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The Daily Grind: Do you skip quest text in MMOs?
I heard an odd complaint in the Massively offices this week: One of our writers was annoyed with Guild Wars 2 because it isn't delivering enough backstory through regular gameplay and normal questing. He couldn't figure out what was happening in the plot and didn't want to have to hunt down an out-of-game wiki page or NPC with a prepared info-dumping spiel; he just wanted the basic lore presented during the quest itself from normal quest NPCs. Crazy, right? Why would a designer put lore in quest text? No one reads quest text -- everyone says! Might be it's time to challenge that assumption, especially with games like WildStar with tweetquest philosophies on the horizon. Do you, in fact, skip quest text in MMOs? If you do, would you read it if you knew the text actually mattered to the plot of the game and wasn't just a 500-word essay on why you should kill 10 rats? 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!
Patch 5.3: New gear vendors for Cataclysm leveling
Two new gear vendors were added in Patch 5.3 that sell ilevel 232 gear so that you can immediately do the Blackrock Cavern and Throne of Tides dungeons upon reaching level 80. The ilevel requirement for both dungeons is 226 which is greater than the questing and dungeon gear from Wrath of the Lich King. Before the patch, if you were leveling up via dungeons, you had to stop and quest for a bit at level 80 in order to get the ilevel of gear required to continue running instances. Quartermaster Iris Moondreamer at the Nordrassil Inn in Hyjal sells full sets of gear for each class. In Vash'jir, Erunak Stonespeaker saves you from drowning and then sells the same gear as Iris. The beginning quest reward gear in Cataclysm is ilevel 272, so questing for a while will get you better equipment, but these new vendors help close the gear gap. Note: If you are choosing to buy your gear from Erunak, make sure to do so before completing the quest chain that gets you out of the sunken ship. as he stops being a vendor in the next phase. I had missed this detail in the patch notes so it was a pleasant surprise when questing in Hyjal on a mage that had leveled the previous 20 levels via pet battles and archaeology. Though the gear gap isn't as large between the older expansions, I'd still like to see more supply vendors like these and the ones in Pandaria as you level up, particularly if you are doing so in a non-traditional way.
The Daily Grind: What quest or questline is the most memorable?
MMO quests are old hat by now, and the vast majority of them are some slight variation on the standard kill-10-rats or FedEx mission. Some are unique, though, in terms of both their rewards and their mechanical presentation. I'm thinking of EverQuest II's betrayal quests here, which allow you to switch factions, home cities, and in some cases, even classes. What MMO quests or questline do you find the most memorable and why? 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!
Garriott talks Shroud of the Avatar story, questing, and mechanics
Richard Garriott recently dropped in on Matt Chat to talk up Shroud of the Avatar with host Matt Barton. Lord British has a lot to say over the course of the hour-long show, including some elaboration on Shroud's curious is-it-or-isn't-it-an-MMO design structure. "While most people will probably play in what I call the default setting of the open world, you can also turn it down to the other levels of comfort or safety that might prefer," he says. There's plenty more where that came from, including bits about the story, Tracy Hickman's involvement, and the game's approach to traditional RPG questing. Click past the cut for the full interview. [Thanks Avaloner81]
The Daily Grind: Do you still love the traditional questing model?
Lately I've been enjoying somewhat of a gaming renaissance in Lord of the Rings Online. I've been gaming in both high- and low-level areas, chewing through quest lines, and actually reading all of the story text. It struck me that in this day and age when MMOs are attempting to bring storytelling and questing to new levels, there's still something attractive and addicting about "old-fashioned" questing models. Perhaps it's the straight-forward presentation, the promise of "do this and get rewarded." Maybe it's still satisfying to vacuum up eight quests at once and check them off, one by one. And I think that great tales can still be told through such models. But enough about what I think -- what's your opinion? Do you still (or ever) love the traditional questing model? 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 fine art of PvE twinking from level 1-35
I'm sure most of you are familiar with the concept of "twinking" in WoW for PvP. It generally entails decking a low-level character out with all the best possible gear available to them and then tearing up the battlefields. In these post-experience locking days twinking is more straightforward than ever, and our own Olivia Grace has already covered a lot of the gearing aspects of twinking, for both PvE and PvP. PvE twinking is a bit of an unusual idea. Mostly it refers to locking experience at one of the former level caps - 60, 70, 80, or 85 - in order to enjoy the challenges of old raids or to accomplish something limited to players of a certain level, such as the Herald of the Titans title. These are fun and interesting ways to spend time in the game, but what about PvE twinking at even lower levels? Say, level 20? Or 40? Why on earth would anyone want to do that?
Daily iPhone App: QuestLord is a retro RPG trip back in time
A lot of apps these days show that developers are always thinking about what they can do in a new way: How can we change up controls for a touchscreen device, or use the power of the iPhone to create a new experience? QuestLord, however, is very decidedly old school. It's an RPG from the first-person perspective, similar to the old Elder Scrolls games, and while it obviously runs on the latest and greatest iOS devices, the interface is almost stubbornly retro. You just press a few different on screen buttons to move around, talk, or fight, and the game just sticks to the standard RPG conventions: Do quests, level up, and so on. Rather than come off as boring or simple, however, QuestLord feels familiar, like the scent of an old book. Yes, it's nice to see innovation, and yes, it's always fun to see developers try something new, but once in a while, it's great to see someone just stick with the old, and do it really well. That's what QuestLord is -- if you like these old 2D RPGs, you'll feel right at home here. If you didn't play those games back in the day, you might think QuestLord is a little too low-fi, and that's fine -- its pixelated graphics are no match for more modern games. But I really like QuestLord, and I'm happy to pay the $1.99 to experience a new title that seems like it was made quite a while ago.
Breakfast Topic: What are your quest nightmares?
All in all, I think the World of Warcraft questing experience is easier than ever. Quests can be tracked and shown on the screen, locations are automatically marked on your map, and anything you need to kill -- or anything that drops quest items you need -- is marked clearly when you approach, with more details when you mouse over. While some of the mystery may be gone, a lot of the annoyance has gone with it. However, while the overall experience is much better, you do run in to the occasional quest that seems to be stubbornly holding out to Blizzard's new, streamlined questing philosophy. Quests that require you to kill ten beasts for a single tooth to drop (why don't they all have teeth?) or run around for an hour (or more) waiting on painfully slow respawns. Recently, while leveling through Outland, I ran into the quest Veil Lithic: Preemptive Strike, which asked me to redeem 3 arakkoa hatchlings and slay 3 arakkoa hatchlings who couldn't be redeemed. It seemed simple enough: Veil Lithic had several nests that spawned eggs. When the eggs spawned, all I had to do was click on them to free the hatchling, which would either fly off or become aggressive. Except after freeing 3 hatchlings, no more clickable eggs appeared. Not in 20 minutes, not in an hour, and not in two -- and though I did manage to collect a lot of arakkoa feathers, the whole thing seemed like a big timesink (several days later, I've still only managed to slay 2 out of 3 hatchlings). At this rate, my attention span is certain to run out before the quest does. (In fact, I'm surprised it's lasted this long.) And what about you? Have you run into any quests -- now or in the past -- that are the stuff World of Warcraft nightmares are made of?
New Asta beta videos show off questing, races, and world events
The Asian-themed Asta: The War of Tears and Winds is currently in its first round of closed beta testing, and Steparu has posted a review of the upcoming title along with a number of gameplay videos. Although there are a number of playable races and classes to choose from, some classes can only be played by certain races, which start in their own specific areas. The game features the standard tab-targeting combat, with either point and click or WASD movement commands. For leveling, Asta offers a variety of quests, from collecting to killing to running errands; it even boasts open live event quests with multiple phases. Check out the landscapes and underwater aspects of questing around a port town in the clip after the cut. Then, for even more videos on the open world events and character creation for various races, head on over to Steparu.com.
New ArcheAge gameplay clips showcase crafting, questing, and undead
ArcheAge is launching in Korea this week, and Steparu has been spending a lot of time in the game's open beta exploring crafting, trading, questing, and even running afoul of pirates and farming bots. Questing appears to be the fastest way to level through XLGAMES' new sandpark, but plenty of XP can also be gained by tradeskilling, mining, farming, exploration, and more. Speaking of tradeskills, players have multiple chances to crit on their equipment when crafting, which can raise the quality of the resulting item or its level. Even equipped armor can be reforged and upgraded. As usual, Steparu also provides readers with a number of video highlight clips. Check out some battles with the undead in the dark of night and take a look at upgrading your armor through crafting in the clips after the break.
Alternative leveling in the Isle of Quel'Danas
I'm bored of Northrend. It is beautiful and has lovely music and is full of lore and I'm bored. It's the new Outland for me and my alts. Other ways to level abound, of course, but they all have their drawbacks and are various levels of "Been there; done that." as well. So I took Tizzi, the bored goblin mage, to a place where my aged druid spent many grindful days: the Isle of Quel'Danas. We complain about dailies now, but Quel'Danas (also known as the Sunwell Isle) was the land of too many dailies for our quest log. Grind, grind, grind we ancient Burning Crusade players did, so we could be of the Shattered Sun and get some lovely loot besides. When Quel'Danas was the in-thing, everyone was max-level, so there was no XP -- just the cash, gear, and camping. Oh, so very much camping. The Isle of Quel'Danas is vacant of players now, but is otherwise unchanged. It resides in a bubble in time, much like Outland, and the NPCs are still there to give quests or be slaughtered.
Why are there moral choices in WoW?
Most quests in WoW are fairly straightforward in intent. Go kill a bunch of birds and gather meat. Go kill the pesky vermin that are messing with our crops. Go get that book from that guy in the next town over. But then there is the occasional quest that takes us outside the usual gather, kill and fetch arena of standard questing -- the ones that asks our characters to make a choice. Do we kill the harpy matron, or do we let her go? How do we persuade Tyrus Blackhorn to help us? Are we really so gung-ho about interrogation that we'll gleefully do so to get information out of the Scarlet Onslaught? Or if we're asked to torture someone in the name of the Kirin Tor? Do we really want to let Thalen Songweaver go ... or would we rather leave him rot in Theramore's prison? These types of quests don't pop up terribly often, which prompts the question; just what are these moral choices for, exactly?
RIFT expands beta in second weekend event
The beta for RIFT: Storm Legion continues to grow as it heads into its second beta weekend event. The new beta event starts on Friday the 19th at 1:00 p.m. EDT and includes the zones of City Core, Eastern Holdings, and Seratos. Beta participants will also be able to get their hands on two of the expansion's new features: Dimensions and Hunt Rifts. You can guarantee a spot in the beta by pre-ordering. Better do it fast if you have a hankering because the second beta weekend will come to an end on October 24th at 11:00 a.m., at which point the countdown clock will commence for the third event. In the meantime, RIFTers are invited to check out the evolution of the game's questing system through a Hungry Man-sized livestream after the jump!
People live in Pandaria; or, our house in the middle of the sea
"And that night, her mom said that the two of them and the now-dead guy were the only 3 people who ever lived in Las Vegas. Everybody else just arrived, ate their complimentary shrimp cocktails, and left." Blizzard's focus is, as they've repeatedly professed, "to create the most epic gaming experiences ever." But for all the world-ending threats we've encountered in the last few WoW expansions, Azeroth just isn't that big. The entire Eastern Kingdoms are about the size of the island of Manhattan. We're made to believe that hundreds of thousands to millions of people of various races inhabit the planet, but examining the amount of residential space in each zone shows us room for far, far fewer. Now, yes, the Azeroth we see could simply be an abstraction of some other, larger, "real" Azeroth that doesn't tangibly exist. But this one is the one we get, and it seems sillier and sillier each time when you ponder things like where exactly King Wrynn managed to find a hundred thousand troops to send to Northrend, or where night elves have lived for the past ten thousand years. The same goes for Azeroth's endless supply of doomsday villains and the cultists they inevitably find to do their bidding. They had to come from somewhere. And they definitely don't live in Stormwind. But the problem isn't even really where they live. It's how they live. It's where they come from. Outland presented a unique opportunity to show us the how and why of the many strange alien races on an entirely new planet, but we learned more about how they died than how they lived -- the fate of most non-player races in World of Warcraft. Their homelands were a theme park, a casino, and we run through pulling levers, grabbing drinks, buying t-shirts. Nobody lived there. Pandaria, though? People live there. The continent feels more like a brand new planet than even Outland ever did.
The Soapbox: RuneScape is a proper MMO
Most of us will remember RuneScape from its first incarnation: a tiny and blocky world with simplistic gameplay, no sound, and only a handful of quests. The product of two brothers operating out of their parents' house in Nottingham, the original version launched in 2001 and slowly carved out its niche as a game for kids that could be played in a web-browser. RuneScape has a special significance for me as the first MMO I ever played, and it's responsible for starting my life-long love affair with online gaming. A whole generation of gamers grew up with that primitive, blocky world and eventually left for more polished games. But RuneScape has grown up too -- and boy did it have a growth spurt! Today's RuneScape bears little resemblance to the classic version many of us played as kids. The graphics are now considerably better, the world map is about five times the size, and it has features most people dream of getting in their favourite MMOs. RuneScape now has player housing, guild halls on huge floating islands, a full player-designed battleground system, procedurally generated dungeons, regular content updates, and 186 quests packed full of British humour. People sometimes say that RuneScape isn't a proper MMO like World of Warcraft, but I'd argue that it's actually more worthy of its "massively multiplayer" title than most of the MMOs released in the past decade. In this editorial, I look at just how far RuneScape has come and argue that RuneScape may be more worthy of being called a proper MMO than some triple-A releases.
The Daily Grind: Are dynamic events another MMO fad?
Move over, MMO story: dynamic events are this season's buzz word. Popularized by earlier MMOs like Warhammer Online and RIFT, dynamic events have become such an integral part of modern MMO design that brand-new Guild Wars 2 employs them as its central content conceit. Skip dynamic events in GW2 and you're going to have a rough time leveling (or surviving the ridicule of the commentariat, who consider dynamic events to be far superior to mundane, quest-like renown hearts). Even MMOFPS titles like Firefall are adopting the mechanic for their PvE fans. But is this actually the type of content we want to see from our MMOs, whatever their flavor? Never mind whether they're actually dynamic -- do you actually think they make for fun, desirable content? Or are we just so sick of themepark-style questing and leveling that we're willing to accept anything in its stead, even if that "anything" might be a fad akin to MMO story? What do you think -- are dynamic events all that and a bag of chips? 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!
WoW Archivist: Burned by Hellfire Peninsula
WoW Archivist explores the secrets of World of Warcraft's past. What did the game look like years ago? Who is etched into WoW's history? What secrets does the game still hold? When Mists of Pandaria goes live later this month, players will all begin leveling in the same zone for the first time since 2006. In Cataclysm and Wrath of the Lich King, Blizzard gave us two zones to choose from at the beginning of our adventures. Wrath split players up on either side of Northrend with Borean Tundra and Howling Fjord. Cataclysm's starting zones put players on different sides of the planet with Mount Hyjal and the less popular but unique underwater saga of Vashj'ir. In contrast, The Burning Crusade's Hellfire Peninsula put us all on opposite sides of the street. That is not a joke. It is literally true -- see the image above! As you can guess, this led to problems. Let's look back at the Hellfire experience and try to gauge what we're in for when we arrive at the Jade Forest shortly after midnight on September 25.
The Soapbox: The quest to save quests
Disclaimer: The Soapbox column is entirely the opinion of this week's writer and does not necessarily reflect the views of Massively as a whole. If you're afraid of opinions other than your own, you might want to skip this column. Semantic shift is a phrase I've recently acquired for whenever I want to sound insufferable at parties. It refers to the phenomenon of a word's usage changing over time, sometimes to the point that it's completely the opposite of whatever it originally meant. I believe that the word "quest" has undergone a semantic shift in the MMO community (and video games at large). What once had roots in the long, difficult journeys that take place in life and fiction has quickly become reduced to a trivial task of gathering, killing, or clicking in-game. The sheer volume of such quests and that meaninglessness of their charges has reduced the word to bargain basement kitsch. If we're supposed to be heroes, why then are so many of the quests we're given are no more exciting than going to the grocery store? "Quest" as a word has lost much respect in the community, almost completing its semantic shift such that it's almost pejorative. Yet there is a movement right now to reclaim the word and restore it to its proper meaning, and it's happening right in front of our eyes.
MMObility: Stomping around the world of The Missing Ink
If there's one phrase that gets me excited for a new MMO, it's "cross-platform." I know that's not very slick-sounding, but when I hear those words, I envision playing the same game across multiple devices. I can sit at my PC, move over to my bar, take a seat on my patio, sit down in the bath (with the tablet carefully held over the side) and finish off a dungeon while I'm lying in bed. The Missing Ink is not only attempting to be a unique title by offering the type of access that we normally see only from Spacetime Studios or HTML5 browser MMOs but presenting a very unique-looking game, one of paper cutout figures and Burton-esque curly trees dotting a wavy landscape. There's also a building mode promised, although I haven't experienced it yet. But will this multi-platform approach work? Well, I took a look at the alpha and have enjoyed what I've seen so far, but I must warn you: This is not a review. It's hardly even a preview. It's just a peek into a strange, new game. The following opinions and gameplay bits are subject to massive, sweeping changes.
E3 2012: Dragon Eternity's cross-platform warfare and weddings
Harken back, o reader, to ye olden days of E3 2012, if thou canst recall, as a great and powerful force of dragons has arrived among us. OK, so E3 wasn't that long ago (although it often feels like it), but something dragon-like has certainly surfaced: During the expo, I saw an impressive demo of Dragon Eternity, a cross-platform fantasy MMO from Game Insight, and as of this morning, the embargo on all the details of that demo has finally lifted. Hit the break and I'll tell you all about it!
