Lens on Questing Can Be Trying (And Two Requests)

Many years ago, in the primitive days of computing when a 5 gigabyte hard drive was the size of a washing machine and a terabyte meant a room-sized robot with 6000 tapes inside, there were people who spent much of their professional lives fetching, mounting, accessing, unmounting, and storing magnetic tapes.

In the data-rich environment in which we live today it can be hard to imagine backing up a computer on dozens of magnetic tape reels over many hours (or even a weekend).  I have no clue how many 9-track tapes I've mounted (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9_track_tape).  At least the tape robot would handle all 6000 3480 tapes (http://www.computerhistory.org/revolution/memory-storage/8/258/1038) itself...after we labelled the bastards.

Once upon a time...I was what was not-so-lovingly referred to as a "tape ape".  I bowed before the Great God Of Backups and spent years slapping tapes on drives at the beck and call of The Computers.

And now?  Now I'm a "quest monkey".  I bow before the Mighty Quest Givers (and their holy symbol of  !  ) and spend countless hours stabbing critters with swords at the beck and call of The Designers.

PRE-HISTORY

In those same old days as the computers above, MMOs existed too!  And many of their game mechanisms were as obsolete as the tapes I described.

Questing as we now see it in MMOs barely existed.  And conveniently marked quest NPCs?  Hah...we wished!  If we'd known, we'd have dreamed of being quest monkeys.

Some games had dynamically generated grinding quests to help the player out with fresh "content".  In Star Wars Galaxies there were quest terminals where a player could get a critter nest or pirate camp or something to destroy for a few credits.  Ride (or run) out, kill, ride (or run) back, repeat.  Anarchy Online had dynamically generated instanced spaces, usually a series of rooms populated with predictable batches of mobs conveniently standing around to be massacred.

Honestly, it was just mob grinding for all intents and purposes, with a small cash or item reward for completing the "quest".

Any really cool content tended to be hidden, not usually as a matter of intent.  Either by conversation in the server chat or, for those fortunate enough to have access to this thing called USENET (look it up, punks!), through newsgroups devoted to a particular game one could hear about more involved quest that even to our jaded tastes today we would recognize as genuine content.

These were often quite involved and sometimes would be utterly impossible to figure out without those who had gone before sharing information.

Actually...some of the quests in The Secret World remind me of those old days, and in a good way.  A little bit of work can be quite rewarding (in real, not game, terms).

There sure as hell wasn't anything like Wowhead.

Now, if you want a quest spoiled...well, Google has spoiled us all I suppose.  It used to be hard to find.  And often didn't exist at all.

HISTORY BEGINS

And then came WoW (and to a lesser degree, EQ2) and questing in MMOs changed enormously.  WoW did to questing what it did to almost every system in the game, it took what existed before and streamlined it.  Then it polished it until it gleamed.  And made quest monkeys of us all.

Suddenly quest givers were obvious.  And usually clustered together.  The phrase "quest hub" came into the MMO player's vernacular.  It was convenient to quest.  And the experience gains were faster than any other method.

And so, for most purposes, mob grinding died with the appearance WoW's quest-focused levelling.  Oh sure, some times you might still grind mobs for a specific purpose (crafting components or deed completion, say) or a group of people might find a location where the xp or loot made it worthwhile, but for the most part, old school mob grinding was dead.

And good riddance.  For as much as "quest grinding" can be a, well, grind, it's nothing like standing in one place just killing one mob after another for hours on end.  If you've never done it, you don't know what you're missing and you should be glad.

As questing became the dominant method games used for levelling, the basic mechanics of questing themselves became more streamlined and more player friendly.  Over time they became perhaps too player friendly.

Now most games clearly label on their in-game maps where to complete a quest.  Quest items show up as clickable icons on the quest tracker.  Quest completions pop up to provide the rewards without having to return to the quest giver.  Oh...and quest flow...it has almost become too good.

If vanilla WoW made questing into the levelling mechanic, the Cataclysm expansion polished quest flow to the point where, in some ways, it became less of a themepark MMO and more of a single themepark ride.  You'd go neatly from hub to hub doing two or three batches of two or three quests and then, upon completion, be handed a deliver quest to take you to the next hub.

The quest flow in Cataclysm was so smooth and so fast you could fly through all 5 levels of new content in just a few days.  Very little extraneous time was spent doing anything that wasn't part of a quest.  The design was beautiful...and strangely uninvolving.

An odd circumstance...something so good it wasn't good anymore.  And the quest monkeys scratched their collective heads.

WILL THE PAGE TURN?

For the last almost 8 years, questing in the WoW vein has become the norm.  Almost every game released since has incorporated parts of their system.  The single-line of quest hubs that was so prominent in Cataclysm is almost indistinguishable from the system that TOR implemented (albeit in a less polished fashion because they are, after all, only BioWare not Blizzard).

It's all gotten so predictable and stale.  And in a few games, we are seeing designers looking at options other than the monorail.

Let me mention a few specifically.

Rift fired the first shots in the Boring Quests War with the dynamic content provided by rifts, invasions, and the like.  While it still has the standard questing mechanics, it also incorporated entirely new mechanics for generating the feel of a more living, changing world.

Small raiding parties running around, rifts spewing invasions and fighting off players...sometimes entire zones overrun, with quest NPCs slaughtered and their respawn points occupied by hordes of mobs.  That sort of thing doesn't happen in Goldshire in WoW.

The Secret World does incorporate a lot of the (now) standard questing boilerplate.  There are some "kill 10 zombie" type quests.  Most quest targets are clearly marked on the map.  Ah, but a great many of their quests are implemented quite differently indeed.

Most of the quests have a narrative thread where the actions you take actually make sense in a real-world way (if you can describe a cross between "Fringe" and "The X-Files" as "real-world).  You can see my earlier blogs for more info on TSW questing.

And the investigation quests are an AWESOME addition to the questing milieu.  More puzzle/scavenger hunt than "kill 10 zombies", if you want to fly through them for xp you can Google up the spoilers, but if you want to do a little thinking, a little trial and error, a little frustration...they can be enormously fun and rewarding.

They probably aren't a good option for every game, but Funcom deserves enormous credit for doing something VERY different, very appropriate for their game, and doing it very, very well.

Guild Wars 2 has re-jiggered almost the entirety of the questing mechanic, with the exception of the storyline quest which is fairly standard in terms of mechanics, at least through about level 15 or so.

GW2 has "hub" locations where a small number of different dynamic events will regularly go off, and that's about as close as they get to a quest hub.  Throughout the game world are dynamic...I'll call them "chains"...where an event occurs, which leads onto another event, and so on.  And these dynamic chains can have multiple branches, leading on until, in some cases, a Big Badass Mofo Mob (BBMM) is spawned, with the Phat Lewtz(tm) he drops as the reward.

So the best way to level in GW2 is to explore, to find nifty things happening and hang around to see what happens next.

This is the exact opposite of the perfectly streamlined hub-to-hub-to-hub quest architecture of WoW:Cataclysm or the less streamlined but otherwise identical TOR.

In GW2, for a great part of the levelling experience, the most economical way to level seems to be "wander around".  I doubt it will work out exactly that organically, but a guy can hope!

TWO REQUESTS

Questing is never going to vanish from MMOs, because it is a good mechanism for propelling a player from place to place and levelling them up.  But the standard, accepted mechanics have turned into an exercise in rote and repetition.

On the positive side, we're seeing some new games coming out with a philosophy of "standard questing has a place, but if we tweak it this way and add in this entirely different way of motivating players, we get a deeper and richer game experience for everyone."

And frankly, the quest designers have got to be sick to death of writing the same old crap.

But regarding old-fashioned questing...I do have two requests...

1)  Please get rid of quest log limits.  If you're going to throw a billion quests at us, don't make us micro-manage which ones we're going to keep and which ones we're going to throw away.  Really, how much goddamned database space is it going to take up to let us have those old group quests and "I'll get to that in a couple levels" quests cluttering up our quest log?

Just design the quest log to present the quests in a smarter way and cache the goddamned thing locally...I don't care how, but dammit give me a quest log with no limits!  Fricking SWTOR had one in beta (something met with Hallelujah-praise by me at the time) until they changed it to a ludicrously small 25 for one of the later betas and release.  Bastards!

2)  Please get rid of fucking escort quests.  Seriously guys, you are NOT a smart enough designer to make 'em work.  Nobody else has managed it, and neither will you.  Oh sure, occasionally someone by pure luck manages to balance an escort quest such that all classes can finish it, but that usually requires that you are escorting Darth Overkill on a roach-squishing mission.

Most escort quests end up with whatever shit-fer-brains NPC you're escorting aggroing too many mobs and getting you killed or aggroing too many mobs and getting himself killed.  Or he provides no assistance in a quest balanced for two.

Regardless...game designers and developers...your players HATE escort quests because they have no control over the NPC they are escorting, and that just leads to frustration.

We HATE them.  And we HATE you for putting them in.  So just stop making us HATE you.

Because we really, really want to love you!