Champions Online to incorporate Warhammer's public quests

One of the biggest innovations Warhammer Online brought to the MMO industry was easily its Public Quest system. The ability to share a big heroic encounter with a group of friends or even strangers is tons of fun, although without other people PQs suffer from an acute case of boringmentia. But that hasn't stopped Cryptic from applying their own version of the concept in Champions Online, according to an interview between Cryptic's Bill Roper and MMORPG.com from GDC 2009.

And who could blame them? The basic idea behind Public Quests is very solid, it's primarily the implementation that seemed to be off in Warhammer Online. A key point is the amount of PQs in the game. If Champions Online doesn't go overkill with them, then the lack of people conundrum may not arise. Beyond that, many other problems such as scalability and equipment progression could cease to be issues -- less is more, basically.

For Mythic, making the earlier PQs more solo friendly seems to have helped alleviate the problem. But considering that these quests are supposed to be public, that approach really does feel like a band-aid rather than a solution. It really could simply be that too many of the admittedly fun encounters in too close a proximity is just a bad idea.