Quests

After having talked about how the quests in FFXI are at the same time better than the quests in other games, and not yet satisfying, I'd like to talk a bit more about quests. Quests are a major part of most MMORPG, Everquest even gets half of its name from them, but no game up to now has gotten quests really right. World of Warcraft is supposed to have a great quest system, but up to now that is just advertising hype, I'll believe it when the game is out and I've actually played it.

The first mass market MMORPG, Ultima Online, did not have quests at all. There was one similar thing, you could escort an NPC in his voyage from one city to another, but that was all. Then came Everquest, which introduced a "classic" quest system, similar to what is found in single player role playing games. You talk to computer controlled non-player characters (NPC), they ask you to do something, and when you do it, you get some reward. Nearly always these quests involve some combination of killing a certain monster, and/or bringing something from A to B. Many games after that, like Dark Age of Camelot, or Final Fantasy XI, are using the same system.

Anarchy Online is in many respects a rather bad game. But its quest system was at least innovative. Instead of NPCs giving quests, you got them from quest terminals. And while the NPCs usually give only one quest (repeatable or not), the quest terminals gave out an unending number of random quests with random rewards. Furthermore, the quest location was a randomly designed dungeon which only the quest taker and his group were able to enter, which nicely dealt with the problem of somebody else killing your quest target monster. Star Wars Galaxies copied the quest terminal idea, but instead of random dungeons the quest targets were placed somewhere on the huge planetary maps. And they didn't really come into existence before the quest taker didn't approach them, which made other people killing your quest target less likely.

The quest terminal system is probably not the way to go. The fact that the quests are random, with random rewards, makes them less special. People know that they just have to hit the "Refresh" button to get another quest, so they browse through lots of quests until they have found one where the reward suits them, or where the quest target is conveniently placed. Now if you compare that to FFXI where the NPC tells you a story, sometimes even using cutscenes to draw you in more, you will see how much more interesting the NPC system can be.

Now the classic NPC system and the quest terminal system both have their problems. The basic problem, common to both, is the question of how much information to give the player about how to solve the quest. The NPC system often gives too little information. It tells you to bring back an item that drops from a mob, but tells you neither from what mob it drops, nor where to find that specific mob. Now if the item you are searching is a "bat wing", you can probably guess where to get it from, but not all items are named in such an obvious way. The usual solution is to ask other players, either in the game chat, or by looking up what these other players posted on different web sites. The quest terminal system gives too much information. As the quests are random, you obviously can not ask somebody else who already did the quest. So both AO and SWG mark your quest target precisely on your map, and all you got to do is run there.

I would much prefer a system that gives you sufficient information, but not too much. "Bring me the necklace of one of the orcs in Crushbone" would be good. Better than "Bring me a crude bead necklace", and better than marking the exact orc to kill on your map. Alternatively, one could add special "sage" NPCs, which give you information for a low fee. Quest giver asks you for a crude bead necklace, and if you never heard of it, you ask the sage who tells you that he has seen the orcs in Crushbone wear them.

A secondary problem to the "too little information" one of classic quests is that quests are often given at the wrong level. You get a quest by talking to a NPC standing in some corner of the city. You have no way of knowing whether the monster he asks you to kill is too easy, just right, or far too hard for your current character level. It would be better to have one central NPC somewhere in each city, who directs you to the NPC(s) giving out quests that are appropriate to your level.

How you get quest items in games like EQ or FFXI is far from perfect. Some quest items, like the afore mentioned bat wings, are relatively common. Kill 10 bats, and 2 or 3 of them will drop bat wings. As there are many bats around, getting the wings is relatively easy, even if other players are doing the same quest at the same time as you do. But bats in EQ or FFXI drop the wings even if the person killing them wasn't on that specific quest. That very often leads to a "reverse quest" situation. You find a quest item, and have to find out which NPC is looking for it. That destroys the flow of the story. Imagine the king telling the hero to slay the dragon and bring him the dragons head, and the hero responding "Dragons Heads? I happen to have 3 of them in my backpack". The other problem in that is that other players might well be selling quest items, and the hero buying the dragons head on a bazaar doesn't make a good story either.

There are better solutions for these common monster kill quests. Both AC2 and SWG had quests in which you simply had to kill a certain number of monsters, instead of bringing back monster body parts as "proof". Another possible solution would be to make the quest item drop only for the person who was on the quest, while people that just randomly killed that monster would receive other loot.

There are also presently in many games quest items that only drop from one very specific named monster. And this sort of item often can not be sold or traded between players. This makes the "reverse quest" situation unlikely, and totally solves the problem of the player buying quest items instead of actually doing the quest. But often this causes a new problem, camping. That was specifically bad in Everquest, where the monster you had to kill was spawning far too rarely in most cases. For example the Testament of Vanear was a quest reward you got by killing a renegade guard named Dyllin Starsine, but Dyllin only spawned every 8 hours. And as the reward was highly useful for different character classes of a wide range of levels, people literally started queueing up for the chance to do the quest. There were conflicts, and problems of "kill-stealing". And that was just for a mid-level item. For high-level stuff server-wide waiting lists were organized. Having to sit and wait for hours to solve a quest is bad enough. But standing in line to do so completely takes away your sense of "being on a quest". A similar problem occurs when players don't have to kill a monster that only spawns in one place, but one that is rare, and that not always drops the quest item you are looking for. In that case you can't even organize waiting lists, but usually find the whole zone full of players trying to find the monster in question before the others. And that can take days, because even if you happen to be faster or more lucky than the competition in finding the monster, you still have to be extra lucky for it to drop the quest item.

The ideal specific monster slaying quest would put these monsters in mini-dungeons that exist only for the quest-taker and his group. FFXI already has this sort of encounter, the Burning Circle Named Monsters, the first of which you encounter for the rank 3 mission at around level 25. The quest-taker and his group step on a magical circle and are teleported to the monster to slay. Nobody else can interfere. The quest monster never appears to people not on the quest who just happened to pass by. And nobody has to wait in line for hours for his turn to kill the dragon. Unfortunately, while this good solution already exists in FFXI, it is applied only for very few cases, for few missions and high level encounters. The level 18 sub job quest, which practically every character in the game has to do, is of the classic "find a rare monster and kill it, hoping for a rare drop from it" kind. If you are unlucky, that can be very frustrating, especially if you feel you "must" do that quest to advance.

Dungeons that are "reserved" for one party should be more common, and maybe bigger in some cases. Either randomly generated like in AO, or one one specifically designed dungeon for each quest of this type. It would be perfectly imaginable to force people to fight their way past some lesser enemies, before arriving at the "boss" monster. And a computer generated world does not have to follow the laws of the physical world. Two parties entering the same cave entrance can very well arrive in two identical, but parallel caves, with no possibility of interference.

In short, quests are a way to bring back story-telling into MMORPG. Story-telling is probably the biggest loss when moving from single-player to massive multiplayer role-playing games. To bring the stories back in a believable form, they must be told in an individual way (and FFXI does that admirably with cutscenes). But the further progress of the story must also be individual, much more than it is now in most games. It is difficult to tell individual stories in a world often overcrowded with competing heroes. But it is possible, as some of the best examples of FFXI missions prove. It is unfortunate that even in FFXI this is only done for some of the missions, while the far more frequent quests continue in the classic flawed way. That is most probably a question of resources, as designing individual quests needs man power, and running parallel mini-dungeons needs computing power. But in a world of competing MMORPGs, producers might well find that this is a good way to be better than the competitors.
- posted by Tobold @ 1:42 PM Permanent Link