Fuck quest driven content.

[DLRiley]

I grew up on mob grind. Never had a problem slaughtering monsters just had a problem doing so for 8 hours straight for half an xp bar. My issue is really the grind not whether i'm quest grinding or mob grinding. I would love for quest to be like..quest but that's asking too much. To me quest are what most people call raids...

[Mrbloodworth]

I grew up on mob grind. Never had a problem slaughtering monsters just had a problem doing so for 8 hours straight for half an xp bar. My issue is really the grind not whether i'm quest grinding or mob grinding. I would love for quest to be like..quest but that's asking too much. To me quest are what most people call raids...

[Morfiend]

It honestly sounds to me that the problem _tf has is that he wants a virtual world, not a online theme park. I can understand that feeling. Although I would take the WoW/LotRO quest grind over the Aion mob grind any day.

[Mrbloodworth]

It honestly sounds to me that the problem _tf has is that he wants a virtual world, not a online theme park. I can understand that feeling. Although I would take the WoW/LotRO quest grind over the Aion mob grind any day.

[Ingmar]

I second the notion that it sounds like DDO is the game you want, at least in a theoretical sense. I'm not personally detecting any desire for virtual worldness here. Just a desire for group-focused content, and that's basically all you get from DDO.

[Sky]

At 15, you should be nearly to Othrongroth -- the conclusion of Epic Book I, set in the Barrow Downs. It's the only Book I've finished with a group, and it's pretty memorable.

Hmm. My champ is level 20 and I'm not there. I do a lot of side-quests and dick around with crafting and hanging out at the AH playing crappy midi songs (at least they're period-appropriate, if I hear Stairway to Heaven again...).

[Tarami]

He lost a keyboard, but he found a friendly image search.

[Venkman]

Woohoo, a general rant thread!

I want SWG with good combat. It had everything. It's just that none of it worked.

[Lantyssa]

I want SWG with good combat. It had everything. It's just that none of it worked.

[Ingmar]

About 15 minutes into my trial of SWG it told me to kill 90 rats. Well I suppose technically it was skin 90 rats.

[Lantyssa]

Which version?

[tmp]

About 15 minutes into my trial of SWG it told me to kill 90 rats. Well I suppose technically it was skin 90 rats.

My SWG trial involved two or three quests from a dispenser that told me to run across half of randomly (and badly) generated planet landscape to slay a few rats spawned over there for me. Or deliver a package.

So half way through that second or third run i said fuck it and spent rest of the trial crafting rifles and shopping for clothes with the money i made. Sadly, very little of these looked any good, too.

[Ingmar]

Years ago at this point. Pre-NGE. I was doing some sort of intro tutorial thing - I was a wookie something-or-other, the 90 rats was actually the 3rd thing I had to do, I forget what the first thing was, second thing was skin 10 rats or something. Some guy came up to me and tried to get me to group with him to do something I didn't really get so I pretended I could only speak Wookie so he'd go away.  

But yeah it was basically "Here, let's teach you how to do the basics of your crafting shit, kill 10 rats, skin them, and make a tent." And I thought OK I can do that. After I did it, it basically said "Great! Now that you know how to do that, kill 90 rats, skin them, and ..."  

[Sobelius]

About 15 minutes into my trial of SWG it told me to kill 90 rats. Well I suppose technically it was skin 90 rats.

My SWG trial involved two or three quests from a dispenser that told me to run across half of randomly (and badly) generated planet landscape to slay a few rats spawned over there for me. Or deliver a package.

So half way through that second or third run i said fuck it and spent rest of the trial crafting rifles and shopping for clothes with the money i made. Sadly, very little of these looked any good, too.

That describes Anarchy Online.

[Slyfeind]

Oh god yeah, I remember that. I was like, "WTF?" I was doing the crafting equivalent, which meant I was going to Craft90Modules anyway, but if it was a kill quest, I would have dropped it in an instant.

Who started that whole thing, quest loot only drops when you're on the quest, was it WoW?

[Mrbloodworth]

Some technical director somewhere, I am sure. I think its more of a technology issue really, than a game play one.

[Ingmar]

If quest loot shares the same bag space with regular loot, then it is far preferable for it to only drop when you're on the quest.

[Threash]

If quest loot shares the same bag space with regular loot, then it is far preferable for it to only drop when you're on the quest.

Then it shouldn't!

[Teleku]

Oh god yeah, I remember that. I was like, "WTF?" I was doing the crafting equivalent, which meant I was going to Craft90Modules anyway, but if it was a kill quest, I would have dropped it in an instant.

Who started that whole thing, quest loot only drops when you're on the quest, was it WoW?

WoW was the first one I saw that did it.

I thought it was just a way to prevent people from farming quest loot and selling to people.  In EQ I'd just go buy a bunch of the shit I needed to turn in and spam the quest giver with it to gain levels instantly.

[Venkman]

Oh god yeah, I remember that. I was like, "WTF?" I was doing the crafting equivalent, which meant I was going to Craft90Modules anyway, but if it was a kill quest, I would have dropped it in an instant.

Who started that whole thing, quest loot only drops when you're on the quest, was it WoW?

CoH was the first I remember. EQ2 then ran with it. WoW too of course but no idea who copied who during beta on this feature.

[Ingmar]

Oh god yeah, I remember that. I was like, "WTF?" I was doing the crafting equivalent, which meant I was going to Craft90Modules anyway, but if it was a kill quest, I would have dropped it in an instant.

Who started that whole thing, quest loot only drops when you're on the quest, was it WoW?

CoH was the first I remember. EQ2 then ran with it. WoW too of course but no idea who copied who during beta on this feature.

Ummm... CoH didn't have loot at the time, quest or otherwise.

[Samwise]

I want SWG with good combat.

Have you tried Fallen Earth?  That's about how I describe it to people.  SWG with much less suck.

[Ratman_tf]

Wandering around just killing shit to grind levels isn't much of an attraction for me either.  I crave direction and purpose.

I do too, but I hate being given orders by NPC bots. If I were to put it into words, I'd say that I'd like more organically generated content. From quest items that drop from mobs, giving me the illusion that I found the quest, as opposed to being handed it by an NPC; to personally generated goals. Most of those come from tradeskills. Gathering and crafting items. Now, I know anything can become a grind when you're trying to do a lot of activity X to get to point Y, but a little lateral thinking in how to deliver content can go a long way with me.

[Ratman_tf]

About 15 minutes into my trial of SWG it told me to kill 90 rats. Well I suppose technically it was skin 90 rats.

My SWG trial involved two or three quests from a dispenser that told me to run across half of randomly (and badly) generated planet landscape to slay a few rats spawned over there for me. Or deliver a package.

So half way through that second or third run i said fuck it and spent rest of the trial crafting rifles and shopping for clothes with the money i made. Sadly, very little of these looked any good, too.

Gah. My feeling is that if they had decent PvE and PvP content, to go along with the very robust tradeskill/harvesting system, then SWG would have been damn near perfect. And I'm not talking "If I had a million dollars, I'd be a millionaire!", I'm talking "Raph doesn't seem to enjoy Diablos as much as MUSHes."

[Gunzwei]

But that doesn't exist anymore.  Quest grind is exactly the same as mob grind but with a bunch of running back and forth thrown in, the only difference is with straight mob grinding you spend your time fighting rather than running places.

There's no flavor to that.  I know what I'm essentially doing, but instead of just grinding out mobs; I'm moving around, getting some lore/story in, exploring, and getting rewards on top of whatever I got for killing.  If combat were that interesting in these games, I might not mind grinding, but there's other issues mob grinding introduces.  I haven't seen them addressed, because I really haven't seen that mode of leveling encouraged in games I'm interested in.  Of course, I do enough research that I'll likely avoid that in any case, so I'll likely not see the improvements.  

Wandering around just killing shit to grind levels isn't much of an attraction for me either.  I crave direction and purpose.

A few years back when I was really into NWN modding I tried my hand at making my ideal quest/explorer mechanics in a short 20ish minute module. One of the gimmicks was to make useless skills useful through background skill checks. So for instance if a player walked by a pile of bones it would just be a set piece, but if a player had points in Lore+Spot the bones would be lootable and you'd get XP for passing the check. Same sort of skill checks would also change what mobs spawned, if a door was static or usable, difficulty/length of a quest, and provide short term combat buffs like passing a concentration check during an ambush would cast time stop for you. When it was done I think there was something like 100+ of these put in and about 20 more that changed things based on what class you were.

Putting that in an mmo however would probably be unrealistic.

Just in my own opinion I think what developers on MMO's miss out on the most is designing things that give the player the impression that they are actually interacting with the world. Killing 10 rats isn't engaging at all. Showing up to kill 10 rats, having a small cave entrance spawn (just for you/party), and the quest changing to "fuck the rats, explore the spooky cave full of loot and spooks" is.

[Margalis]

In most games there really isn't a difference between a quest and old-school camping other than a new car smell that has now faded. Personally I'd rather kill what I want with who I want then get railroaded into killing exactly what the game wants me to kill to get reasonable xp. It would be one thing if quests were actually interesting and questy but "kill ten rats and bring me their tails" to me isn't any different from just killing ten rats on my own.

The same can be said of many open world games with templated repetitive missions.

[DLRiley]

About 15 minutes into my trial of SWG it told me to kill 90 rats. Well I suppose technically it was skin 90 rats.

My SWG trial involved two or three quests from a dispenser that told me to run across half of randomly (and badly) generated planet landscape to slay a few rats spawned over there for me. Or deliver a package.

So half way through that second or third run i said fuck it and spent rest of the trial crafting rifles and shopping for clothes with the money i made. Sadly, very little of these looked any good, too.

Gah. My feeling is that if they had decent PvE and PvP content, to go along with the very robust tradeskill/harvesting system, then SWG would have been damn near perfect. And I'm not talking "If I had a million dollars, I'd be a millionaire!", I'm talking "Raph doesn't seem to enjoy Diablos as much as MUSHes."

Or they could have said "fuck the tradeskills and harvesting system that 3 people care about, lets make a STARWARS Game." I recon if the spent the same talent and resources doing that instead SWG would be perfect.

[apocrypha]

In most games there really isn't a difference between a quest and old-school camping other than a new car smell that has now faded. Personally I'd rather kill what I want with who I want then get railroaded into killing exactly what the game wants me to kill to get reasonable xp. It would be one thing if quests were actually interesting and questy but "kill ten rats and bring me their tails" to me isn't any different from just killing ten rats on my own.

The same can be said of many open world games with templated repetitive missions.

Problem I can see with that is that in a MMO it would mean that players would just cluster around the nearest/easiest mobs. With quests sending you to kill specific things you can spread players around a bit, distribute them, get all of your content seen & used, etc.

Thing with quest-driven content/grind is that the more polished it all is, the more variety there is and the less painful crap there is to do (low droprate item collection quests for instance. Fuck those, really) the less it feels like grind.

Yeah an entirely new paradigm for character advancement would be great, but I've yet to see anyone come up with a convincing one.

[Ratman_tf]

About 15 minutes into my trial of SWG it told me to kill 90 rats. Well I suppose technically it was skin 90 rats.

My SWG trial involved two or three quests from a dispenser that told me to run across half of randomly (and badly) generated planet landscape to slay a few rats spawned over there for me. Or deliver a package.

So half way through that second or third run i said fuck it and spent rest of the trial crafting rifles and shopping for clothes with the money i made. Sadly, very little of these looked any good, too.

Gah. My feeling is that if they had decent PvE and PvP content, to go along with the very robust tradeskill/harvesting system, then SWG would have been damn near perfect. And I'm not talking "If I had a million dollars, I'd be a millionaire!", I'm talking "Raph doesn't seem to enjoy Diablos as much as MUSHes."

Or they could have said "fuck the tradeskills and harvesting system that 3 people care about, lets make a STARWARS Game." I recon if the spent the same talent and resources doing that instead SWG would be perfect.

Because everyone agrees on what a great Star Wars game should be about.

[Venkman]

Ummm... CoH didn't have loot at the time, quest or otherwise.

Yep. However, it was the first diku-inspired MMO I can think of where you went on a quest to get X and when it dropped (not to your inventory, but to your Mission progress), it would also for everyone else.

Which of course is why I threw EQ2 in there, to be closer to the spirit of the original question

Have you tried Fallen Earth?  That's about how I describe it to people.  SWG with much less suck.

Yea, played beta for a while. I love what it's trying to do, but I am tired of paying for "trying to do". That plus the game graphics felt like an indie version of Fallout 3, which I was playing a lot of again at the time (so it biased me). SWG is my high water mark for this style of game, and that was fun more because of how it was broken than anything else.

[Koyasha]

Ironwood nails this. And it's something friggin' EQ1 had: you could make progress on a quest before taking the quest, thus having a leg up on the quest once/if you take it. Aion does this to some degree, not strictly hiding drops behind quest triggers, but it's rare.

I have to say.  This.  A thousand times this!  What kind of stupidity got into developers in the years after EverQuest that they ever thought it was ok to require you to have accepted a quest in order to get the drops I have no idea, but killing something and having it's head/ear/left testicle drop so that you could hand it to the guy that wanted the person dead is such a simple no-brainer that it makes me incredulous that people switched to the insane WoW method of doing things where quest items do not drop unless you're on the quest.  The incredibly stupid part is that with Serpent's Spine, even EQ started to do this (which I should note contributed GREATLY to my leaving the game, their stupid adding in a wow-like quest system where you had to accept the quests before progressing on them).

Everyone should essentially be on all quests at the same time and be able to make progress.  All this shit is tracked in the background anyway it seems, so it's not like it would cause technical issues to have your quest progress be tracked without informing you (since you haven't actually learned of the quest) but when you do finally talk to the right NPC he instantly recognizes that you have succeeded and rewards you.  Now there might be some quests where it's reasonable for you to have accepted the quest, from a logical standpoint, since you wouldn't perform the correct action on your own.  Yes, sure, in EQ it made little sense to pick up a random head drop and then look for whoever wants it, cause you wouldn't have taken the head if you didn't know someone wanted it.  But in the end the tiny bit of 'yeah it makes sense that I wouldn't have known to take his left testicle' is trumped by the fact that I am now killing the same guy twice and had to go out to do it a second time even though I already did it.

And another thing that I'll note in Aion in particular, but appears in other games in small amounts...quests that are repeatable that involve killing X amount of monster Y need to be infinite instead.  Lineage II got this one right (Sort of.  The reward system for those quests was very screwed up there.) by having infinite-collect quests where you would be sent out to kill monster Y and collect item X off them.  When you got back in, you turned in your stack of item X which could be as small as 5 and as big as however many monsters you killed, and you'd get a reward based on the number you turned in.  Simple.  Easy.  No running back to the questgiver every five minutes.  And it actually makes sense as a bounty-type quest because that's exactly what you'd get if there was a bounty on a particular type of hazardous wildlife/monster.  Bring me <unique monster part> from each one you kill and I'll reward you based on how many you brought.

In most games there really isn't a difference between a quest and old-school camping other than a new car smell that has now faded. Personally I'd rather kill what I want with who I want then get railroaded into killing exactly what the game wants me to kill to get reasonable xp. It would be one thing if quests were actually interesting and questy but "kill ten rats and bring me their tails" to me isn't any different from just killing ten rats on my own.

The same can be said of many open world games with templated repetitive missions.

And this.  This is why I was saying in the Aion thread that I'm tired of all these stupid quests and the game would be improved by removing the vast majority of them.  Quests are thinly disguised grind in any game, except for the few that are cool and have great story/plot/whatever.  Removing all the kill 10 rats nonsense and keeping only the quests that are significant would be an improvement (even if it means you don't always have a quest to do and sometimes have to go out and grind).  If all the quest you can give me is go kill 10 X, then don't give me any quest at all and just bump up the exp of X, and bump up the exp of Y, Z, and F while you're at it so I can go kill whichever one of those I feel like killing today and get the same advancement rate.

[Redgiant]

I think everyone (at least here) realizes that the quests mechanics are designed nowadays to maximize content stretching.

They want
- more to do in less content space
- reduce the deviation min/max (so grossly smart people won't get a gross advantage)
- force inventory management as its own activity
- somewhat manage known quest items separately from inventory

In particular they don't want you able to make one pass through content, gathering all the items you know ahead of time you will need, and avoid the back-and-forth stall they have planned for you. It s the same reason a goddamn road that should be the length of a driveway takes 5 minutes to run down.

[Sjofn]

Oh god yeah, I remember that. I was like, "WTF?" I was doing the crafting equivalent, which meant I was going to Craft90Modules anyway, but if it was a kill quest, I would have dropped it in an instant.

Who started that whole thing, quest loot only drops when you're on the quest, was it WoW?

CoH was the first I remember. EQ2 then ran with it. WoW too of course but no idea who copied who during beta on this feature.

Ummm... CoH didn't have loot at the time, quest or otherwise.

Pretty sure way back in DAoC you would only get quest drops if you were on the quest. They'd also drop every time.

[Goumindong]

If quest loot shares the same bag space with regular loot, then it is far preferable for it to only drop when you're on the quest.

Then it shouldn't!

Lets go one step further.

If you're going to provide repeatable milestones for killing monsters just have a counter of "uncollected kills". When you kill something, it goes up, when you turn something in, it goes down. Seriously, fuck K10R quests. Might as well just make rats give more XP and drop leather belts.

On second thought, lets just end the idea of inventory management in MMO's. Bags, slots, weight, etc. Fuck all that shit, that is for single player games where it serves as a limiter, not for games where it serves as a hindrance as you go get your 10th mule character. MMORPG's are for killing things with friends, and every time i hear "I need a break because my inventory is full and i need to go transfer/sell/whatever" i want to punch a developer in the face.

[Endie]

Glad someone other than me said it.

Wut?  This has been the constant, weary (and wearying) refrain for the best part of a decade. If you're glad he said, you'll be delighted that it's at least the second thread on this this month on this very board.  God knows how often over the last few years.

tl;dr this thread topic is as tired as killing ten rats.