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The Tattered Notebook: No one is left behind
'Allo again, lovelies. Last week has been a week of danger and intrigue as I battled through Nektulos Forest and worked on getting my unique Shadowknight armor. During all of this, though, I thought to myself -- how can I apply any of these experiences to my notebook entry for this coming week? Then of course, it hit me. Why not just explain what I've been doing to get through the areas in a short amount of time? A few tips and tricks for playing the level game? Sure, I've been up and down with grouping and preparations for Sentinel's Fate, but many players are always intimidated when entering a game and "being behind." Well, don't worry about being behind. You're not entering the game late at all when it comes to EverQuest II, especially thanks to the recent additions to the game in Sentinel's Fate. Interested in catching up and experiencing some great content? Then click on through after the break! Also, I'm still looking for questions anyone has on EverQuest II, so I can answer them in an upcoming Tattered Notebook. Ask me anything, from EverQuest II questions, guild leadership and raiding questions, and even questions on my Dark Elven heritage. Send them over to seraphina@massively.com, and she'll be sure to forward them on through the Norrathian Express mail to me.
Breakfast Topic: This is my quest
A little musical interlude for your morning, courtesy of Peter O'Toole and Sophia Loren. On with the topic: quests, of course! With the upcoming expansion, there are going to be a lot of changes happening all through Azeroth, both to the way the world looks, and to the quest givers and quests that we've all grown so familiar with. Some quests will stay, some will change, and some will simply go away, never to be completed again. There are two quests I recommend that people do now, just in case they vanish into the nether when Cataclysm hits. One is Alliance, and one is Horde, in the interests of equality: Alliance: Sully Balloo's Letter: This one is entirely too easy for Alliance players to miss, as there's no indicator on the minimap that a quest even exists. If you go to the bridge over the Thandol Span and jump off into the water below, you'll find the skeletal corpse of a dwarf crushed by a boulder. In his hand is a note with a gear icon if you mouse over it -- clicking it gives you a Waterlogged Envelope that will start the quest. While the chain that starts is interesting enough, it's the letter itself that's noteworthy -- be sure to read it before you turn it in. For history buffs, yes, this is a reference to Sullivan Ballou, the Major from the Civil War. Horde: Test of Faith: This quest is pretty straightforward and simple, but players sometimes miss it both because it's in Thousand Needles, and because it's so far off the beaten path in Thousand Needles. You get it from Dorn Plainstrider, who's off in a little cave in the side of the cliffs just northwest of Freewind Post. Dorn gives you this quest, it's really quite simple: He teleports you to the top of one of Thousand Needles peaks. The quest objective? Jump off. I won't say what happens, but it's a long way down. So here's my question for you Breakfast Topic types: If you were asked to recommend just one quest to someone, one that really stuck out in your mind, what would it be?
The Tattered Notebook: Sentinel's Fate aftermath and advice
Hrm. After a brief vacation, darlings, I am back at the reigns of my column. Neriak was lovely this time of year -- I encourage you all to stop by for a visit if you have the time. But who has the time these days, right? All of your are off exploring Odus as if you haven't seen the place in 500 years. I hear that some adventurers are already tackling some of the most dangerous dungeons on that continent already! My, my, my, how you all tackle your challenges so quickly. Many of you have had some very interesting things to say about Odus, and I've been silently watching and taking some notes. I've got them all right here, tucked away in my notebook. I've even amassed some answers for a few of your more common problems, just in time for the digital download release today. But, all of you can never say that Seccia Ravenloft was a secretive elf. I'm more than happy to share my findings so come closely, gather around the campfire, and listen here.
The Daily Grind: Should MMOs be more or less reliant on questing?
MMOs and questing have become inseparable, much like breakfast and bacon or Abbott and Costello. Since World of Warcraft popularized the "questing exclamation point," MMOs have since embraced the concept and have utilized it in one way or another ever since. Today's question is an interesting one, as we want to know what you guys think of quests. Do you think MMOs should be more reliant on questing, using quests to drive story and other gameplay elements, or should they be less reliant on questing, seeking to entertain the player through a more varied set of systems? So go on, hit that comment box, and tell us all about your gripes with questing or your love for the exclamation mark. Share them with fellow readers, get into a conversation, and let's see what comes out today's Daily Grind.
Breakfast Topic: What you hope survives the cataclysm
It's no secret that certain things (and even whole zones, in their current state) are going to go the way of the dodo when Cataclysm arrives, and both players and developers have talked a lot about the changes in Azeroth and environs beyond. By contrast, today I'm interested in hearing about what you don't want to see eighty-sixed -- the quests you'd miss, the factions or NPC's you hope will cling to life, the dungeons or raids you don't want to see go gentle into that good night. Personally, as dumb as I know this will probably sound, when I think about old Azeroth my mind immediately returns to a tiny quest called Until Death Do Us Part. It's started by a bitter Forsaken who wants you take a pendant to her husband's grave at the Sepulcher. If you only wanted to look at it in terms of game mechanics, then it's a Fed-Ex quest designed to get you across the ocean and questing in Silverpine, but even with all the improvements to questing today, it stands apart. It's a very long journey for a young character, and when you finally arrive at the Sepulcher and find the husband's grave, you realize you've come all this way to deliver a worthless trinket to someone who threw his life away on a hopeless cause. You turn it in and...that's it. There is no follow-up. There is no happy ending. There is, however, the feeling that there's more to the savagery of the Forsaken than meets the eye. Blizzard is actually trying to move away from quests that emphasize text over cool visuals, and it makes me a little sad just because Until Death Do Us Part was, from a writing standpoint, a masterpiece of effective writing and quick exposition. I'm hoping that, out of all the quests that stand to get axed in Cataclysm, this little gem survives.
Patch 3.3 PTR: New UI function lists completed quests
Over on the WoW LJ community, poster Honem has pointed out something that made me sort of squeal with glee when I first read it: The latest PTR build includes a couple very interesting new functions, as reported by official forum MVP Iriel: NEW - QueryQuestsCompleted() requests that the server send the client a list of completed quest ids. Once the list is received the QUEST_QUERY_COMPLETE event is fired. (There is a limit on how frequently this can be called) NEW - tbl = GetQuestsCompleted([tbl]) populates a table (creating one if necessary) with the ids of completed quests.
Five more quick tips for Aion (p2)
The two main ways your character gains levels in Aion is through questing and grinding. Nodes always respawn in the same spot within about 5 minutes, so you should be able to keep up a decent pace killing mobs and collecting between two or three nodes.
Five more quick tips for Aion
We spent a lot of time playing Aion last weekend and have another round of quick tips to share with you. Check out last week's list in case you missed it. Enjoy!1. Cheaply level your craftThis tip assumes you know the basics of crafting. The fastest and cheapest way to raise your crafting skill is to complete work orders given out by your crafting trainer in the Artisan district in your capital city. Crafting costs kinah (money), but there are three important things you should bear in mind to maximize your savings.First, only grind up your skill on work orders 10-15 levels below your current crafting level. For instance, if your Tailoring is at 40, only do work orders that require a 30 Tailoring until you reach 50 skill points. Each work order will give you around 1-1.5 skill points, will complete more quickly with a higher level of success, and your extra ingredient(s) cost will be lower from the crafting vendor.Second, only make as many items as needed to complete your work order. Each work order only requires that you create 6 items but the trainer gives you enough basic ingredients for 8. Too many people click "Craft All," which ends up wasting additional resources (i.e., money). Manually type in "6" and then press your craft button.
The making of the World of Warcraft
Eurogamer has a nice long look at the early days of World of Warcraft, way before Northrend and Outland and even Molten Core, back when the question wasn't just how big the game would get, but whether Blizzard, a company known for their polish rather than their size, could pull off an entry in this new MMO genre. They've interviewed some of Blizzard's luminaries, and the piece offers a really good look at what it was like at Blizzard even before WoW's release, when they were hashing out some of the ideas and mechanics that have now set the bar with World of Warcraft: the stylistic Warcraft look, and questing as storytelling (originally, they thought they'd only do quests through the starting levels, and then have the game move to a grinding, monster-killing stage towards the end, but players said the game was boring without quests).There are all kinds of great little tidbits in here: originally, Warcraft III was planned with the over-the-shoulder look that WoW now has, and that's one of the reasons they wanted to create a more straightforward RPG game. Tom Chilton showed up on the team about a year before WoW's release, and to his surprise, the game was almost completely unfinished -- the level cap was only 15, the talent system wasn't implemented, the AH or mail systems weren't in, PvP wasn't in at all (of course, even at release it was pretty barebones), and endgame raiding was nonexistent. Most of the things we think of as intrinsic to the World of Warcraft -- even things like the Horde and Alliance not speaking to each other -- were debated and almost not in at all as they moved towards release.
Heirlooms for every slot
I've been pushing forward on my Paladin lately, and so I've entered the wacky world of Heirlooms. I have already picked up the leather Heirloom shoulders (thinking that even though the Pally wears plate, if I ever want to level a Druid or Rogue, I'll have them), and I'm well on my way to grabbing the new Heirloom chestpiece as well -- 20% bonus XP, combined with a healthy amount of rested XP, should make the leveling curve as easy as it gets (RaF is nice too, I guess, but I'd rather not pay for a second account). So I'm in Heirlooms up to my neck (at least until they give us helms), and I was intrigued by this question over on the Rawrcast forums: do you think Blizzard will eventually provide Heirloom items for every slot?20% is already a significant bonus to killing and questing XP, and rested technically provides a 50% bonus. But with ten Heirlooms in 10 slots (we'll leave out weapons, since those don't have the 10% XP bonus, as well as shirts and tabards, and rings and trinkets for now), you're looking at a 100% XP bonus even without Rest. The current average 80 probably spent about 14 days leveling up, so with an extra 100% bonus, you're looking at seven days /played, or very close to the current record. At that point, Blizzard might as well let us grant levels to each other.
The next level of questing
Elnia at the Pink Pigtail Inn has some excellent and interesting advice for Blizzard's quest designers (or whoever they hire for the current position). As big a component as quests are in the game, they haven't been innovated on much since the game's release. Blizzard has played around a little bit with allowing us to repeat certain quests, and they've streamlined the group questing mechanic, but other than that, quests are pretty much the same: pick up a task, do it, and bring it back for a reward.So how can it be done differently? Elnia has some great ideas: she asks for quests that span a little farther, that push players through a storyline that might even follow them all the way up to 80 (of course, there are quests like that, though they're few and far between -- and not all players have the patience to finish them). Rewards could be mixed up, too -- instead of the old gold and XP, how about some profession skill, or a tradeoff of badges based on certain quests done. Finally, Elnia suggests that every quest in the game become repeatable. Questing is paced to keep us interested in from 1-60, but we all know how the game works now -- why not let us do some of our favorite quests over more than once?I'd suggest we go even farther -- Warhammer Online offers Public Quests that are an interesting twist on the usual "go kill boars" mechanic. I'd like to see branching quests with more than one outcome -- maybe a moral choice to make that affects the storyline of the quest you're doing. And talking real pie-in-the-sky here, I'd like to see questgivers treat you different based on the way you look or maybe what title you've got equipped. If you've got "Jenkins," they might not expect you to do much, but with "Champion of Ulduar" over your head, they should probably be groveling at your feet.
Choose My Adventure: Turpen dings 45
WoW.com readers, it's up to you to decide the fate of Turpen the Gnome Warlock with Choose My Adventure. Casting your vote toward the many aspects of Turpen and make him your own! Well, not literally. He belongs to Alex, but you know what we mean.Well, it took longer than I had hoped, but Turpen has finally dinged level 45 and he did it in the wet, muddy wastes of Dustwallow Marsh. It wasn't particularly hard, but between all of the patch 3.2 preparation I've been doing, it was sort of a scatterbrained trip. Do a few quests here, a few quests there... all in all, it wasn't particularly memorable!Throwing fuel on the 'not very memorable' fire was the completely anticlimactic ding of level 40. I remember that level being something of a landmark, but for Turpen the level came and went without much celebration. Mounts are at level 30 now, and the level 40 talent for Affliction Warlocks is pretty useful, but not much to get excited about. Oh boy, Dark Pact! Mana regen is so exciting! Don't get me wrong, I love me some mana, but could there be anything less exciting to someone who's leveling, questing and exploring? I want toys! I want explosions! I want excitement! This was none of those things. Maybe I would've been more excited if I run around with my Imp or Succubus out, but I've been getting pretty good mileage out of my Voidwalker still. I didn't have mana problems before Dark Pact, so I rarely use it now that I have it.
Patch 3.2 will show quest objectives on the world map
The patch 3.2 PTR patch notes have been updated again; I still expect the PTR to go live sometime today. The only new information in this iteration of the notes is what they'll be marking in the way of quest objectives on the world map, and with what markers. We already knew they'd be doing something like this, but we didn't have the specifics. User Interface: Quest creatures and objects will now show on the player's world map. A skull graphic will be placed on the map in the general area where creatures players must kill can be found. A glowing skull graphic will be placed on the map in the general area where creatures can be found that drop quest objects. A gear graphic will be placed on the map in the general area where players must loot objects found in the world. A chat bubble graphic will be placed on the map in the general area where players must interact with a specific NPC. X marks the spot on the map where players must reach, discover or explore a designated area. A yellow question mark graphic will show on the map to provide the location of a NPC whose quest the player has completed.
GDC09: Spending time with the cruise director of Azeroth
At GDC09, we got to talk with many people and listened to a variety of panels on all aspects of game design. But there was little doubt as to which panel attracted loads of attention -- the Jeff Kaplan panel on quest design in World of Warcraft.Warcraft has come extremely far in terms of their UI design and quest implementation since the game launched back in 2004. Just between 2007 and 2009, Kaplan revealed that over 8,570,222,436 quests have been completed, while the daily average was 16,641,409. With those numbers in place, it's safe to say that World of Warcraft players are driven by their questing.Kaplan's panel revealed a few tricks of the trade, as well as his beliefs regarding questing, so without further adieu let's get into the meat of his panel.%Gallery-49071%
GDC09: Spending time with the cruise director of Azeroth pt. 2
Mistakes of World of Warcraft Kaplan was quick to note that Warcraft was far from perfect, and he wanted to highlight some of his own mistakes inside of the design. The first mistake was the idea of the "Christmas tree effect," otherwise known as having so many quests in a quest hub that the minimap lights up with exclamation points like a Christmas tree. While players enjoy this, Kaplan wanted to say that the developer loses call control over the player at these points, as the player will not read any quest text in their clicking frenzy. There's no control over what quest leads into what or which order the player will do the quests in. The second was the internet adage of "too long, didn't read." Quest designers don't need to write a book to get their point across with the quests. He brought up that video games had a type of "medium envy," where sometimes they get too preachy with their topics. Games should be fun first, story second. Mystery also falls in this category. The story can provide mystery, but the quest log should never have any mystery to it. The quest log should always point where to go and what to do, but the overall story of those quests may provide some solution to some mystery. Also avoid poorly placed quest chains, like the Chains of Myzrael questline in Arathi Highlands. The Myzrael line was hard to find, ended up spanning 14 levels, and ended with killing an elite mob that was level 44. This quest line was a "brick wall" according to Kaplan, because most players never stuck with it. It's good to have quest chains that span content, but quest chains like this break down trust the player has with the developer. When the player runs into a chain that he can't finish with a monster he can't kill, the player loses trust in the developer's sense of guiding them to fun. He also emphasized to avoid inserting "gimmick quests." His example here was part of the Oculus dungeon where players ride on dragons. These types of quests center around doing something the client may not be able to properly handle. Warcraft was not designed to accommodate vehicles. When developers resort to putting in parts of the game that center around a gimmick, it can detract from the fun of the rest of the game. The horror of collection quests Kaplan's speech ended with an analysis of why people hate collection quests so much, and a few tips on how to make collection quests into a better experience. His problems with the quests stemmed from three areas -- dense creature population, too few of a creature to kill, and having a wide variety of items required for the quest. Having a dense creature population can put off people, especially when there's a lack of the monster required for the quest. If someone has to kill four lions for every one raptor required for the quest, then there's a problem. His other point was that collection quests shouldn't require an insane amount of items. To everyone's amusement, he brought up the Green Hills of Stranglethorn quest chain (a chain he wrote) as the exact thing a designer should never do. Collection quests should be an easily obtainable number of items, and not such a long grind fest with the hope that your required item might drop. Lastly, never have the player question why they're collecting the item required -- it should be clear from the onset. Kaplan brought up the infamous gnoll paw collecting quests, in which gnolls may or may not drop paws upon death, where obviously a gnoll has four paws and not a number between 0 and 1 (which everyone applauded at loudly). Quests should make sense and not become a gimmick in their own right. This causes the player to once again, lose trust. Most of these points that Kaplan has brought up pertain to Warcraft, but can easily be applied to any game on the market. With all of this in mind, perhaps we'll get to see some better design in our MMOs from other developers, now that we're all on the same page... of the Green Hills of Stranglethorn.
Progressive drop rates
Jeff Kaplan has said some interesting things at this year's GDC (expect a full account from us soon). One of them concerned a new technology that debuted in Wrath of the Lich King which I, for one, had not heard of before: progressive drop rates for quest items. Pre-Wrath, if you're on a collection quest, whatever you're trying to collect will drop at a constant rate (35% was apparently the standard). Overall, this averages to a predictable amount of kills per quest. But probability being the way it is, it was altogether possible to have terrible luck and have to kill 100 foozles to get your four gizmos, or to have great luck and get your gizmos in only four kills. It was the bad streaks that the devs were particularly concerned about, as those are very memorable and never fun. In Wrath, according to Kaplan, drop rates for quest items are progressive - the more foozles you kill, the higher chance each one has to drop a gizmo. The standard quest item drop rate has been raised to 45%, and each kill you make raises that drop rate by some amount. Kaplan said that it can eventually reach 100%, at which point every kill would drop your item. This puts a hard cap on just how frustrating a collection quest can be. Seems like a smart idea to me. I hadn't really noticed Wrath collection quests being easier, but then, I wouldn't - I simply wouldn't have bad-luck streaks, the absence of which might not be easy to notice. [via Shacknews]
Kaplan on being the "Cruise Director of Azeroth" at GDC '09
Jeffrey "Tigole" Kaplan, former WoW Lead Designer who just recently headed off to work on Blizzard's new MMO, held a panel at the Game Developer's Conference earlier this week in San Fransisco called "Cruise Directior of Azeroth," in which he talked about some of the design decisions behind World of Warcraft, where Blizzard got their inspiration for a lot of the gameplay now made famous by the game, and even some of the mistakes they made in putting the world's most popular MMO together.WoW Insider had correspondents there on the site, and they sent back audio of Kaplan's speech. We've paraphrased the salient points, and you can find them all after the break. There's some really interesting stuff in there, including the fact that in the past two years, 80 billion quests have been completed in North America's Azeroth alone, and just who is behind the frustration that is The Green Hills of Stranglethorn (hint: it's Kaplan himself).Hit the link below to see what Kaplan told the crowd at GDC.%Gallery-48658%
Starting out in Vana'diel: Questing and you
Hello again adventurers! Today's topic is once again back on hard gaming ground instead of community theory as I introduce quests and their purpose.Questing in Final Fantasy XI is not like questing in other games. Quests exist, but they don't jump out at you with bright yellow exclamation points. NPCs don't scream, "I have things for you to do for me!" Quests don't hold your hand as you pursue their goals. Also, most importantly, quests don't reward experience.So why bother, right? If you're only going to get come cruddy gold and maybe an item, why should you spend your time doing the quest? Beautiful question, and a very accurate one. Let's take a look at the quest system, what it has to offer you, and how to find some quests at your level with ease.
Quests added to mob tooltips on the PTR
The Godmother over at ALT:ernative ducked into the PTR recently, and noticed something new: Blizzard is apparently testing adding Questhelper-style notes to tooltips of the quest-related mobs you come across. This looks so familiar that I thought it was an addon, but no, apparently Blizzard really is planning to tell you when a mob you're looking at happens to be the target of a quest.It shocked me for a second -- not only is this dumbing down the questing game even further (maybe someday we will have a large red arrow pointing out a quest target from zones away), but it seems to be an awfully big break in immersion. Blizzard is basically telling you that "this is the mob you need, right here," and actually reading the quest text becomes even less necessary.But then I realized that tooltips themselves aren't exactly paragons of game immersion -- it's already a little jump in the reality of the game to see a box with a mob's name and level whenever you mouse over it. Tooltips are already where the UI meets the road, so to speak. And as for the "dumbing down" of the game, most experienced players already had this functionality through addons like Questhelper and MonkeyQuest anyway (and if you do plan to complain that this makes things way too easy, make sure Questhelper is out of your Addon directory before you start typing). But if the tips stay in the game when the patch goes live, questing will be that much easier for people who stick to the basic UI.
Finding unfinished quests
Alan on LJ is having a problem I've been thinking a lot about lately -- like me, he wants to go back and finish the Loremaster achievement, which asks you to clean up all of the quests in the old continents. But like me, he's wondering just how he'll find all of those old quests -- unfortunately, there's no way to know which quests have and haven't been done, and while of course, there's a "low level quest" tracking option, that still requires you to run around to all of the different quest locations to find them.A forum thread like this one is a huge help, but still, there's no way in the game to really go back and easily find which ones we've missed. Even with a list like that, you might spend twenty minutes trying for a drop before realizing you've already done that quest. Blizzard promised us a little while back that they'd be changing the "discovery" mechanic (so that we'd be able to see on the map which areas we hadn't discovered for the achivements yet), and an option like that might be helpful for cleaning up old quest -- say that low level quest tracking might work over the entire map, or there might be a magic box in Dalaran that would have whatever quest items we might need.The good news here is that Blizzard has built a fair amount of leeway into the quest achievements -- you won't need every single one to get the points, so the more obscure drop-based quests can probably go undone without worry. But just like the World Exploration achievements, a little more help finding the quests we might have missed would go a long way.
