despite being mostly kill quests and gather missions.
**SPOILER EXAMPLE** The side mission where you have to hunt bullymongs because the quest giver doesn't like the names, the manner in which you have to interact with them changes as the names visibly change above their heads. Bullymong to primal beasts and such.
***** They are first person shooters in which you level up and collect gear like an RPG. You have skill trees have meaning and weight like an RPG. But the core gameplay is that of a shooter.
In a sense it could be classified as both genres. But gearbox, the company that made both games, sums it up on the back of Borderlands 1. "Borderlands is the first 4 player co-op Role Playing Shooter..."
It's worth a check if you want to see what i mean in regards to both the quest design and in this strange mixture of genres. I think they get as low as $10-20 for the game of the year edition on steam.
***** I wish you best of luck. May you enjoy your time in the borderlands and have fun whilst analyzing them.
***** Well, yes. Yes it is. It is a FPS in the fact that you are in First Person View and Shooting. Yet it has Character Advancement through RPG elements and a Story Structure like a Traditional RPG.
Genres can absolutely mix.
***** I'll have to look up the mixing genre episode, hadn't seen that one yet.
I want to really incorporate RPG into a Moba.
There would only be one Champion/Hero/Character... yourself. You'd start as a Tabala Rasa, a clean slate. Everyone would start with the exact same Stats, completely balanced.
You'd but Items, just like in DOTA2, LoL and Smite... but you'd ALSO buy your Skills. So you could completely customize your Abilities.
We'd have Q Abilities, W Abilities, E Abilities, Ultimate Abilities and Passives.
Most Q Abilities would be Damage or Direct Heal Abilities.
Most W Abilities would be Gap Closers and AoE Damage/Heals.
Most E Abilities would be Shields and Self Heals, and other Buffs.
However, there would be a small amount of each in everything (say you wanted to have Q, W and E all be Ranged Damage Skill Shots... that would be possible).
Ultimate Abilities would all be very powerful... some would be big stuns (solo or area) others huge damage (ranged and melee, Magic and Physical) while others would be Heals and Buffs.
Passives would help fine tune your build and would just be a layer that you wouldn't have to actively use.
The 'stronger' the Ability is considered, the more Currency it costs to unlock it. So you can jump out early with a weaker Ability, but you'll have an early advantage as you HAVE an Ability and your Enemy doesn't... he plays safe and waits and when he gets his Ability it's way better than yours, but now you have 2 or 3 Abilities to chain.
So far, all that is Standard Moba with the twist of having to In Match Buy your Abilities to 'Craft' your Role.
The RPG element would come in your Leveling to Max (for instance, 30 in LoL)... where you acquire Base Stat Boosts.
So you walk into Team Chat and people decide their Roles, and this time you draw 'Tank/Support/Initiate'... so something like a Leona or a Thresh, Braum or a Blitz, or Taric for LoL Fans.
Now you take your Base State Boosts to hit the Stats that need to be Boosted to make you a good Tank (HP, Armor, HP Regen... maybe Mana/Energy to be able to use more Abilities).
Also adding to the RPG is while you are Leveling yourself overall (again, the 1-30 in LoL) you have to Unlock/Buy the Abilities for you to use In Match.
You may focus on AP Range Damage because you want to be a Mage... and that's fine, but when you don't get your Role you will be wishing you had some variety. Of course WHEN you get your Role, you will be more well equipped than others as your Abilities will perfectly compliment your Role.
I would want some Abilities to be Unlocked due to certain Individual Achievements and others to be Unlocked due to Team Achievements and others to simply be 'passage of time' Achievements, like 'Congratulations, you earned Level 2... you have unlocked X Ability'.
I'd also have Multiple 'Clones' for the Player, so he can focus on putting those Base State Boosts that makes sense into say each of his 10 Clones (which he can Permanently Name, and Design the Look of with our Create-A-Champion Process).
So instead of a Champion Select at the beginning/draft, you would have a Champion Build.
We could still Ban, but we'd Ban Abilities... what 3 Abilities out of Hundreds do we want to keep out of this Match?
Anyways, just an idea I've had. No more restraints by what Champions are Available, you are free to build how ever you like.
The only thing that can be OP is how you combine your Build... no more 'Champion X is OP, NERFHAMMER!'.
***** Any thoughts would be welcomed. To be honest, the idea is in infancy and I don't have a Code/Design Team to actually start any real 'Game' work... it's all paper and pencil right now.
Thanks a ton for these videos, I was thinking about trying out RPG maker and this gave me some good ideas
There was a series of riddles like that in ESO where you look for a treasure chest. It was quite memorable. I still remember every part of the riddle.
Actually, when I think about it, pretty much every quest in ESO is quite interesting and immersive. Their quest always have multiple steps and you only get the reward at the very end.
I was hoping that you would talk about the Guild Wars 2 quest systematic as it makes the world feel very alive. The quests pop up organically and affect the state of the world as a whole.
Agreed. I love that, in GW2, you don't ever have some list of quests that you accrue other than your next main story quest. You just see whatever events are near you, and there are even many in-depth quests where you simply need to follow the clues in the world which eventually leads to a chest or an achievement. Like you said, it definitely make the world feel organic and helps to build the lore of the world around you.
My favorite TSW quest was "Signal Effect" which had 4 signal towers you had to interact with. They each listed off a bunch of data in different format (binary, hex, ASCII numbers, and I think Unicode). When you decoded each message you got 4 garbled messages. When you lined those garbled messages up, you realized they were each a fourth of the completed message, which was a puzzle that you had to solve. If you solved the puzzle and went to the right place on the map, you got a quest complete. Took me and my friends a solid four hours of collaboration to figure out.
One day you will have to tell us about Homestuck though.
I'm surprised they haven't yet.
In Cataclysm, in Grizzly Hills in Northrend, the primary Alliance quest chain was exceedingly cool. Your PC had to complete various ordinary kill quests and escort quests, pretty ho-hum stuff, plus few NPC fetch quests. But what made it different was that you were effectively engaging in diplomacy, brokering needed marriage. And just to cap it off, your character was the best man or bridesmaid at the wedding - and had to perform the original duty of the best man and bridesmaid: emergency bodyguard. By this point, I at least was so invested that my immediate reaction was "Oh, no! You are not wrecking this wedding!"
That sewer cap quest would have bothered me a ton; most of the time the orientation of a sewer cap depends on how the crew randomly put it back last time there was maintenance to be done. Even if the city planners were hard core Illuminati wishing to encode a message in the streets (why??), that message would only last a few years at most till one or more of the clues got rotated the wrong way. So I never would have looked at that triangle as an arrow, and instead I would just have been stuck there until I looked up spoilers and got mad.
Except right before that, the guy says "the sewers will point the way" or something like that. When laid out as it is in this video, it sounds incredibly arcane. I think most people could get through that quest if they gave it some effort, but it still felt like an achievement when I did it.
What you mentioned with The Secret World is a good way to let the players help each other.
"Dear sister,
Mmmmm whatcha saayyy"
this is why i liked the world explorer achievement in wow. first of all, no one told me to do it, i just did it because it sounded fun. as i got into it i started thinking about azeroth in new ways. the low level zones werent useless to me anymore i got to see a lot of places i hadnt been to. as a horde player, this introduced a lot of new challenges on me, as i had to learn the alliance ship routes, figure out where i could repair my gear or find the closest mail box if i needed to as i couldnt use the nearby flight points, and i had to sneak into a lot of places where i werent really meant to go. i bought a rifle to kite guards individually (this isnt something a warrior usually needs to do) and clear paths into more tightly guarded areas. a few times i went in with a large raid group of horde players, and other times i teamed up with my mage friend because his slow fall spell created shortcuts and back entrances to some areas. once i had to hide under a bridge to avoid being spotted by a group of alliance players, and when i realized my weapon was poking out i had to clear bag space on the fly to remove it. there isnt a single quest i remember better than this achievement, and it makes me wish more quests had unclear or unexpected solutions to them. the only contender is the Linken's sword questline. if youve read all this, look it up.
I really liked the quest designs in TSW, but I felt like after you got out of the starting area they tended to lose their creativity. But that first town, damn it was full of wonder! I still occasionally play TSW, but I'm getting near the end and the quests just don't seem to have the same "wondermunt" factor.
But yes, the quest described in this video was the one that really got me hooked. I'd never imagined that such detail could be incorporated. Then there's the quest where I had to download a Morse-Code translator on my phone and use it to figure out a clue.
mmos lose creativity after starter regions. Quest get less interesting and often dont even have meaningful story or special cutscenes etc.
I guess it's hard to keep up the same level of creativity throughout! Like Extra Credits said on one of their other videos "You have to ship at some point, you cant work on your game forever"
I'm betting something ridiculous like 70% of the time they spent making towns and quests was used on that first town, then they were like oh man this is taking forever to place such detail!
Mauro Tamm
I know of one that keeps the content consistent throughout most of the leveling, but I won't say the name because people here the name and start ranting. My point is that it can be done, not all mmos fade after starter regions. Now I'm not saying that they won't later fade in their design quality at some point though. Sometimes the quality is good up until you reach the end of the content that was created pre-launch.
More on quests please!!!!!!!!!!
That was so amazing but short and left me wanting more, only having just given a glimpse of what makes players like a quest.
Keep up the great work!!
I appreciate what TSW is trying to do with more out of the box quests, but the example you mentioned sounds more like crazy adventure game logic. If that was a puzzle in an adventure game, people would (rightfully) berate it for "how was I supposed to figure this out".
I said that with some Zelda games.
The game encourages you to google people and clues to figure it out, like names of historical figures and stuff like that. There's even a built in web browser for it. So it's definitely not crazy adventure game logic, you just have to stop for a moment and think about what to look for.
dragonbrad98
the problem with this is some people may be under educated or even not educated in the proper field related to said quest. i have encountered a few of the quests and was able to complete a few of them through looking online, but a lot of the rest was so far off of what i know in my head that i wouldnt have finished them without looking up a specific guide to the quest.
dragonbrad98 Of course, the problem with the fact that TSW wants you to Google stuff in game, and uses really obscure references is that you have to actively avoid spoilers. Every single puzzle quest I've ever tried in TSW had the first page or so of Google results be quest walkthroughs. And that's not Googling the quest name, just the quotes or names from the hints.
~Trying to start an argument~
I guess this correctly correlates to the education system in America and why it sucks.
In LotRO, I really liked the Titles associated with the tasks. With the way my mind works it was actually more rewarding for me to get the "Scourge of the Barrow Downs" or whatever Title than the minor bonuses. It gave the feeling that my character's accomplishments existed after I was done with the task.
And with all the titles you had available, you don't see 50 people in town using the same exact title (*cough*GW2DungeonMaster*cough*). It helped your character feel unique.
Gonna say, they put "James the Undeated".
Kind of a funny typo.
that "let me tell you about homestuck" at the beginning made me choke on my drink
No mention about Runescape quests? Those are some of the best in the industry.
+victor zeng Seriously. They're like miniature parts of Adventure games.
The World Wakes
Enough said you get a GOD and protector of the world killed
firekid88000
I guess that's not spoilery since it's a major part of the World Events.
yup plus it has been out for like 2 years
+victor zeng He has actually never referenced a game that did so many fucking things fantastically, quests, combat, skilling, lore that was formed over 15 years and that every high end players knows by heart and a world so beautifully crafted, the game was in all intents and purposes a fluke, it was so basic is style that it could fit an absurd amount of content seamlessly into the world while turning basic systems like combat pvp into a skilled game of chess and quick reflexes.
Wish I could had sunk some of the 10 years I played into WoW but being 8yo+ RuneScape was far more accessible and wallet friendly.
Sad to see the old boy crumble to its knees due to some poor decisions made by JaGex, sadly a lot of the people who quit wouldn't touch another MMORPG for the rest of their lives :\
This was a very good episode. It made me realize I should be thanking the whole team for their hard work and powerful insight.
Thanks, everyone who works on Extra Credits. :)
That Secret World quest sounds like more like a riddle or an oldschool adventure game puzzle.
Doesn't seem to fit the flow of regular MMOs, since you wouldn't be able to solve it without leaving the game.
However would like to see a different kind of MMO that went entirely in the puzzle direction, where players mostly discussed over the chat how to solve a problem, like a tabletop RPG. Doubt it would work though, sooner or later someone would just ruin it with gameFAQs
But you can. Secret World has an in-game browser with fake websites made to give clues about the areas you visit. Secondly, investigation missions are clearly marked so you know it's gonna require investigation. All of the invest missions are pretty difficult.
GameFAQs is still a thing?
BenRangel the problem with that is that there'd have to be many new puzzles or people would jsut figure it out and people would stop caring. imo, the closest thing to this i know of is probably fallen london; a sorta browsery game thing with puzzle ish elements. my whole problem with the secret world model is that nobody is going to care about the puzzles because they require effort that most people would consider wasted. i mean, don't get me wrong, puzzles are great, but how many people do you think will stand around and ask for the solution to the puzzle because they're lazy? contrast this with the other secret world thing he talked about (the highly leveled monster thing) and you get a thing that i think is much better: a puzzle with multiple solutions, maybe. unless it's much more straightforward than i give it credit for, you're probably going to find multiple ways to sneak around the mook, which will provide some needed variety to how you solve the quest. you might (jsut maybe) find people in chat going "what's the BEST WAY to do this quest" instead of "solution plz". speaking of, that's what gets me about enviromental quests too; at worst people are just going to see these as unneccesary walking filter ( unless you allow the player to fly there which is in and of itself a bad decision (because players will just never experience the world)) and at best people will make pilgramage there in droves and it won't be a special thing
also idk that's just my take when i'm really tired
That questdesign is ingenious!
More developers should think in THAT kind of way!
I would never have been able to solve that quest. Not even a little. That game sounds hard enough that it wouldn't even be fun for me.
thats the problem with gamers these days ...they want everything to be told to them ina game already >_< gamers seem to not be able to enjoy finding out something ina game rather than knowing it already haha
I think a better way might be for a puzzle solvable more easily if you read the optional in-game lore. Like if one of the random books in Skyrim had how some other hero solved a problematic quest.
MrMilkyCoco I think the key words are "in game". When a quest relies on you having to go outside of the game to reference things that are not common knowledge, you may be making your quests a bit too difficult. It's not that people want to be told everything (though there are undoubtedly people who actually do) but rather that people want to actually be provided with the tools to solve quests without having to go hugely out of one's way just to obtain those means.
Presenting a complex riddle steeped in the game's lore, but not providing access to that lore except in a single book found halfway across the map in a large library? Bad.
Presenting the same riddle but providing a number of differing sources of information within the same area? Much better.
I admit that my examples here aren't EXACTLY relevant to the problem at hand, but I think they illustrate what I'm trying to say rather well.
You know if the answer's in such an obscure place in the game, like a specific book, you know what I would do? look up the answer online on a walkthrough. At which point it becomes either a fetch/collect quest, or I miss out on lore cause it's in the way. So I think it's very clever that Secret World forces you to do just that, allowing you to use lateral thinking. However, I do agree that quest example is very complex-I would have no clue how to do that. But the idea of using outside knowledge to complete a quest sounds like a very cool
Well I think there should be a balance of both simple and very hard quests.
A lot of people are complaining about Skyrim in the comments, with regards to its massive amount of quests. But I think the quest system in Skyrim is a hell of a lot better than just "get a bunch of quests and do them". For instance, when walking into the Riverwood Trader, you hear the trader and his sister arguing, and so of course you are interested and ask him "What was the argument about?" You don't need to do this, but through indirect interaction you are suddenly interested in what is going on. That gets you the Golden Claw quest, which you later realise is connected to the Dragonstone and the return of the dragons. This is great because you realise that some seemingly random retrieval quest is related to the whole province of Skyrim, and you suddenly feel the connection between yourself and the world. There are plenty of other examples I could give, I just wanted to throw that particular one out there.
First Kings or Second Kings? How do you know? It's First Kings, by the way!
Mmmm what you sayyyyy. SO MUCH props for putting that in the note.
If the missions being doled out are as real as mentioned in the beginning of the video, then the rewards (and more important, the entire game) has to be precisely as real.
If I'm going to spend that much brain power in figuring out *one* quest then it had better be damned important and lucrative. If this quest was given to me in a game like wow, where I have to do 30 quests simply to level once, I would easily abandon the mission entirely. You have to match the missions to the game.
Now, if this were skyrim (or some other sandbox, highly open, customizable rpg) then I would probably be more inclined to do that quest, because I'm having fun with my character and figuring myself out.
In an MMO that is not the case, sadly. It's all about the grind.
There are no "levels" in The Secret World. You accrue skill and ability points, rather quickly, and with no limit on how many you can accrue. If you play enough, one character can be good at everything and have all abilities.
bitchin' arcade Sounds Skyrimy. I like it.
It's a very hard question to answer from a design standpoint.
I mean, that kind of quest enables players to seriously game the system. If you have progression of character power/abilities of any sort, you absolutely NEED the player to not want to power through to higher levels and improved skills as fast as possible. You NEED to convince them to just enjoy being there, as a character, in that world. And in a genre where that's usually not the case, players are coming into the game already thinking the wrong way, and they are going to game the system.
So as a designer you end up having to choose between making these quests reward players with the assumption that they took the time to figure things out themselves, or gimping the reward because you know people are just going to look up the solution and blaze through.
Neceros Too bad the end game isn't.
They address this : limit quest numbers. By proxy, this should also make quests worth more. Instead of doing 50 "Kill 10 Boars" quests to level up, it would only require 5 or 10 of the quest chains like the example given. Or just make each step of the puzzle its own quest (follow the sewer covers *quest complete* Find the town hall *quest complete* find the painting *quest complete*) You'll have a dozen or so quests complete by the time you finish the chain, and it's a lot more fun than a dozen or so mob grinds.
Of course, if you don't want to do the thinking part, you can almost certainly just google the answer. But games should allow for organic gameplay. You should be able to play the game within the game, as much as possible. Going to WoWhead (or whatever) to look up the spawn point for each quest mob isn't engaging. It's a crutch, and we should at least TRY walking on our own.
I encountered a quest like that in Ni No Kuni. It required you to take a look at the world around you, and even though it may not have been as hard or as complex as the one you talked about, I think they did a good job.
Dark Souls is a good example of this kind of quest design
Actually, I don't think it's that similar. It's even better! You pretty much make your own quests and decide where you want to go and how you want to do it. I'd love to see an MMO adopt this kind of gameplay. It would be tough (or maybe impossible), but imagine how cooool it would be! An organic sense of progression and freedom WITH A SLEW OF OTHER PEOPLE!! (Sqweeee!!)
exactly, my skyrim playthroughs often boil down to get as many quests as possible and just start at the closest one and work my way around the map, picking up more quests as I go along
In Oblivion, they introduced the instant travel map and leveled dungeons. That was a TERRIBLE IDEA. They made it a bit better in Skyrim, but I still prefer the Morrowind quests. They felt more real because they didn't arbitrarily send you roaming around the map. They were local, like the people. It made the people feel more real and the place feel more real because both worked off of each other.
In a particularly bad example, the "Missing in Action" quest in Skyrim, your goal is all the way across the freaking map! Why? In what reality would the bad guys take a single prisoner to another country, through wolf-infested woods, to some random fortress in the wilderness? It makes no sense and it breaks the flow of the game.
Skyrim is supposed to feel vast, but if they make long trips a regular part of quests, then the world feels more like a clunky interface than an actual place. Morrowind had much less "landmass." But, I had to think about how I traveled in it, and then do actual traveling, so it felt bigger.
Games continue to get more and more 'realistic,' but anyone who has ever traveled through actual wilderness knows that it is a challenge. If Skyrim is an untamed wilderness, then that challenge is broken.
Russell Richard I have to ask why would you not take a prisoner into an area like that, what hope would he have of getting back home? I think it's necessary to have a variety of distances in quests to make them more dynamic and make you plan for them, and only having fast travel areas, like only being able to travel from one city to another, not the middle of the woods to a city
brandon carter
Yes, I could definitely agree with that. Variety is good in just about everything, including quest travel distance. But, I suppose that if the quest takes you a long way across the map, there should be a good reason for it, or it should at least be acknowledged. Someone in some conversation needs to mention that the journey will be long and arduous and filled with danger, because it would be if the developers want to convince me that Skyrim is a real place.
Now I wanna play the secret world.
Daniel Jones LOTRO is pretty amazing. Combat and perhaps even quest-wise it's not very special or different. But the way they incorporated the books lore and events and the attention they gave to detail, atmosphere and roleplay is amazing and made the time I spent with it worthwhile.
Be warned though, it's a very unfriendly free to play if you're not considering subscribing or paying a bit. At least when I tried it you basically got to level 20ish and then you have to buy quest packs to actually have quests on the higher level zones. You can buy them with currency you get from grinding but it sort of breaks the rythm.
that's a thing I like about tree of saviour. It's a cute little mmo which one could consider pretty simple and it has only these normal generic quests. But only on the surface. I think it was half a year ago or so someone who didn't skip all dialogues and then went off never speaking to the npc' s again found something interesting. hidden quests. hidden quests which requires to actually listen to the npc and when you finish that quest you get a new class(which has something to do with the tos class system but I don't really wanna explain it xD).
These quests are specific to one of the 4 ground classes so you can't become a rune caster or a miko while being an archer or a swordsman and the players are all over the place trying to find new quests and new classes and it's so awesome to just see new quests discovered or meet a player who has a class u never saw before and interacting with them learning how to get there. It's a great way to implement other quest types and bringing the community together.
i have to play the secret world now
reddit.com/r/ thesecretworld
Lots of buddy keys you can get a 3 day trial to try it out :)
I downloaded it last week because of part 1. I'll dive into it when I get some time.
the problem is it has a subscription fee which is something i do not aprove of so...idk if ill play it or not
israelyrex No it doesn't. Just the purchase price like Guild Wars.
israelyrex The subscription fee isn't mandatory. You can buy the game itself and still play. The mandatory sub fee was removed around last Christmas.
The Secret World: Legends is the only MMO I've ever played where I didn't care if I was levelling or not. Now I know why, it is a great narrative and immersive experience.
Welp, time to buy The Secret World now...
I will definitely take these ideas to heart if I become a game developer. Those large ! icons above NPCs always annoyed me, not just because it was a lazy way of saying HEY, THERE'S A QUEST, PAY ATTENTION, but because it tickled the completionist. I really just want to get Hoth over with in SWTOR, but those damn missions lure me to spend hours worth of additional time here, even if I don't need more xp. I could do with less XP, because I'm already too over leveled to enjoy the combat
This get me to think about a game I'm currently working on, sadly I don't think it would fit the game, since the player isn't playing the RPG part, the computer is. Instead the player runs the town, and can set quests/tasks of what the town needs.
Interesting concept are we talking using elements of RTS (in it's losest sense) click and wait or turn strategy.
Gareth Brooks-Martin Yes, the player will build the town, and setup quests for the AI controlled RPG characters to do. It will all be in real time, I'm trying to make the characters get sentimental value to items or other characters, so they in turn can also generate quests. Like a character loses a ring, and request the player set up a quest to find it.
Yemto
That sounds very interesting, reminds me of Recettear.
Good luck anyway
TERA is one game that suffers heavily from boring quests, because the combat system feels really good and rewarding and your choice of class really makes a HUGE difference in what role you take in a party, even between the different melee classes.
Speaking of which, an episode on good design practice for character roles/classes would be nice!
why can't every game dev just watch this lol
The thing about Secret World's quest design too is that it treats each big quest as important, dividing them up into "tiers" that turn them into a series of tasks to be completed. The main story missions especially, trust that you'll take the time to do the big and small quests you encounter along the way to move you along and earn experience between tiers.
Listen, sweetling. Do you hear?
Can you hear the buzzing of the wings?
In the original Guild Wars, you had the Survivor Title and the LDoA title (Legendary Defender of Ascalon). The Survivor Title was, like in Lotr Online, for getting to a certain level without dying (although in this game the only survivor title that actually meant anything was for getting 13,370,000 xp). LDoA was for getting to the max level without leaving the prologue area, Pre-searing Ascalon
Everyone!! What if is part of an ARG!?!? O_O
Vghoyxste
Great example, a friend and I actually spent a day figure out that quest in The Secret World beta and it was some of the most fun I've ever had in an MMO.