Reinventing the Quest

I think I killed most of my audience yesterday with the massive Minecraft thread.  Then again, I keep arguing with friends as to whether or not I actually have an audience in the first place.  I still feel most days like a little kid sitting in a huge cardboard box on the living room floor pretending to be on TV.  I say whatever comes to mind on a specific day, and out comes a blog post.

Comments from Community

One of the things recently that has been getting under my skin more than I should allow it to is a series of comments surrounding Rift.  I realize I spend a good deal of my time evangelizing the game, and a month and some change after release a lot of the new has even worn off for me.  Thing is I am still enjoying it more than I have enjoyed any other MMO in a long while.

All that said, the general frustration I have had, and have even posted about this before now, are those comments surrounding the lack of innovation in Rift’s quest system.  Tipa at West Karana gave a great run down of the game from the point of view of a player not yet max level a month into the game.  Problem is for me at least, deep down in the post are the same sentiments I have had trouble understanding before.

If you have read this blog for a bit I commented (in Three Things Rift Didn’t Get Wrong) on similar statements about the questing system from MMORPG.com.

Ultimately I guess the question I pose is, what exactly do you want instead?  We have arrived at the quest system we have today through a long line of prods and pokes and tweaks over the years.  Granted the big evolutionary jumps came from World of Warcraft, but looking back I am not sure how someone can really improve on the system.  I think to bring things into perspective we should examine where we have come from.

“Hunt For the Quest” Era

Granted, the screenshot I have chosen to illustrate this cannot really be deemed as “early in the era”, but it represents a time that I like to refer to as the “Hunt For the Quest” era.  During this time, questing consisted of a random process of trying to canvas every new town you came to looking for those precious few NPCs that actually responded to you.  More often than not, a quest was dumped in your log as you went through a mostly non-interactive set of text. 

The vast majority of these games lacked any real quest tracking system, and instead listed a generic journal showing which quests you were on with very arcane directions as to how to complete each one.  Much of the “gameplay” actually involved trying to interpret what the heck the quest authors meant in their tips. 

Ultimately, players got stuck frequently and ended up relying on websites such as GameFaqs to figure out exactly how to do that one step of the quest that was holding up their progress.  In the dark days before the internet, it involved relying on your friends just hoping they had figured out whatever step you were stuck on.  Guidebooks existed, but in general no one I knew actually purchased these, and at worse case next time you were at a bookstore you thumbed through the copy on the shelf just long enough to find your answer.

Everquest – Most Ironically Titled Game Ever

With the birth of the MMO genre, not much really changed.  If anything, quests became even harder to find as you roamed through a world populated with massive numbers of NPCs, few of which offered anything interesting.  As the title above states, Everquest was probably the most ironic title for that game.  Questing took an act of congress to do successfully because it involved a cryptic series of text prompts to actually trigger said quests. 

Here is an example of a quest text…

If you are catching on to the pattern, initiating a quest involved saying whatever text was contained within [ brackets ].  This would trigger another line of text and so on until ultimately you needed to collect something.  This snippet of text for example was initiated when an item was handed in to the NPC.  Problem is there was no real way of telling which NPCs would accept an item and give you a quest, nor was it entirely certain that if you handed an item in you wouldn’t simply lose it.

The Dark Age Arrives

Dark Age of Camelot took this construct and made it one step better.  Everquest encapsulated the keyword used to trigger the quest in [ brackets ] but DAoC made the “revolutionary” jump of hot linking.  So instead of having to type /say Rutabaga, you could simply click [rutabaga] in the chat window.  While this may not seem like much, it was freakin cutting edge stuff at the time.  Unfortunately you still had to roam around the camp randomly right clicking on NPCs until you found the quest givers, but at least once you found one the steps that followed went a little smoother.

Dawn of the Exclamation

Questing for the most part continued in this fashion for years.  We accepted the frustration that it gave us, but dealt with it.  The end result however was that the majority of players simply ground their way through the levels by running dungeons or hunting various “camps” until there was a significant reason to actually try and track down a quest.  These reasons were often doled out by the various MMO help sites available like Allakhazam.

The first major advancement in questing since Everquest came with when the first screenshots of World of Warcraft were leaked to the public.  You can tie alot of innovations back to WoW, but it is funny that I think the most lasting of them is the act of sticking an icon over the heads of quest NPCs to clearly identify them.  Our little friend to the right side here, has literally changed the MMO gaming world.

Now instead of running around town humping NPCs until they gave us a quest starter, we were able to see from a distance whether or not there were quests for us to do.  This was a big deal, and for the first time in a fantasy MMO questing actually played a key role in the game play.  As players we came to expect that as we move through content, there was a constant flow of quests to keep ups propelling forward.  For years folks had wanted something other than killing mobs to do in MMOs and it had arrived.

Assimilation of the Idea

Quickly every MMO on the market adopted this method for identifying quests.  Above is a quick cut and paste job showing all the various implementations.  While some have clearly tried to set themselves apart by making the icons look more unique, the fundamentals are the same.  Go into a town, look for a recognizable icon and go off and do the quests.  The era of quest grinding had arrived.  No longer were you forced to kill an endless string of mobs for no good reason, now you had NPCs to go tell you where to hunt and for how long.

I resisted this era for a long time.  Having cut my teeth on EQ and DAoC, I still preferred to take out monsters with a blind and unfocused rage.  However, in WoW and other games I noticed that if you completed the quests, you could level far faster than through killing monsters alone.  In addition to this you had all these wonderful bits of story along the way to make you feel attached to the game world.

Thing is however, that no matter what game you played, the process was essentially the same.  While a lot of todays players seem to find this boring, and un-original.  I find it the natural progression of the system.  Each crop of games, has managed to tweak the system to fit into whatever design they wanted.  Questing has arrived at this point, because each game that has come before it added something new to the genre.

So with Rift, we have this rich UI that is far better than any previous game shipped with.  It is the synthesis of years of gradual change, and represents the best of all the ideas to date.  You have great story telling, clear objectives, and nice visualization to complete them.  Problem is, players seem to be tired of this system that has been in place in one form or another for the better part of a decade.

Other Systems in Play

I return to the question, that if this system is now tired and boring… what exactly would you replace it with?  The only other tried and true parallel in the PC gaming world is that of the dialog tree quest.  The above example is from Fallout 3, but these are the bread and butter of the ever popular Bioware games.  The user is presented a prompt and then given a list of choices to pick from as the answer.  Often times the choices are determined by the players faction, skill and level.

Problem is, for seasoned PC gaming veterans this system is just as well trodden as the quest giver system.  We have literally played dozens of games at this point where we navigated our way through the text options.  Regardless of how well written these systems are, there is never an answer to the prompt that is exactly how you would want to respond.  You are basically left with the renegade/evil response, the goody two-shoes response, or the aloof neutral response.

Hope For The Future

This is the kind of system that it seems like Bioware will be bringing to the MMO genre with The Old Republic.  it will be interesting to see how it plays out, but like I said for me at least this is already the “old way” of doing things.  The problem again is, how would you build a better breadbox?  What can really be done that hasn’t already been done before.

Right now I simply cannot imagine a better system than the one that keeps getting labeled as “un-imaginative”.  Sure we all know how it works at this point, and we can blindly do the quests without thinking.  But to me at least, there is comfort in the familiarity.  I know what to expect in the quests, I already walk into the room knowing the language that will be spoken.

WoW has tried to evolve the quest construct for years, but for the most part in doing so they have created a series of mini-games that he player has to deal with.  I would far rather have “kill ten rats” than pilot this annoying vehicle around the zone, and bomb various objectives.  That is just me however, I have always enjoyed the generic construct of the kill task.

My Actions Should Matter

I will admit that I would love for there to be some weight in my decisions in an MMO.  I would like to know that if I choose the good path, various NPCs will react to me differently.  One of the most frustrating and annoying moments in Cataclysm came in Twilight Highlands.  In Wrath you spend hundreds of quests working for the Red Dragon flight, and as a result you end up interacting a good deal with Alexstraza directly.  So it was almost game breaking for me to encounter her in Twilight Highlands, and for her to not even mention the fact that you did dozens of quests for her flight.  Don’t we at least get a handshake and a nod out of the deal?

I would like to play a game without the faction wall, where we as players choose our alignments, and the choices we make have massive ramifications on the entire game.  In Dragon Age: Origins you join the Grey Wardens, and from that moment forward every NPC in the game has a reaction based on that fact.  Imagine a world where various social organizations are vying for control, and each has a specific slant on the world.  In the case of Rift, along with Defiant and Guardian, we should be able to join the various dragon cults if we so chose, or the various organizations set aside to fight them.

Wrapping Up

Ultimately for me, Rift is an evolved system, that has taken in all the best elements of the other games I have played to date.  While it is not ground breaking, it takes all these “best of” elements I wanted from other places and places it squarely in the same system.  Problem is for many players these elements just feel old themselves.  I would like to see some evolution in the system, a leap forward as big as the exclamation point was, however I did not go into Rift expecting it.  I came here expecting best of breed game play, and in that it has delivered plenty.