Dailyquestification of Games

I had a bit of a revelation over the weekend, and now I understand a little better some of my motivations. I hate daily quests, and I understand WHY I hate them, but first I guess we should probably talk a bit about the daily quest construct as a whole. If you are one of my readers that has not played a ton of MMORPGs, then maybe you have escaped the sirens call of them. Essentially they started their life as an optional method of creating repeatable quest turn-ins and have become widely signified as having a blue exclamation icon to signify that status. The very first repeatable quests I ever experienced were in Everquest, as I turned copious amounts of bone chips to the dude in the Kaladim Paladin guild.

World of Warcraft however had a more formal questing infrastructure and as a result they had to make a specific version of questing in order to support the repeatable nature. I am honestly not exactly certain when I first encountered them, but I know for certain that by the time we reached Silithis they were the backbone of the quests leading up to the opening of Ahn’Qiraj. At that point they served a very distinct purpose and were pretty straight forward in nature allowing you to gain favor with a faction for repeatedly turning in the same items over and over. They were more construct than feature at that point and served as a means to an end.

With Burning Crusade a number of optional faction grinds were put in place, and with them a series of limited daily quests were introduced. Each faction would give you a number of quests each day with additional options opening up as you increased your standing. The first of these that I participated in was Ogri’la, which required a flying mount so absolutely nothing you even saw prior to dinging the level cap in that expansion. These were time wasters more than anything, and if you decide to completely skip a week it didn’t feel terribly bad because it didn’t feel like you were really missing anything other than some incremental progress.

The problem is that as we have moved further from that original mission of simply facilitating multiple turn-ins they have spread more and more from something that felt like optional content, to something that is absolutely a requirement in order to function within the game. Now exists a tapestry of daily quests, world quests and weekly objectives that all feel like they need to be observed for fear of your character falling terribly behind the curve. In Shadowlands for example there are a number of things that can only be obtained while a certain World Quest is up, which only serves to add a fear of missing out on potential rewards by not logging in every single day.

This unfortunately isn’t a World of Warcraft problem, but a larger MMORPG problem. Every game has some version of this infrastructure of giving you limited rewards for logging in each day and doing some things… all in an attempt to make you appear to be “active”. This becomes important because in the free to play economy… no one reports subscription numbers at investor calls anymore. They instead report on MAU or Monthly Active Users, and if they can keep you logging in it gives the appearance of the game having a healthy ecosystem. However none of this is really compelling content and I’ve reached a point where I find it harder and harder to swallow as such.

In general I do pretty well with completing dailies for maybe a week at a time, but eventually I find I lack the desire to log in. I’ve reached this point with so many games now that I started to wonder why exactly I reject this construct so much. Now comes the realization part. I play games as an escape from the rigors of my day to day existence, and my life is basically a series of repeated rituals at this point. I am the primary caretaker in my household and when I get up I start running through a list of little daily activates that are required to make sure the household is running smoothly. Everything in my life has been ritualized in order to make sure it happens and to also try and make it as efficient as humanly possible so I can move on to more enjoyable things.

So for example this morning my list of rituals looked a little something like this:

  • get up and turn off the alarm clock
  • check email for any critical alerts overnight
  • turn on the morning news so wife can wake up slowly while listening to it
  • hop in the shower
  • get dressed
  • make sure wife is actually waking up
  • prepare Kenzie’s insulin shot and coax her into letting me give it to her
  • give the cats wet food and a little dry food
  • gather and take out the trash
  • feed the outdoor cats
  • sit down and consume caffeine while writing a blog post

There is a similar evening sequence of events that plays out in order pretty much every night, and if anything gets out of order there is a high chance of forgetting to do something. My life is so ritualized that daily quests don’t feel like an escape. They feel like converting what is supposed to be enjoyable relaxation and exploration time… into doing more “Wizard Chores” as my friend Grace calls them. I said before that I can seem to do them for about a week, and that seems to be the point at which I begin to realize exactly what I am doing. Then I start to wonder… why exactly am I logging in? I mean I don’t find the daily quest construct enjoyable in the least, and it is only out of that fear of missing out on something that I start doing them in the first place. Eventually I realize that I am probably better off finding something I actually do enjoy instead.

The problem however is that as more titles have shifted to the “Games as a Service” model, with it comes a “dailyquestification” of content. I mean I get it from the development standpoint. If you can create content that is largely just a ticking of boxes, make it repeatable and it has a positive hit on the MAU… then it absolutely makes sense. As a player however I look out upon a sea of task lists that are really no more enjoyable than doing the laundry. My daily rituals in the real world I have to do in order to maintain a quality of life that I have come to expect. In the game world… I can just log the hell out and go find something else to play instead. Unfortunately my buffer of willingness to deal with these systems has been full for quite some time.

That said I am still just as susceptible to them as anyone. For a period of time I can forget what exactly I am doing as I chase making gear numbers go up. However I always end up back where I started in realizing that I am just doing busy work, and that busy work isn’t fun. I hit Shadowlands hard and heavy for a few weeks until I realized that I wasn’t actually enjoying myself, and now have not logged in since before Christmas. I feel bad that I have not been logging in, but I am actually enjoying myself playing other games so I am mostly ignoring that guilt. I am not sure what the answer is to make repeating content more enjoyable. It isn’t like games have the budgets or hours to create fresh content every week for us to consume like the locusts that we are.

I am wondering if I am just outgrowing MMORPGs in general. Diablo 3 is a grind I do over and over, but it is a self paced grind that allows me to commit as much time as I want to it when I want to… and then bugger the fuck off and forget it exists when I don’t. I crave more experiences like that, but those seem to be fewer and further between. Being artificially gated when I am having one of my periods where I want to binge a game… also feels horrible and will similarly inspire me to bounce. I think maybe the real answer is to break down the lie that is Monthly Active Users… because if you are just logging in to clear your mailbox are you really active? That is a discussion for another day, but I think I now better understand why I hate daily quests.

10 thoughts on “Dailyquestification of Games”

  1. It feels like such a hook to draw you back in, there isn’t anything nice or pleasant about it, it really does feel like a mechanism to inspire addiction to that particular title. Keep engaging, keep coming back for the same mind numbing chores and tasks. If every daily chore was original, fresh, added something objective to take away from it, sure, when it’s just work in the digital ether, no thanks.

  2. I feel you.

    I’m glad that I’ve found a very good reason to not do Genshin Impact’s daily commissions you pictured (which is that I don’t want the massive amounts of AR XP they yield), so there’s pretty much nothing left in the game that I really do each and every day. Feels great.

    But yeah, they’re basically everywhere nowadays, and it’s definitely more bane than boon.

  3. I might do a post on the back of this although it’s a topic I’ve written about more than once already. The thing that interests me is that when I first encountered daily quests (and I can’t remember when or where that was with any confidence) I loathed them. I didn’t so them and I complained on forums about thjeir very existence. They seemed to me to be the antithesis of what I believed a virtual world should be.

    Over a long stretch of time, though, my feelings have almost compeletely reversed. I actively seek out daily or weekly quests and tasks to the point that I don’t just fit them into my gaming day – they are my gaming day. I currently do daily tasks in EQ, EQII, GW2 and WoW. In total that generally takes less than an hour and quite often that’s all the mmorpg gaming I do in a day. Conversely, on other days something else catches my eye while I’m logged in – someone popping PQs in EQII for example or a commander I like running a squad in WvW in GW2 – and I end up spending a couple of hours doing that.

    It saves me from having to create my own structures and gives me a small amount of guaranteed content which encourages me to log in and when I’m there I notice other players generating ad hoc content on the fly which I can join in with if the mood takes me. It’s similar too, but for me better than, what it used to be like when I logged in to do stuff I’d planned to do for a couple of hours and ended up getting drawn into doing stuff guildmates wanted to do.

    On balance I prefer the way things are now, with a loose structure that carries player-generated content without the commitment a guild demands. I would agree that there are probably too many dailies in some games but since I never feel I have to do any more than the ones I enjoy I’d prefer that to there not being enough.

  4. Daily quests aren’t a reason to login, they are a reason to logoff. We are wired to check boxes, theres a dopamine effect of rewarding a task. The shine doesn’t last though, and eventually you math out the reward vs effort. When that doesn’t make sense, then the checklist has a negative connotation. Think about it this way, if you have a giant checklist of tasks and none of them are rewarding, then why bother? Twice in a row? Shadowlands is insulting for this… who needs 30 anima?

    D3 is a great example where the checklists are meta (season rewards). Get that, and you’re done. Takes a couple days or a couple months, the rewards are the same.

    • Also with the seasonal rewards, there are some seasons where I maybe don’t care enough to go all of the way and I can just stop with Haedrig’s Gift and be happy. Others I want to finish everything so I can get a cool looking pet. There is a freedom of choice that allows me to determine ahead of time how much effort I am willing to put into it. There is also zero artificial gating and if I was super dedicated I could in theory get everything done in a single day of grinding super hard, or pace myself out through the reliable three month cadence of seasons. Destiny 2 on the other end of the spectrum… it feels like you really need to be playing that game as your ONLY game to make it through the seasonal journey and get all of the rewards. You can’t just spend one really serious weekend and knock it all out, which makes me want to check out of that system entirely knowing I won’t get everything from it… so why put ANY effort into it.

  5. Daily quests, log-in rewards, gamification of little task lists are everywhere now. Not just MMOs. Mobile games, gacha games, shooters, MOBAs, Battle Royales, idle games, the list goes on – if there’s a multiplayer and online component, it’s low hanging fruit to have the feature included, because the majority of humans react a certain way to particular psychological tricks.

    My defense mechanism these days is de-sensitization. Play a bunch of the games at once and the realization that there aren’t enough hours in a day to do all the daily quests will eventually sink in. What’s the worst thing that can happen? FOMO, “oh no, I have less rewards and am slower than this other guy.”

    But wait… there are some guys that only play one primary game all their lives, and/or are whales in that game. So anyone who even branches out briefly into a variety of games is doomed to be ever slower and have less than -that- guy.

    If one can live with that, it’s not that big a step to skip a couple of dailies and accept that in all games, one will always be in between. Some players will have more than you, some will have less. Dailies can then be enjoyed for their proper function – a suggested guide for what to do, if one has no ideas and just want to see some checkmarks on a completable task list – while one has decided to actively play a certain game.

    I suppose being forgetful and easily distracted helps. Once I wind up drawn to and obsessing about games A and B, I’ve forgotten that games C, D and E have dailies that were supposed to keep me logging in.

    • The problem is that if you do have just one game, but limited play time, just skipping dailies will make it feel like you’re falling behind as dailies are often used to gate progress and pad out content. Rift had a good approach for some of their daily content whereby the bonus reward for dungeons was awarded daily but could stack up to 7 so if you couldn’t get on every day you could still catch up when you could get on. In contrast standard dailies promote unhealthy practices of trying to squeeze in time to “just log in and do the dailies” in order to not feel left behind in your hobby.

  6. I definitely think you’re on to something here. I guess I avoid the grind of daily quests by just picking a new character to level each time and trying a new approach. It does feel like the gaming companies are trading real engagement with a need to just spend time logged in. I’m not sure it really holds folks’ attention in the long run.

Comments are closed.