player generated escort the freighter full of POS fuel thats is in dire need to get to the outpost before your faction enemies roll up and cause fireworks cause the shield is down
In Fallen Earth the people you have to escort actually *run* - I still hated the escort quests, but they were a lot less painful, as the person you were escorting actually followed your path exactly so the chances of random mob attacks were greatly reduced by tactical planning.
There were the standard "triggered when you cross x invisible line" scripted attacks for each escort quest, but they were easier to deal with.
Some other games could take a leaf out of their book on that front. Or just, y'know, not have any of the damn things (I'd prefer the latter option tbh).
The quests themselves i don't mind, except for the escort ones and it's not so much the fact of doing the escorting.
It's the fact that what the NPC does that makes no sense.
Many time i've been escorting some farmer guy and the first thing he will do is run head long into 4 enemies (when i'm not ready i might add) and start to fight them. Now if i was a farmer i wouldn't do that. I'd stay behind the nice person who is trying ot save me who has the armor and weapons (or spells) that can slash, bash, or nuke the guy to death much better then i can beat him up.
Now if the guy i was saving was some war torn hero that was clearly blinded by rage then i can understand but there needs to be lore reasons for it.
Second thing i hate is their AI pathing (which is terrible in CoH i might add) which causes them to get lost and stop (in an area that is respawning) and then you have to run back, or babysit them while walking backwards (cause thats slower) to make sure they don't get stuck on anything.
Mind as well just tie a leash around them and pull em. Between the aggro, the babysitting them, how weak they are. The escort quests are just a pain and stop being fun about half way through.
As for regular quests, if they are well done i have no problem. But so many developers decide quests are a means to an end (to get xp and armor/weapons) rather then a mechanic you should put time and money into making great. Thus most of the quests suck because the story is bland, in my opinion of course.
Help me Bioware, you're my only hope.
Is ToR going to be good? Dude it's Bioware making a freaking star wars game, all signs point to awesome. -G4tv MMo report.
LOL great article ... one of the things besides those that drove me nuts is (especially in rift) you're the hero of this game and these peons want you to do menial tasks.
in rift im a soul brought back to life by the gods to fight the forces of evil and protect Telara from invasions ....
"oh Ecoces im glad i ran into you can you burn the rotted crops for me "
did you not hear me when i said i was trying to protect Telara from invasions?!?
"Ecoces after you do that can you plant some new potatoes for me?"
uh I died and was resurrected to fight the forces of evil ... does that sound like i should be planting ....
"Ecoces after that can you pick the potatoes, feed the pig and make him s*** so you can find my lost necklace that he swallowed .... in it?
Originally posted by Coyote Sharptongue [...] And of course in these games you can never do what you really want to do at that point, which is kill both Pete and Mike and take their sh*t because they dont deserve to live [...]
not a mmorpg, but you can in the gothic games. quest giver going on your nerves? whack him dead, take his money and go looking for the next. actually you can kill every npc in the game except for those that are absolutely essential for completing the game. its great. (if you wanna try go for part 1 and/or 2, part 3 and following are an insult to the series)
“Our scouts have found an orc camp not far to the north of us. We need you to go there and kill some orcs, just to let them know they’re not safe. 20 or so should do.”
Off I go to do my duty. Lots of ocs, tightly packed as well, going to be tough. Eventually, with much kiting of ridiculous numbers of adds the job is done. Return to quest giver.
“Excellent work. While you were there, the orcs raided us as well and stole some supplies. We need you to go return to their camp and return those supplies.”
Hmm...ok, well a plausible reason for what looks suspiciously like a repeat quest so off we go. Same issues with packed mobs again but with the added complexity of having to stop for a few seconds every now and then to pick up items. Back to quest giver.
“Good job. We need to stop those orcs thinking they can get away with this sort of thing. Can you go back there and kill the boss standing right in the middle. Oh, you’ve killed him twice already? Well, go do it again.”
I don't even bother reading quests anymore like i used to do in EQ and EQ2. Now for me questing is all about XP and getting some decent loot. I would rather do 'pick flowers' quest than grind on mobs like a gold farmer to level up. It is like chosing lesser of two evils. And my chocie is quest.
Quests in MMOs generally sucks for some reason. Not only are they written by someone who I would boot out of my P&P RPG group after 5 minutes because they are so boring and predictable, they usually are far from actual "quests".
Quests are stuff like finding the holy grail as God told you or take the one ring with you while you sneak all the way to Mordor and finally throw it in mount Doom. Not delivering a letter to a guy 20 feets away, picking some nearby flowers or killing some pests. Those are menial work, not quests. I don't think I did an epic quest every time I go down to the post office or do my dishes.
MMO quests is the thing that is easiest to improve but still are as silly as they was when I logged on the first time to Meridian 59 in 1996 and was asked to kill 10 rats outside town (yeah, that really was my first MMO quest ever).
Most MMOs cost over 60 million dollars to make nowadays, is it so hard to hire in a half decent author to write the quests?
Could you actually imagine a peasant ask Conan if he could kill the rats in his cellar? I can but in my imagination Conan beats the crap out of him for asking him to do something stupid like that and then tells him to get a cat.
The problem with quests in MMOs and that at least 95% of them sucks so badly that even scy-fy wouldn't use them in their dumbest show (that would be "Sanctuary" BTW).
You probably shouldn't use spoiler alert examples as your examples. Yes, there are still people who haven't seen or read Lord of the Rings. Not everyone is 33 years old and a veteran of the fantasy genre. Young kids and new arrivals to the genre might still have not read the novels.
You probably shouldn't use spoiler alert examples as your examples. Yes, there are still people who haven't seen or read Lord of the Rings. Not everyone is 33 years old and a veteran of the fantasy genre. Young kids and new arrivals to the genre might still have not read the novels.
Sorry, it is just like when we discussed Jean D'Arc and I spoiled it for my friends brother by telling him she would burn in the end. My "If you havn't seen Titanic yet the ship sink" comment didn't make him happier either...:D
You forgot the worst one of all, "the go kill 2000 bug thingies then report back to me" quest. Repeatable 3 times in order to complete.
Velika: City of Wheels: Among the mortal races, the humans were the only one that never built cities or great empires; a curse laid upon them by their creator, Gidd, forced them to wander as nomads for twenty centuries...
Any quest that tells me to go harvest organs or body parts off of an animal that should have have said organs or body parts in order to f***ing exist, yet has a 25% drop rate can go die in a fire. I'm looking at you, Goretusk livers.
"You'll never win an argument with an idiot because he is too stupid to recognize his own defeat." ~Anonymous
There was one quest chain in WoW that I really enjoyed. It was very long and required you to travel to about four or five different zones all over the frigging globe, But it was worth it. It was the Linken chain in Un'Goro crater. I almost stopped playing WoW right then and there because they took out a really fun quest, but left all the boring "go kill ten of this", "go fetch twenty of that", and "escort this suicidal sociopath to the other end of the @#$%ing zone" quests.
Although, sometimes the fetch quests can be worse than the escort ones when the drop rate is so low that you have to kill off eighty mobs just to collect five of their eyeballs, or what have you.
I have never experienced any unique quests since my MUD days. Discworld MUD hands down has the most original quests and lots of them. If you don't have the patience to play do a quick search for the quest list just for a laugh. If you are familiar with the series you will love it.
Despite being text based more effort and thought has been put into this world than 90% of the games on this site! Sorry for being a fanboy but be honest, how many MMO's on here aren't shockingly shite? Exactly, didnt need to take our socks off to count them. All jokes aside there is more depth in this 1 dimensional world than the tosh churned out of late.
Bearing in mind you are just an unskilled peasant (to start) and not the saviour of the world doing the 2 (and only 2) delivery quests for the post office fits in well with the setting and is there mainly to help you learn your way around.
They mostly all fit in with the humour, style and settings of the books. One includes starting (and finishing) a bar brawl and others make use of the many crafting skills available. And if you think you're hard enough you can just kill the NPC (although sometimes this is frowned upon) and parade around with his/her underpants on your head (not so frowned upon).
Quick spoiler of a quest. In one house you may or may not discover on your journey, a stern, bossy looking woman is looming over her husband who is cowering in a corner... Go downstairs and you will see a mean looking poodle. Kill it and drag the corpse upstairs and give it to her... She gets upset and runs off I think and her long suffering fella is very grateful.
I like quests that matters, and not pointless ones.
Pointless: Hail adventurer, Kill me 10 rats. There is no particular reason you should do this, other than that is what I am programmed to say. Reward, an item just like the 100 billion others you get from dull quests or from drops.
Matters: Hail adventurer, before I will let you in to my castle, you must proove that you are on a noble cause. Find out what is causing the rats to become aggressive and return to me.
Reward: a key to the castle and reputation increase (which may lead to other npc wanting to deal with you).
THAT is feeling of accomplisment, I took on the task and won the sympathy of Whoever, and I can now enter the castle. (People who arent mmorpg players will leave this game quickly and you will have even minded players to play with) .. Yes I said what you were thinking.
I personally don't really mind gathering quests or "kill X number if this specific creature" quests as long as the number is low. Want me to pick 5-7 flowers? Sure, no problem. Need me to go slay 4-8 of this certain kind of (insert creature name here)? Be back in a jiffy. It's when they ask me to collect/kill upwards of 10-20 that I start to question the reward's worth vs. the task at hand.
The Rift quest where you are supposed to investigate why townsfolk were acting strangely and you slowly figure out that the entire town has been replaced by shapeshifters - that was fun.
Something fairly open-ended, where you actually have to figure something out - that can be interesting.
Kill x, escort this idiot, deliver x, go talk to x - all that crap bores anyone to tears who's spent any time at all playing MMO's.
In LotRO there's a quest where you go from one side of a field to the other to deliver messages from one hobbit to her neighbour who wants to date her. Back and forth you go. I think at one point they both send you off to do a little flower gathering... maybe not.
Either way, they are a total of 27 steps apart (I counted them.. trust me). You could fricking THROW a hobbit that far. Can they walk across to the edge of teh field next to tehir house to say hulllo? No, they have to stand there like a pair of mutes, waiting on some passing idiot who'll run back and forth like a carrier pigeon on speed...
At least in games like Red Dead Redemtion you'd have the chance to shoot both of them in the face and loot their stumpy little corpses...
********************* So, you all sat in camps and that was fun? *********************
LOL holy shit that was funny. Thanks for the laugh man
"Don't mistake a fun game for a good game... Checkers is fun to play but its not exactly the highest point of gaming design... and definatly not worth $60 plus $15 a month"
Comments
On the other had you have...
player generated escort the freighter full of POS fuel thats is in dire need to get to the outpost before your faction enemies roll up and cause fireworks cause the shield is down
...quests. Yeah. In that Eve game.
In Fallen Earth the people you have to escort actually *run* - I still hated the escort quests, but they were a lot less painful, as the person you were escorting actually followed your path exactly so the chances of random mob attacks were greatly reduced by tactical planning.
There were the standard "triggered when you cross x invisible line" scripted attacks for each escort quest, but they were easier to deal with.
Some other games could take a leaf out of their book on that front. Or just, y'know, not have any of the damn things (I'd prefer the latter option tbh).
Yep quests have not changed in many years. Yet companies keep hiring the same devs and writers over and over. Hmmmm
Just My 2 Lunars
The quests themselves i don't mind, except for the escort ones and it's not so much the fact of doing the escorting.
It's the fact that what the NPC does that makes no sense.
Many time i've been escorting some farmer guy and the first thing he will do is run head long into 4 enemies (when i'm not ready i might add) and start to fight them. Now if i was a farmer i wouldn't do that. I'd stay behind the nice person who is trying ot save me who has the armor and weapons (or spells) that can slash, bash, or nuke the guy to death much better then i can beat him up.
Now if the guy i was saving was some war torn hero that was clearly blinded by rage then i can understand but there needs to be lore reasons for it.
Second thing i hate is their AI pathing (which is terrible in CoH i might add) which causes them to get lost and stop (in an area that is respawning) and then you have to run back, or babysit them while walking backwards (cause thats slower) to make sure they don't get stuck on anything.
Mind as well just tie a leash around them and pull em. Between the aggro, the babysitting them, how weak they are. The escort quests are just a pain and stop being fun about half way through.
As for regular quests, if they are well done i have no problem. But so many developers decide quests are a means to an end (to get xp and armor/weapons) rather then a mechanic you should put time and money into making great. Thus most of the quests suck because the story is bland, in my opinion of course.
Help me Bioware, you're my only hope.
Is ToR going to be good? Dude it's Bioware making a freaking star wars game, all signs point to awesome. -G4tv MMo report.
LOL great article ... one of the things besides those that drove me nuts is (especially in rift) you're the hero of this game and these peons want you to do menial tasks.
in rift im a soul brought back to life by the gods to fight the forces of evil and protect Telara from invasions ....
"oh Ecoces im glad i ran into you can you burn the rotted crops for me "
did you not hear me when i said i was trying to protect Telara from invasions?!?
"Ecoces after you do that can you plant some new potatoes for me?"
uh I died and was resurrected to fight the forces of evil ... does that sound like i should be planting ....
"Ecoces after that can you pick the potatoes, feed the pig and make him s*** so you can find my lost necklace that he swallowed .... in it?
oh f*** this game!
(if you wanna try go for part 1 and/or 2, part 3 and following are an insult to the series)
Good read
)
“Our scouts have found an orc camp not far to the north of us. We need you to go there and kill some orcs, just to let them know they’re not safe. 20 or so should do.”
Off I go to do my duty. Lots of ocs, tightly packed as well, going to be tough. Eventually, with much kiting of ridiculous numbers of adds the job is done. Return to quest giver.
“Excellent work. While you were there, the orcs raided us as well and stole some supplies. We need you to go return to their camp and return those supplies.”
Hmm...ok, well a plausible reason for what looks suspiciously like a repeat quest so off we go. Same issues with packed mobs again but with the added complexity of having to stop for a few seconds every now and then to pick up items. Back to quest giver.
“Good job. We need to stop those orcs thinking they can get away with this sort of thing. Can you go back there and kill the boss standing right in the middle. Oh, you’ve killed him twice already? Well, go do it again.”
...
I don't even bother reading quests anymore like i used to do in EQ and EQ2. Now for me questing is all about XP and getting some decent loot. I would rather do 'pick flowers' quest than grind on mobs like a gold farmer to level up. It is like chosing lesser of two evils. And my chocie is quest.
By far the best howling so far...
Quests in MMOs generally sucks for some reason. Not only are they written by someone who I would boot out of my P&P RPG group after 5 minutes because they are so boring and predictable, they usually are far from actual "quests".
Quests are stuff like finding the holy grail as God told you or take the one ring with you while you sneak all the way to Mordor and finally throw it in mount Doom. Not delivering a letter to a guy 20 feets away, picking some nearby flowers or killing some pests. Those are menial work, not quests. I don't think I did an epic quest every time I go down to the post office or do my dishes.
MMO quests is the thing that is easiest to improve but still are as silly as they was when I logged on the first time to Meridian 59 in 1996 and was asked to kill 10 rats outside town (yeah, that really was my first MMO quest ever).
Most MMOs cost over 60 million dollars to make nowadays, is it so hard to hire in a half decent author to write the quests?
Could you actually imagine a peasant ask Conan if he could kill the rats in his cellar? I can but in my imagination Conan beats the crap out of him for asking him to do something stupid like that and then tells him to get a cat.
The problem with quests in MMOs and that at least 95% of them sucks so badly that even scy-fy wouldn't use them in their dumbest show (that would be "Sanctuary" BTW).
You probably shouldn't use spoiler alert examples as your examples. Yes, there are still people who haven't seen or read Lord of the Rings. Not everyone is 33 years old and a veteran of the fantasy genre. Young kids and new arrivals to the genre might still have not read the novels.
Sorry, it is just like when we discussed Jean D'Arc and I spoiled it for my friends brother by telling him she would burn in the end. My "If you havn't seen Titanic yet the ship sink" comment didn't make him happier either...:D
You forgot the worst one of all, "the go kill 2000 bug thingies then report back to me" quest. Repeatable 3 times in order to complete.
Velika: City of Wheels: Among the mortal races, the humans were the only one that never built cities or great empires; a curse laid upon them by their creator, Gidd, forced them to wander as nomads for twenty centuries...
Any quest that tells me to go harvest organs or body parts off of an animal that should have have said organs or body parts in order to f***ing exist, yet has a 25% drop rate can go die in a fire. I'm looking at you, Goretusk livers.
"You'll never win an argument with an idiot because he is too stupid to recognize his own defeat." ~Anonymous
There was one quest chain in WoW that I really enjoyed. It was very long and required you to travel to about four or five different zones all over the frigging globe, But it was worth it. It was the Linken chain in Un'Goro crater. I almost stopped playing WoW right then and there because they took out a really fun quest, but left all the boring "go kill ten of this", "go fetch twenty of that", and "escort this suicidal sociopath to the other end of the @#$%ing zone" quests.
Although, sometimes the fetch quests can be worse than the escort ones when the drop rate is so low that you have to kill off eighty mobs just to collect five of their eyeballs, or what have you.
I have never experienced any unique quests since my MUD days. Discworld MUD hands down has the most original quests and lots of them. If you don't have the patience to play do a quick search for the quest list just for a laugh. If you are familiar with the series you will love it.
Despite being text based more effort and thought has been put into this world than 90% of the games on this site! Sorry for being a fanboy but be honest, how many MMO's on here aren't shockingly shite? Exactly, didnt need to take our socks off to count them. All jokes aside there is more depth in this 1 dimensional world than the tosh churned out of late.
Bearing in mind you are just an unskilled peasant (to start) and not the saviour of the world doing the 2 (and only 2) delivery quests for the post office fits in well with the setting and is there mainly to help you learn your way around.
They mostly all fit in with the humour, style and settings of the books. One includes starting (and finishing) a bar brawl and others make use of the many crafting skills available. And if you think you're hard enough you can just kill the NPC (although sometimes this is frowned upon) and parade around with his/her underpants on your head (not so frowned upon).
Quick spoiler of a quest. In one house you may or may not discover on your journey, a stern, bossy looking woman is looming over her husband who is cowering in a corner... Go downstairs and you will see a mean looking poodle. Kill it and drag the corpse upstairs and give it to her... She gets upset and runs off I think and her long suffering fella is very grateful.
Fanboying and shameless plugging over.
I like quests that matters, and not pointless ones.
Pointless: Hail adventurer, Kill me 10 rats. There is no particular reason you should do this, other than that is what I am programmed to say. Reward, an item just like the 100 billion others you get from dull quests or from drops.
Matters: Hail adventurer, before I will let you in to my castle, you must proove that you are on a noble cause. Find out what is causing the rats to become aggressive and return to me.
Reward: a key to the castle and reputation increase (which may lead to other npc wanting to deal with you).
THAT is feeling of accomplisment, I took on the task and won the sympathy of Whoever, and I can now enter the castle. (People who arent mmorpg players will leave this game quickly and you will have even minded players to play with) .. Yes I said what you were thinking.
"I am my connectome" https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HA7GwKXfJB0
I personally don't really mind gathering quests or "kill X number if this specific creature" quests as long as the number is low. Want me to pick 5-7 flowers? Sure, no problem. Need me to go slay 4-8 of this certain kind of (insert creature name here)? Be back in a jiffy. It's when they ask me to collect/kill upwards of 10-20 that I start to question the reward's worth vs. the task at hand.
Quests I actually liked:
The Rift quest where you are supposed to investigate why townsfolk were acting strangely and you slowly figure out that the entire town has been replaced by shapeshifters - that was fun.
Something fairly open-ended, where you actually have to figure something out - that can be interesting.
Kill x, escort this idiot, deliver x, go talk to x - all that crap bores anyone to tears who's spent any time at all playing MMO's.
This type of article is exactly why I love reading Coyote's stuff more than others. Humor + Truth = Win.
Paragus you could have made your point better without using nasty language.
Adding to that, I hate quests that take a long time to do, sometimes you only have 30 minutes to play..
In LotRO there's a quest where you go from one side of a field to the other to deliver messages from one hobbit to her neighbour who wants to date her. Back and forth you go. I think at one point they both send you off to do a little flower gathering... maybe not.
Either way, they are a total of 27 steps apart (I counted them.. trust me). You could fricking THROW a hobbit that far. Can they walk across to the edge of teh field next to tehir house to say hulllo? No, they have to stand there like a pair of mutes, waiting on some passing idiot who'll run back and forth like a carrier pigeon on speed...
At least in games like Red Dead Redemtion you'd have the chance to shoot both of them in the face and loot their stumpy little corpses...
*********************
So, you all sat in camps and that was fun?
*********************
LOL holy shit that was funny. Thanks for the laugh man
"Don't mistake a fun game for a good game... Checkers is fun to play but its not exactly the highest point of gaming design... and definatly not worth $60 plus $15 a month"
OMG Coyote is so right. i love this guy I couldn't had vented any better. Thanks for gettng it out for me bub
I only play Eve Online or Perpetuum now because after a while all quests get boring (unless the plot is good - which is exceptionally rare).
An example of a good plot is the Defias Brotherhood storyline in WoW - I think this was one reason why WoW appealed to so many people so quickly.