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The Daily Grind: How should MMO quests be delivered?
I was tinkering in Ultima Online last week when I spied something I had forgotten about: quest givers with yellow exclamation points over their heads! In Ultima Online! The much-maligned mechanic has even retroactively invaded ancient sandboxes. But I started to wonder what MMO players would accept as a mechanic for quest delivery. World of Warcraft's exclamation points are hated, Star Wars Galaxies' mission terminals seemed artificial, WildStar fans complain about pop-up quests, and there's no way I'd want to go back to EverQuest's keyword-based quest text. Hail, a_quest_giver_001! So how, exactly, do you want your MMO quests doled out? Every morning, the Massively bloggers probe the minds of their readers with deep, thought-provoking questions about that most serious of topics: massively online gaming. We crave your opinions, so grab your caffeinated beverage of choice and chime in on today's Daily Grind!
The Daily Grind: Do you favor random quests?
One of Star Wars Galaxies' content quirks, borrowed heavily from Anarchy Online, is the random quest. If you tire of themepark questlines, you can trek over to a mission terminal and ask it to generate a random kill-10-rats quest for you. In SWG's prime, these quests were terribly annoying; no one really wants to spend all of his time leveling up by taking missions to destroy a gubbur lair over and over and over. Thank goodness for this new era of individual, scripted quests brought on by World of Warcraft, right? Well, not necessarily. More than once, I (and some our our forum-goers) have been irked at hand-written quests in WoW-esque games. They're usually trite and transparent, and the quest-givers rarely have good reason to entrust me with their tasks. We're still getting kill-10-rats quests -- we just have to click through a bunch of lame dialogue first. What do you think? Do you prefer pre-scripted, one-off, linear quests, or do you long for the simplicity and honesty of random quest generation? Every morning, the Massively bloggers probe the minds of their readers with deep, thought-provoking questions about that most serious of topics: massively online gaming. We crave your opinions, so grab your caffeinated beverage of choice and chime in on today's Daily Grind!
