f13.net

Sometimes I dislike shit, but can't put it into words. Not for a while, anyway.

So tonight I'm thinking about why I dislike most quests (Tasks, missions, etc...) in MMORPGs. And I think a big reason is that my character is usually doing shit for other people.

"Get me 12 ferret eyes."
"Kill Hemmrhoid the Orc King."
"Go explore the stinky cheese cave."

I'm rarely, if ever, doing something that my character would be interested in, or doing a thing because my character wants it done.

How would quests be designed to be about what you (or your character) wants to do, though?  Besides, in general, that's how things make sense working, as an individual you need to align yourself to larger groups and adopt the goals of those groups, or at least accomplish them in order to advance yourself.  Personally I would do away with 'collect x monster parts' quests entirely, but that's both a style consideration and inventory annoyance (although a game with a separate 'quest item inventory' that only works for quest items and does not occupy space in your normal inventory would make that a lot less irritating.

I suppose one possible way to do the 'do what you want' is to create a quasi quest creation system where each monster is assigned a point value for difficulty (taking into account location, difficulty to reach, difficulty to kill, etc) and allots rewards depending on the difficulty of the quest you choose to create then undertake.  Toss in some 'points' in the world that can also be used as a generic 'interact with the ancient idol' setting also.  However, it seems like a lot of work just to pick what to kill or gather, not to mention, someone would find ways to exploit (or perhaps a better term would be powergame) it, as people would discover which combination of monsters makes for the best time to reward ratio.  I remember reading about discussions here some time ago about ways for players to create quests and dungeons for each other, and the problems inherent in such a system still seem to outweigh the benefits considerably, and I can't really think of any other way to tailor-make quests to what the player or character wants to do.

Maybe put it in a tree form.  You walk up to an npc and you might ask him "Have you heard of any magic swords?
This enables a tree which might look something like this:  Combat/weapon/sword/1hand.  If you asked him if anyone needed you to make them a magic robe it could go something like: Crafting/tailor/robe/(your crafting skill).  So then the npc says "Aye, I have heard of Stickitupyourass, it is said to reside in the nearby bog.

Random, dynamic quests could fill some of the gap.  Coming across [random monster] attacking a villager.  Save the villager (is it possible he dies?) and he tells you [random monster type] has been attacking the village.  Please save them.  Either kill most, all, or a specific target such as the queen to complete the quest.  If the villagers are dead you just get the loot spawned in the randomly laid out [adventure type area].  If they live, maybe they'll give you a few trinkets or tell you rumors about Stickitupyourass which generates a chain of random adventures.  Talking to other villagers linked to the system may earn you some respect, a small meal, or further rumors.  If the system is really good, maybe you can bargain with the villager before and after, and depending upon your attitude and how you went about completing the quest, get more or different rewards.

It's complicated, but doing it successfully is the holy grail of quest design.  Given enough variables (and a ton of options for each), you have a quest system to match Diablo's randomly generated maps.  Throw in truly random item rewards for extra fun.

(http://hellava.homestead.com/files/MULDER_POSTER_-_I_want_to_believe.jpg)

Either you meant to write it all in green, or you've just re-invented the XP and loot attached to mob kills. In the pre-WoW settings where they wouldn't bother to throw million quests at you, but rather just spawn the shit all over the place and let people pick freely what they want to grind at.

These sorts of discussions are neat, but you really need to consider it in the totality of XP-based DIKU gaming. That system compels the reliance on a whole bunch of shallow quests that don't require a lot of attention, because driving for the reward is more important than just experiencing for the sake of experiencing (since it's all about reward to unlock abilities).

So if you want better quests, you have to change the foundation of play.

Personally, I find myself disinterested in dynamic quest content because it either feels like I'm achieving some useless task generated by a machine or generated by myself. At least static quests (should) feel like someone lovingly crafted them to be achieved, rather than just playing mad libs with the quest system. In my opinion, much of the charm of single player gaming comes from the notion of overcoming a challenge and interacting with a story that is communicated by someone else.

Short of full-blown logical reasoning, implementing an NPC that you can 'realistically' interact with is either a matter of predictable scripting on a slightly larger scale or a frustrating sampling of randomly generated scenarios, many of which provide nothing in the way of context for why you're doing it. One option along this line would be having an entire village filled with 'intelligent' AI citizens that have interacting desires and capabilities, but such a system would be difficult enough to tweak effectively for a single player game and would be too complex to effectively engineer out unforseen emergent behavior, especially in an environment where there's thousands of players that could make commitments and never return. While ithat sounds cool and it would be interesting to have such an environment, the amount of risk involved is enough to scare off serious investors that want a guarantee that the game will continue to be fun. If one player can come into town and buy all the fish and flood it with gold you may get a situation in which NPCs buy what they need and just want fish for a month.

I'm not entirely sure what you mean about re-inventing XP and loot, but I was assuming that the idea would be to pick a reward for completing a task of your choosing (say, get a sword with certain stats which requires a quest worth 11250 'points' worth of activity, while a mage may do the same 11250 points of activity and opt for a robe instead) as opposed to loot being either random for grinding in a particular area, or camping a specific mob, both of which don't exactly allow you to do whatever you want if you want a specific reward.  If all you're after is exp, naturally, grind where you want, but loot tends to be localized to either a specific monster or a specific type of monster found in a particular region.

The dynamic quest generation system Lantyssa described makes more sense to me in the end, though.  Combining that with Tannhauser's explanation of a way to seek the particular reward that interests you - rather than having to wander the countryside looking for a random peasant in trouble that, when rescued, offered you the reward you want - would be effective.  Of course the difficulty is as noted, designing such a dynamic system in the first place.

However, when you really think about it, how many quest objectives exist in games right now?  Off-hand I can only think of three.

• Kill specific monster - also includes bringing back quest item that said monster is in the possession of or otherwise guarding, or destroying or otherwise interacting with an object guarded by the named monster.
• Kill X number of monsters - also includes bringing back a particular number of quest items including but not limited to body parts in the possession of said monsters, since those are simply a kill X number with a drop rate factored in.
• Deliver item or individual to specific location, passing through dangerous area in order to do so.  Delivery/escort quests.  Essentially the same thing.

Everything else is indeed, just 'playing mad libs with the quest system'.  Randomly generating a story that both makes sense and conveys a sense of story and background to it is not just difficult, it's extremely difficult and if it's obvious at all, people will have even more of an NPC-as-quest-dispenser feel than they do now.  It's possible to create entire groups of NPC's that behave quite realistically, but this probably isn't particularly conducive to fun for most people, for the above reasons.  UO NPC's were originally designed that way to a very limited degree (vendors would buy what they perceived they 'needed', the price they were willing to pay going down as their stock increased, until they were unwilling to purchase any more items at all).  It was interesting, but did not make for easy gameplay, as anything they sold that was useful - reagents, for example - were sold out almost all the time.  Furthermore, anything they would pay for that wasn't valuable to anyone but NPC's would flood their inventory much faster than they cleared their inventory, resulting in vendors that very quickly had nothing useful to sell and would purchase nothing.  Quests generated in the same manner would likely work the same way - all local dragons, orcs, skeletons, etc, would quickly be cleared out, removing the danger to the NPC's and therefore their desire to dispense related quests.

Written quests in WoW are designed to - and to a limited but considerably larger degree than other games I have personal experience with - attempt to pass along at least a little flavor to the player so they feel the world is more of a world.  There are few who play WoW who cannot tell you at least a basic overview of the world and the obvious interactions of the major characters, and few who have, for example, gone through Westfall and the Deadmines and don't have at least a slight grasp on the VanCleef storyline.  On the other hand, there are few who play (or played) EverQuest that can tell you much of anything about anything except in the most basic ways (example, dragons in Velious are at war with the Giants is about the extent of most players knowledge on that).  There's a lot of story in the game, but there are only a few who know anything, anything at all, about the background of what they're killing.  Written quests, as much as they may send you on things that you either as the player or the character doesn't particularly want to do, are still a lot better than either a quest-dispenser option or the EQ route.

WoW quests are the same as EQ1 quests except in quantity and percentage of XP gained from them per level. WoW is part of the migration away from grind-mob-based gameplay, but it simply shifted the activity away from one-area grinding to grinding your task list. Through sheer density of text alone have they introduced the game world and lore to the players. But you can't discount the story that already existed on the RTS side for the near-decade prior to WoW's launch.

And also due to that sheer density of quests, it's easy to get the impression that they're all delivery/kill quests. But some of these are very creatively wrapped in ongoing progressive stories that can be interesting. Because that's how delivery/kill quests usually wrapped in DIKUs. Even LoTRO, the quintessential story-based game is merely a series of the same tasks wrapped in different lore.

That's my point. If you want players to feel more a part of something, whether they're own story or the world's story, you need to ditch the idea itself that lore is just what you wrap a to-do list with. Until that day (and until the vast majority of PvE MMO players around the world prove they want it), all you're really asking for is more complex stories with greater player choice within them, beyond whether they want the one piece of armor they can wear or the three they can't.

Remember that quests in RPGs are designed to guide the player through the world, to give it context, and to point the player in the direction of the game mechanics (i.e. the fun). A lot of players expect that, and when they don't find it, they don't know what to do and they quit. Quests are also really really easy to make. Flavor text is secondary, as long as the player knows what he or she is supposed to be doing. I think too many resources are put into quests. They don't have to be that good, honestly.

So all those writers and artists and coders and designers need to step away from the content-heavy quests and into the rest of the world, to make those hidden lairs, rare spawns, scenic vistas, and random Tetris showers that give players something to do besides follow the quest NPCs.

Damn, honestly I don't know what else to put in a game besides quests. That's...that's all there has been for so long.  :ye_gods:

Personally, I'm rather fond of RND missions. From old Cyberstorm through X-Com and etc... up to SWG and Anarchy Online. at least I could use my imagination to fill in the blanks for why I'm out there blasting bad guys, instead of having a block of text spoon-feeding me my motivation.

Not only are the quests in (frex) WoW static, but everybody does them. Paladin, Shaman, Mage, pauper or prince, noble or greedy, everyone does the same questlines to get to 70. Not only do a lot of the characters in WoW look identical, but they have identical "histories".

I realize it takes resources to give players options in what they're doing. Arguably they already try with talent trees and crafting to give individual characters ways to differentiate themselves, but this shit directly contributes to my burnout of MMOGs.

Nine.

EDIT: In some single-player games, there's a 10th option, that consist entirely of conversation choice / persuasion skill checks. My opinion, worth what you paid for it, is that most RPG plots - even the best, most memorable ones - are nothing more than a series of these basic objectives dressed up with a connecting storyline.

Courier
The hated “FedEx quest.” You are given an item to take elsewhere, or asked to bring an item to the NPC from a safe location.

Retrieval
Retrieval quests have several subtypes. The first is a simple “recover” scenario. Recovery is going in search of an item protected by mobs, killing the mobs, and bringing the item back; essentially a FedEx quest with fighting. A variant is “theft.” This involves sneaking through a sparsely-populated dungeon of very powerful patrolling monsters to recover an item. A more obscure variant is “taming.” This implies hunting down and trapping or taming a live creature of one species or another.

Hunt
Another hoary old tradition, Hunts are also known as assassination or “kill Foozle” quests. That is, finding and slaying a particular uniquely named “character” mob or a number of generic mobs of one or more species. A variant of the Hunt is “clear dungeon,” which simply requires the player to kill everything he finds, regardless of species or level.

Escort
Escort is the inverse of Hunt. You are asked to escort an NPC or NPC trade caravan on an overland journey to a distant location within a specific period of time. The NPC moves from one city to another, and will be attacked by any ambient mobs it comes across en route.

Destroy
Destroy is a similar to Hunt. Instead of finding and slaying a mob, the player must fight his way through the mobs protecting a fixed object that must be destroyed. This may require using a special object (such as explosives or holy water) on the object. While the item is protected, it doesn’t fight back itself. A variant is “sabotage.” This is similar to the “theft” Retrieval scenario, in that the player must sneak through a sparsely-populated dungeon of very powerful patrolling monsters to find item he must destroy.

Defend
Defend is the inverse of Destroy. You are asked to keep mobs away from an item that they are trying to destroy for a certain period of time.

Track
Tracking quests are a peaceful variant of the Hunt. In these, you are given a vague area in which to locate a uniquely named wandering mob. Once you get within a certain distance of the mob, you may return. A variant, “stalk,” requires the player to stay within that distance of the mob for a certain period of time. Another possible variant is “exploration,” in which you are given directions to a location. If you get within a certain range of an invisible NPC at that location, the quest is completed. A last potential variant is the “survey,” which requires you to locate an area in which a certain type of resource is available.

Craft
Craft scenarios require a character to build a particular crafted item. This will usually require finding the materials and/or tools needed to make it. Alternately, the NPC may give you a broken item and ask you to fix it.

Competition
A staple of the more peaceable MUDs, competitions involve multiple players bringing back the most or best quality items to specific NPC within a set period of time. Examples of this scenario include fishing derbies, royal hunts, and “give the Lady the gift she likes most.”

Good list. I'd throw in there generic resource gathering as a subset Retrieval.  But I'd also display the list differently, more like a web of interactions (since you often have a combo of Retrieval, Track, Hunt and Destroy).

I'd also add to it a tenth one: Access

Not often used in MMOs, but could be more (and is in some parts of DDO). Having to "figure something out", usually on the way to a Retrieval, but doesn't need to be restricted to it. For example, you've got a PopCap-style minigame that you need to solve in order to open a door. In DIKU MMOs that'd be replaced with kill-mob/get-key. But in DDO there's a quest to get a scroll where once you find the room, you need to rotate tiles on the floor to unlock the magical shield that protects it. That is good stuff because a) it requires thought; and, b) if built the right way (like on a typical casual-game foundation) no amount of cheat site is going to help you actually solve it.

List of quest categories - Actually, if a game has more complex mechanics (ie: players do more than just killing rats/orcs/etc.) then quests can ask players to do more complex actions, and there are more categories.

Random comments about quests - Some thoughts about quests are here: http://www.mxac.com.au/drt/NutritionalGameDesign.htm (http://www.mxac.com.au/drt/NutritionalGameDesign.htm)

An excerpt, particularly pertinant to quests:

Interesting how you broke that down. I'd say there's only two kinds of quests; delivery, and tag. Gathering, FedEx, escort, those are all just delivering something to someone, or someone to somewhere. Hunting, exploring, and all that is just playing tag; you tag a number of monsters, or players, or objects, or locations on the map.

But then we could just boil every kind of quest down to "do shit." But that's not as helpful. :)

The end result of all this shit is the same (all this shit being the shit you do in RPGs and MMORPGs):

Every time you do a quest you get one step closer to games just being 'another job.' The only way to help that is to have incredible gameplay or incredibly dialogue - ideally, both. But genre-fans are easy to please. See: Wish, Lineage 2, Tabula Rasa, Horizons, insert Generic Console MMOG here (go ahead, use a Tales of...).

Methinks the genre is turning into bland croutons.

I feel vindicated. I recently let out that I consider Bioshock something akin to an RPG. Got a few strange looks. And yet, what do I read in the most recent PC Gamer but Desslock pretty much thinking similar.

If MMOs are in a rut, it's not because of bland quests and familiar mob AI. It's because at heart, they're still the same predictable time-based stat fights we've been doing forever. CoX tried to break out of this but they weren't successful enough to compel emulation. I have my doubts that TR will either.

For too long, an "RPG" has been assumed to require stats-based fighting, simply because the earliest ones stated that to "play a role is to play with dice". Meanwhile, for too long, an "FPS" has been assumed to required a sci-fi setting, simple because the earliest ones stated that to "shoot a gun and to avoid the censors one must shoot aliens".

A quest turns into a job when THE reason for undertaking the quest is the reward, and the actual quest activity is boring. (Wouldn't do it unless you paid me...)


Change to past tense... "has turned into bland croutons."

The thing about the NutritionalGameDesign LoTRO example is that it applies to the earlier WoW and EQ2. Those were really the biggest games to come along that shifted the grind from mob pounding to task list pounding, at least wrapping a thin veneer of story. Unfortunately, the sheer quantity of tasks required to feel content complete (and manage advancement time) ensures a lot are going to be simple derivations "go grind the mobs you would have anyway, except here's a clear predictable reason to do so". But for the genre at the time, it was enough (which tells us just how little it takes to impress some veterans...)

There's also CoX, which I thought made grinding entertaining by going a different way. Instead of a bunch of mobs standing around waiting to get axed, they created mini events where thugs mugged citizens. This was coupled with other citizens running from those crimes, thereby announcing something was going on if you could backtrack where the citizens were running from. While that game could use a lot more WoW/EQ2 style lore wrapped tasks, WoW and EQ2 could use the random-acts-of-meanness NPC thing from CoX as well.

And of course, they could all use a better reason for people to play the games than playing to get better at playing. But that'll go away or devolve out when people realize advertising an end point is at odds with there never actually being an end point. These aren't RPGs and never can be.

Wow. I felt a serious case of deja vu: Ratman starting  a "I hate mmo quests" thread, Stormwaltz with a list of basic quests, and comments from Slyfeind. All that's left is for me to make an insipid comment,  point out the obvious, and the circle will be complete.  :awesome_for_real:


I normally play a paladin so separating what my character wants to do from what an npc wants done is would be problematic. I think tho, instead of an npc giving me a "rescue the princess" quest, if I was to find out on my own that there was a princess in dire need of being rescued, I might enjoy it more.


I'll resist the urge of bringing up dynamic quests that change the world.  :dead_horse:

TR probably won't (unless it builds a player base by having a long tail in its ability to attract and keep players... which is unlikely) but CoH/V might. WoW is the more attractive target to homage, but there does seem to be a trend in MMOs being announced currently that are drifting away from fantasy (although we are certainly still in the gravitational pull of WoW) and towards sci-fi.

But then again, we (i.e. the MMO player population who thinks their opinions are important enough to post publicly) still have arguments over instance vs non-instanced content, despite pretty clear evidence for the advantages and disadvantages of each existing.

I'd love to believe we've finally played out fantasy for now, but going by what games are launching this year, I'm thinking not. Will reassess once the noise from WAR, AoC and WoW: WofTLK die down. Unfortunately for anyone else, there's not very many windows of opportunity unless you too have a huge ass marketing budget.

As to what's announced, well, I leave that to the years when they're actually launching :-)

True - perhaps I'm just ignoring fantasy games since I don't care for them. My interests lie in games like The Agency, The Secret World, Fallen Earth and MUO since these seem to be pushing the boundaries a bit more.

But none of these games even has a release date, so perhaps I'm an idiot.

If I were a betting man, I'd say that at least The Agency is going to launch this year. Hope to learn more at GDC. And I think both its theme and gameplay style make it the sort that can launch almost at any time because it is so different.

there's this cool advancement system i've seen in some games where you can do just about anything you want, and get rewarded based on the difficulty, time, and usefulness involved in doing it.



they call it a market economy.

Here's an idea. Every quest giver has a little test you take, like the first quest in Ultima games or the one from the Sayge at the faire in WoW. The, totally unrelated to how you answer the questions, he spits out a quest. This would give the illusion of quests just for your character without the extra expense of them designing a dynamic quest generation system, with all the abuses inherent in it.

Color the above only half green.

The 10th Coldain Ring quest in Velious-era EverQuest stands out for me as a classic. Yes it was a "defend" quest, but it was really epic.

Quest text (http://everquest.allakhazam.com/db/quest.html?quest=1291)
Someone's plan and map/sequence of events (http://www.casual-heroes.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=8828&sid=ef69e3ef95555afa394b0bb59d89d3e4)

That was cool, IMO but unlikely to ever be repeated thanks to the vocal soloers faction. Having to get several groups together is an anathema in todays game environment.

Maybe.

I think the basic problem with most quests is that they are designed for you to succeed. Therefore they are a treadmill-like chore instead of a challenge. A quest reward should be a mark of having succeeded where others failed.

That's what is missing in solo quests. They are assumed to be a mechanism for levelling, not a challenge with the chance of a reward.

But how can a quest be challenging?

 Even with the threat of death (with res sickness, permadeath and/or xp loss) getting killed while on a quest just means that you didn't have enough hit points.

On an escort quest, you're pretty much at the mercy of the escoree, or like Tabula Rasa, you lead the escortee, and avoid any danger.

Gather and hunt quests are just a measure of time spent.

Defend, possibly. I'm drawing a blank on any others.

I think he's talking about the possibility of being killed, which as you say, is more a binary issue than anything. You either have enough hp to survive or you dont. Besides, even under those terms, how do you make the quest challenging for all classes to solo? Make it easy enough that a holy priest can solo it and hunters and rogues sail through without raising a sweat.

Failing in the 10th ring war was 100% about the people you brought, not necessarily any particular skill on behalf of most. Enough dps/tanking/healing and you won. Not enough. You lost.

Ayn Rand approves this post.

So? Dying is failure which is a setback while others succeed. And if your amount of hitpoints is the sole determiner of success, the game is bad. In most MMORPGs your tactics are also vital. You have to make good decisions on which mobs to take down in which order, which abilities to use at certain points, where to stand, when to run left/right, and it makes a difference. Generally there is a vast combination of factors and anyone with any number of hitpoints can fail.



But if you only ever succeed by throwing time or resources at a problem, everybody eventually finds out you suck. "Hey, that guy's pretty well geared, let's recruit him ... uh oh, he's just one of those." If you're all soloing time and no skill, you become kind of irrelevant in the end.

I don't get this view that "anyone can do anything in any MMORPG if they bring enough people/hitpoints". That's not how it's been for me, especially now that games have raid population caps. It's also about tactics and implementation. Your leet 200-person ring war raid fails when everyone's taking down normal giants while Narandi the Wretched smashes his way through an unhealed tank and kills Seneschal Aldikar.

I know this because I'm an Aussie. There are too few of us in our time zone. We raid the same targets as US/European zerg guilds, but often with half the people. WoW is kind of an exception because its player base is so high we can actually form larger guilds. But in other games my guild needed to find the tipping point between a good player and a bad player, and if you didn't have it, you were off the team - and we could never find enough of what was needed.

My friend the enchanter was one of the first people to hit level 65 in EverQuest PoP era, because he was really, really good at the game. He invented a charm soloing tactic that later got nerfed. When you thought you were going to wipe, he'd keep about 20-30% more mobs mezzed than any other chanter.

He was also one of the richest people on the server for the same reasons. He saw opportunities in the market where others missed them. He never needed RMT until he sold his character and equipment for US$X,000 and put the money towards college. He was just 18 but he was a smart kid.

That should and does separate people. The group who can enter an untried new zone and figure it out faster than the pile of player corpses lying at the zone-in. The raid of 40 people that wipes, versus the disciplined raid of 40 who rescue their rotting corpses.

The first people to kill Nagafen with one group. The first person to solo Nagafen. They played better, sooner than other people. The solution was not "get more fire resist items", it was a combination of items and tactics and timing, thinking outside the square.

It's quite possible to implement quests that seem "too hard". It rarely seems to happen in WoW - they don't like to limit your levelling progress. But sometimes they do have the guts to really make something difficult like the first fight in Blackwing Lair used to be (can't remember name). Some guilds will do it in fewer attempts with better leadership and teamwork.

Is this not the definition of challenge? Can this not be how more quests are tuned?

For me, the most painfull part of a quest system is the repeatable story arcs.   It just screams single player RPG, which I hate.  Quests are not the unmovable foundation of mmorpg.  Why even bother.   I'd much prefer hunting in a zone like we did in early games.  Quest grinding need to get the hell out of my games.
You should never be able to get the same text twice.

But is it fun?

Quote more.

I never did the elite quests in WoW. I didn't have a guild to help me level, and pick-up groups suck.

If a quest requires extraordinary tactics to defeat, players will usually pass it by and stick to the easier ones. Players might go back to complete quests they passed by, when they've outgrown them.

"Anyone can do anything in any MMORPG if they bring enough people/hitpoints." I think that's what a lot of players want. They like to feel that time invested will pay off somehow. They like applying what they've done. I've never gone on a raid in WoW without knowing what happens before I get there. There are no surprises, no moments of "Holy crap he just lit the floor on fire!" or "What the hell, we're in a PLAY?!" It's always textbook, by the numbers. This is what a lot of players pay for.

I agree with you 100% but this thread started about solo quests, I thought, where all your examples are for group encounters, minus the guy who soloed nagafen, who mainly did it via twinking and bringing lots of heal potions.

For solo quests that will challenge you, check out the darkrune summoning quests in Blade's Edge mountains. http://www.wowhead.com/?item=32602#comments. It's a log involved solo quest where you mind control a demon to fight for you. When it's not bugged out on your server it's worth doing.

Quite a few of the epic flight form quests for druid also get fairly difficult at times as well. One where you fight a summoned mobs has a ton of adds, who can only be handled by using the bear form demoralizing roar, while another summoned mob does way too much melee damage to be tanked but takes extra damage from nature spells, forcing you to root and nuke. The quest line basically forces the druid to use every facet of his character as well as figuring out the weakness of the mobs. One quest even makes you use aquatic form to swim down a river while dodging depth charges and frost traps.

The problem with grinding in a zone is that players quickly figure out which zone has the optimal exp/loot and flock to it en mass. Without at least the tiny amount of socialization from grouping, this quickly devolves into a kill stealing, griefing mess, which is not something a game company want's to force their cs  staff to deal with. A good recent example was in WoW in the blade's edge mountains where people on the wrangling rays quest started griefing each other by killing rays other players were taming.

Dynamic quests are possible. Read the pdf at the end (http://www.gamasutra.com/education/theses/20050628/fairclough_01.shtml) of this article. Also, from the maker of GearHead, an article about (http://h-world.simugraph.com/pmwiki/pmwiki.php?n=Library.TipsForRandomStoryGeneration) dynamic quest formation.

You'd think that Blizzard would pump some money back into R&D with all the cash they're making, but profits are king, right? For quests to make any kind of meaningful progressions, it's going to take NPCs in a world who follow a schedule (Gothic, anyone) and have changing need-states.

Sims have changing need-states. They have schedule they'll try to meet if not interrupted. Their need-states are essentially mini-quests they throw at you (make some money, get that other sim in the sack, get me a new toy, go to the bathroom)  Do you feel like playing the sims and trying to fullfill their RNG needs is significantly better than current MMO quest model? Honestly not sure, given at the end of day it's the player themselves that breaks suspension of disbelief in the whole system, since they are perfectly aware the "person in need" is simple piece of code and lookup tables, with no actual needs or feelings to speak of.

On different note: player generated content, Holic Online (http://holic.netgame.com/information/system.php) (click the UCD tab for the overview) ... nothing particularly special or new but guess they're trying.

Sims 2 sims are very expressive. With the "simlish" and facial expressions. They did a really good job of making those little virtual dolls seem at least a little like people. "They" say that 90% of communication is tone of voice and body language.

I have no clue how that could map to MMORPGs and quests...

I was just wondering if having sim-like NPCs that wander around the MMO town and have randomly generated quests to fetch them things and escort them places would really be so much more immersive and/or fun than having these NPCs in fixed spot and with fixed wishes. Or would the players just get pissed that not only the quests are usual repetitive garbage, but now they also have to run around town in search of roaming dispensers ... as that's what they'd still be seen as, piece-of-code quest dispensers.

Also thinking of it more, ain't Pirates of Burning Sea using 'randomized' quests where the details are determined by RNG... and people still complained these are just repetitive mad-libs no different from the fixed questing? Mainly due to the players easily seeing through the facade of 'dynamic quests' and realizing they're just as meaningless as the usual 'kill 10 rats' stuff.

UO had this back in the day, led to people wlaking through towns spamming "I will take thee" or later "Vendor bank Guards I will take thee" and leading trains of NPCs hither and yon/  They also had quests where NPCs would ask for the head of randomc NPC x.  Problem was killing friendly NPCs was a one way ticket to either getting guard whacked or becoming red and then getting guard whacked. 

Nope, PoBS has hand-scripted quests. But yeah, I'd say random quests (a la SWG) are even more meaningless than scripted ones, because the devs couldn't be bothered to make them. At least with scripted content, someone once upon a time thought it was a neat little story, and that at least means something.

UO's original design was far more ambitious, according to Raph Koster. NPCs would not only have needs or desires, which could change, but they would identify the things getting in the way of fulfilling those desires and ask the players to help them out.

For example:


http://www.raphkoster.com/2006/06/05/uos-resource-system-part-3/

Perhaps unsurprisingly, this never made it into the game. However, this was more than ten years ago and perhaps today's servers would be capable of running this kind of thing. Whether programming it in would be more rewarding than creating static quests, in terms of money spent vs money extracted from gamers, I dunno.

It does seem to me though that MMOs are going backwards rather than forwards in terms of design. Raph didn't achieve half of what he wanted but at least he thought big. Are there any MMOs on the horizon which have anything remotely like this kind of ambition?

Yep, going backwards. I thought  I was a fan of the genre 10 years ago, such hopes for a bright future, not so much these days. I've tried all the releases and :nda: I could lately and nothing but *yawn*. I'm not sure I understand some of what he is saying but Raph seems to touch on this in his WiM talk (http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=17451). (edit: This report (http://www.virtualworldsnews.com/2008/02/liveblogging-wo.html) of Raph's talk made it more understandable to me, I love this part; "... It’s not about virtual worlds; it’s about the real world. It’s about people. That’s what makes virtual worlds the killer app. It’s us. It’s other people...", Not to derail this thread though, I always find the discussions about dynamic type quest stuff fascinating...).

Maybe not as much backward but rather in different direction -- instead of sandbox filled with scripted people that can act and react to stuff in unpredictable ways, it's now more of amusement park ride where every customer gets the same, carefully tailored experience.