GuildWarsNightfall
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A Repletion of Rats...
In all but the most staunch sandbox-style MMOs, the Quest has become the cornerstone of directed player content. Gone are the days when they'd just give us a graveyard full of skeletons, and experience bar and tell us get on with it, and the modern MMO, such as World of Warcraft or Lord of the Rings Online, is very much a task-driven experience. Very little occurs without an accompanying quest journal entry these days, and thanks to generous cash, experience and item rewards, working through the quest chains can often be the most efficient way to make progress and headway in the average MMO.The quest can also provide a little narrative to the otherwise formless adventuring of the typical MMO character; a set task and sometimes even a reason for the ensuing mayhem. That many of us simply skip the text is hardly the games fault. In any case, even without caring what the specifics or backstory to the job actually are, the mechanics of gameplay can be greatly improved by taking an endless and unbroken monster killing spree starting at level one and ending at level fifty, and breaking it into a large number of smaller distinct tasks, suitable for planning a gaming session around.There is very little not to like about the currently widespread quest system; while individual implementations may vary and have their own quirks and peculiarities, the general principle of having something specific to be doing in a gaming session is a good one, and if it isn't, well, they are generally optional anyway and the graveyard of skeletons is always out there. But ask anyone with more than thirty completed journal entries to their name about questing in general, and two specific gripes are likely to come to light very quickly, the 'Kill Ten Rats' quest, and the 'Fed Ex' quest, two types of task that seem to resurface over and over, from back to EverQuest and beyond, in almost any MMO where there are quests at all.What else can we be given to do, or are these two templates doomed to underlie everything we do in all our MMOs?
