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"Quest hubs are dead, finally ! ".. so what?
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Why would you want things to not evolve?
1. For god's sake mmo gamers, enough with the analogies. They're unnecessary and your comparisons are terrible, dissimilar, and illogical.
2. To posters feeling the need to state how f2p really isn't f2p: Players understand the concept. You aren't privy to some secret the rest are missing. You're embarrassing yourself.
3. Yes, Cpt. Obvious, we're not industry experts. Now run along and let the big people use the forums for their purpose.
I agree op, if people didnt make such a big deal of this - it would be a non-issue.
QUEST HUBS ARE DEAD, FINALLY!
...IN GUILD WARS 2
This sounds like every developer of an upcoming game has had a meeting an decided, well, this is it. This has to be done, rules is rules. Lets do this, *high five*
I think the rest of the developing world will now have to cancel their pre-planned features of their games. Soz, MMORPG Blog writers have set the rules now.
Hey site writers and editors, make your flashy title graphics clearer, not everyone plays GW2, in case you didn't notice.
Other than, perhaps, solving a puzzle, what else can a quest encompasse?
Kill X
Killing the big bads have been a staple of quests since Beowulf and before.
Collect X
Jason and the Argonauts comes to mind. How about East of the Sun, West of the Moon?
Deliver X to Y
Besides the "recent" Lord of the Rings I can also think of Jack and the Bean Stalk and possibly the Fisherman's wife depending on how you want to broach what is being "delivered".
escort X to Y
well, Wizard of Oz is a recent example but What about Orpheus?
I think you are asking a bit much for some game developers to completely change a tradition that has been going on for hundreds of years.
Godfred's Tomb Trailer: https://youtu.be/-nsXGddj_4w
Original Skyrim: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/109547
Serph toze kindly has started a walk-through. https://youtu.be/UIelCK-lldo
Hearts and quest hubs are basically the same. DEs are different and that is the change.
In WoW for example you did a quest and the quest was gone forever. If you liked it you couldn't do it again. DEs have a chance of failure or success and branch because of the outcome. Quest hubs are just that, a hub that does nothing but sits in the middle of completion.
It is nothing mind blowing or radical, it is just a much better system and breaks up the monotany of grabbing a bunch of quests, then running out and completing them, and then coming back and turning them in.
Death is nothing to us, since when we are, Death has not come, and when death has come, we are not.
Ok, all of you complaining, I have your answer. STOP DOING THOSE STUPID HEARTS
I never DO a heart quest, and why would I? after lvl25, you can get from LA to any of the starting cities on foot with craploads of content to do. If you're just travelling and taking up tasks and stuff as they come, you will often be completley outleveling content and just staying because "oh I haven't seen this place yet.!".
Furthermore, the rewards for Hearts are ridiculously low for the time they take, especially against DEs when there are many people doing them (which makes them go a lot faster, for most).
The only reason to do a heart is: 1 you're doing a DE in a zone and your heart gauge fills up and you get additonal xp and cash, and map completion, great for you. 2 you've done a DE, pressure is down, and your gauge is half full. Let's go see what fun stuff you can do to finish it (shoot a catapult, talk with people...) 3 you are at 80% map completion (esp. when this is your third run through a zone) and there are two hearts left. Ah, let's do them, it's not as fun but you'll get a big reward.
For the rest, if there's a heart and no DE, just keep on going, kill a mob or two so the gauge goes up a little, and explore the area, but don't grind it. You'll finish it off when you come back, or when a DE happens or something, or never. Who cares? Let's get a vista and jumping puzzle instead. Those are FUN
(notice the last word I used?)
ps: to answer the OP question; that's the difference with a quest hub. When you have a quest hub, you hae to do the quests in the quest hub. Here, there are so many other ways to gain xp than do a Heart quest (and a DE is different from a "hub", hope you at least agrre with that)
Ah so just to get this right, DE's are less monotonous becaue instead of having 100 different quests that you get from hubs and only do once you have 5 or 10 different DEs that you do over and over and over again. Makes sense I can see why this is a much better system /facepalm.
I have found DEs to be like a flash mob of locusts.
You will be there doing whatever with only a few people around and all of a sudden an event pops and 20-30 people show up out of nowhere and lay waste to anything that moves and destroys anything that can be destroyed.
And once done everyone disapears back to wandering the road aimlessly clicking on npcs playing the DE lottery.
It's just a shitty straw man argument. No one ever said that quest hubs are dead.
If anything, people have been saying that quest hubs have been reskinned as hearts and that the hearts are slightly different than typical questing in that you don't have to talk to an NPC and you don't have to complete them in a linear fashion. Actually, you don't even have to complete them at all.
Really? McDonalds has the best hamburgers on the planet? What is the difference between McDonalds hamburgers and other hamburgers? They are pretty much the same in every way.
well the five D's are standard for all mmo's this time it's made so you have to explore to reach the areas these events are handled in. And now that I've reached level 30 those areas with these events in them post 25 have fewer hearts (you know those guides everyone kept complaining about?) I've seen on friends levels (much higher then mine) that there are no hearts in the areas they are running around in so apparently the game weens you of the crappy hearts as you move through the world.
Seriously tho, no mmo will be able to completely get rid of the five 'D's.
Destroy
Defend
Deliver
Drop
Discover
GW2 just does this in a different and imo better way. I love that i can't logout just anywhere because i might log back in in the middle of a fight with either a roaming band of whatsits or a veteran or something. I love how while running around doing DE's something reveals itself like a door or a strange crop of land where i find eventually a series of crops not easily found for cooking or a treasure chest with a green in it. I love how when i walk up to every npc they all have something to say instead of standing there and doing the same exact movements or twelve of them in an area don't look exactly that same or stand around acting like they are having conversations but nothing's making any noise not even a mumble like other titles (swtor) and I especially love how I'll have a difficult time running out of anything to do in GW2 because here i am at level 30 and I've only completed 16% of the map as an explorer style player unlike other titles where one has a limited number of quest hubs and quests before havingto repeat the same old dailies as their only solution to content issues in other games (TSW). smh
Chances of that model being completely gone are... pretty unlikely. Unless it goes completely sandbox... in which most of that will be done still just in another way.
The game has questing just the same content as other games, it just presents it differently.
part of what makes this game so great for me is that the hearts, or hubs, or whatever you decide to call them, marry perfectly with the auto scale down system for me. If you don't enjoy the ambiance of the gameworld here, obvuiously this wouldn't work in your favor.
In most themeparks, the quest hubs are one stop shops. You hit the hub, you do the quests contained within that area and then you are off to the next with no chance or reason to ever return to that area again.
Here though, i find myself contstantly returning to those old areas, the hearts are done of course but the areas are still very interesting to me, and since I scale downward I still have things I can take part in the area, the events and what have you. I love the little stories going on in these areas, bandits busting pipes on water supplies, pirates raiding ports, farmers being invaded by undead, the gameplay all satys fun for me due to scaling. And the "hubs" therefore remain playable for me over and over.
I've already gone back to areas and seen many events that i did not see on my first trip through.
But then, the underlying reasoning for any of this is that it happens to be one my favorite gameworlds to date. I'm a lover of ambiance and all things detailed. The sheets of snow falling off the trees in the Shiverpeaks, the icecycles falling and busting on the ice below, the footprints in the sand/snow, the water drops on my camera when I surface, the oil painted look / feel of the world whith every brushstroke visible and alive. The stones breaking loose under my feet and rolling down the mountains as I climb, the pirate caves that aren't marked but have booby trapped adventures waiting. The conversations in town, in the taverns. Etc... I can't get enough of it even after 70 or so hours it's even better than on day one for me.
So this is what sets the "hubs" apart from typical hubs for me, the fact that not only CAN I go back and still play in that area for rewards, but I actually WANT to.
No one ever said quest hubs are dead? This forum post is in response to a column here called....Quest hubs are Dead, Finally!..so yeah people are saying quest hubs are dead.
The objectives will always be there, no matter if the quests are big exclamation points over heads, orange circles on the map, rotating vorteces, a pair of crossed swords, or player-created content that is implied but never outright told.
To anet's credit, they did really well working within the MMORPG genre to obfuscate the quest objectives. It isn't revolutionary, but it's a step ahead.
Of course, the bad part about Guild Wars 2 is that it's an MMORPG. The very concept of the game works against it, just like every other MMO in existance ever.
Not that anyone could make a good game these days (the only good video game being Planescape: Torment), but attempts have been made, and scores of failures are what we are rewarded with.
We being people with actual standards, that is.
Freegamers are so defensive, hurray quests trigger by proximity now, that makes this game a sandbox?
Get real.
Then that guy is an idiot.
The original poster should be focusing their efforts on whoever wrote that article. The article that isn't even linked in his original post.
Low standards are standards too.
Well I'm glad you can admit it is better. That is what people want, is better things.
Death is nothing to us, since when we are, Death has not come, and when death has come, we are not.
Is that like an expectation?
Death is nothing to us, since when we are, Death has not come, and when death has come, we are not.
Just out of curiosity, since so many of you like to complain rather than contribute, what kinds of quests would you like to see? I understand why these quests exist in Themepark games. They don't have sandbox elements for emergent gameplay (and so many of you say you don't want sandbox features). They don't have a full gaming engine based on artificial intelligence and completely autonomous dynamic events, and likely won't for 5-10+ years. So what exactly are you expecting?
Your argument is very similar to complaining about having to run around and shoot things with a gun, in a first person shooter game.
A sure sign that you are in an old, dying paradigm/mindset, is when you are scared of new ideas and new technology. Don't feel bad. The world is moving on without you, and you are welcome to yell "Get Off My Lawn!" all you want while it happens. You cannot, however, stop an idea whose time has come.
this IS innovation. you cant push the themepark any further. the only thing you can add is "build this", "research that", "claim as your own". go play EVE if you feel that is necessary.
I personally think quests and dynamic events are an intergral part of any RPG, yes, even sandboxes.
Just don't try to pass them for something that they aren't. Dynamic events are not new, they are not revolutionary, they are not genre-defining, or any other BS qualifier the GW2's marketing team wants to put behind them.
THIS.
The quest presentation has changed, but not the activities you do. It is still the same thing you did in any other MMO. Nothing revolutionary or different than 10 years ago.
I´m not a game designer, but as a player I can say, there is nothing innovative about GW2 questing. Nothing. No mission to craft anything, no quest to investigate something or solve something in a challenging, non-combative way. No missions which make you interact with other players in some, new innovative way. And what bugs me the most, no brain puzzles like in Rift or Secret World (Jumping "Puzzles" don´t count sorry, I could as well hunt datacrons in SWTOR).
The only MMO which does those things to give you more variety in questing between the non-stop killing is Secret World. Quests involve crafting devices, solving puzzles, identify or scan mobs first before you need to kill them or use some sonar like tracking device to find specific locations. The kill X missions are never blatantly presented as "go there and kill X" or collect eggs to put them back into a ravens nest.
I mean even if you are forced to kill X in any MMO, TOR and TSW at least give you movie scene like story and interesting cutscenes to watch. GW2 puts two characters in front of a still background and that is quite below the 2012 standards set by TOR and TSW.
Conclusion, GW2 is standard 2003 questing with a new way how to receive quests, but very unsatisfying story presentation. The "innovation" award is not deserved by GW2, just by replacing questgivers by "dynamic" yellow circles, sorry
THIS
Can never do another quest hub game again, I'm done.
Please use the original thread to discuss today's column. Thanks.
http://www.mmorpg.com/discussion2.cfm/thread/364616/Column-General-Quest-Hubs-Are-Dead-Finally.html
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