Not all quests are equal

The discussion this week on this blog about quests mainly showed that the term is far too broad. People complain about quests, but in reality it isn't all quests they are opposed to. Of course we want some hand-holding (preferably optional for alts) at the start of the game to explain the game mechanics to us. Of course we want some form of story-telling to happen which explains us the lore and background of whatever we see in that virtual world. What we don't want is and endless series of being told to kill 10 foozles or to carry an "important message" to an NPC 10 meters away.

In the current adventure of my Dungeons & Dragons campaign, Madness at Gardmore Abbey, there are quests. There is one main quest, collecting the 22 cards of the Deck of Many Things, and over a dozen side quests which serve to tell the history of the abbey, or to direct players to locations they might otherwise have missed. The overall idea is that at the end of the adventure the players not only are in possession of the Deck of Many Things, but also in possession of the history of that artifact, so as to enable them to make an informed decision on what to do with it. None of the quests is completely trivial or involves "grinding" a specific number of enemies. The main quest, and one side quest about finding sacred vessels, do not give the players the information where exactly to look for the items. Rather the idea is that the players will do ALL the encounters in the adventure and therefore ultimately find everything that there is to find. It would be totally possible to play the same adventure with the same encounters without using any main or side quests, but that would give a less interesting result and story.

What I do like in Wildstar are quest series which do similar things than the quests in my D&D game: Telling me a story about a location and letting me interact with that story. What I don't like is two particular things:

1. I don't get a choice how to interact with that story, other than either following the story line or not. I don't get to choose whether I trust the quest giver and I don't get to make any moral decisions. I'm just a stupid grunt who is doing what he is being told.
2. I receive instructions about things to do which are somewhat arbitrary and don't really relate to the advancement of the story. The famous "dickwolf" cartoon from Penny Arcade, before becoming a PR disaster, was meant to be about that issue: Why would a quest ask me to free X slaves, or kill X monsters, and not all of them?

Both cases are obviously due to technical and financial limitations. "Free X slaves" is a kind of a placeholder in the story, representing the player/hero freeing "the slaves" in the story. If you wanted to represent that by him actually freeing all slaves, you would need to deal with the question of how the player knows when the task is finished, and how his freeing the slaves interacts with the player next to him freeing the slaves as well. Wildstar has "adventures" with decision trees, but for normal quests having multiple choices and better story logic would require a lot of costly phasing, and loss of the little remaining multi-player atmosphere.

And then there is the issue of how much information a quest should give the player. I remember one quest in the original Everquest where you were asked in the dwarven city to go out and find a certain dwarf, without being told where. That dwarf was in another city on the other side of another continent. The result of that sort of quest design was that people used the internet to find out where they were actually supposed to go. Even far more hand-holding games like World of Warcraft STILL have third-party websites that list all quests and give hints on how to solve them in case there was the slightest ambiguity left in the quest description. So games are giving more and more detailed instructions, with arrows pointing out exactly where to go and what to click on. I don't remember which game it was, but I remember playing one game where you could click on the quest tracker to auto-run to the quest location. So on the one hand at least some people demand very detailed instructions, but on the other hand these detailed instructions remove any sense of exploration and adventure from the game.

I know what I prefer, but I don't know a solution that would make everybody happy. It is hard to imagine a working system that gives different degrees of hand-holding to different players. Even if players would be happier with having to explore a bit more, chances are they would go the path of least resistance and turn on all quest help features if they were optional.