Hi, I created this topic because I haven’t seen anything related to the quests content.
I am a fan of reading the quests in games because some of them have really unique stories , I played a lot of RO beause of that and I loved how some quests like the Friendship Quest in Lighthalzen or the BioLab Quests had some dark stuff going on. I loved the contrast in the game with cute monsters and dark themed quests!!!
I would like that ToS had some quests like that; but also some humour based quests ! I haven’t seen too much of comedie content in games, but they could give a nice time between killing monsters (like organizing a party and that everything went really bad cofcofCakeInDaFacecofcof but you get your rewards anyway ).
So do you guys like this kind of content in quests or prefer the kill 1089387283 little cute monsters kind of quest?
quests that are actually quests and not “kill 20 monsters for me and gather their claws”, followed by “great! now we’re getting somewhere. a group of monsters was spotted down the road attacking travellers. kill them!”
there needs to be a sense of adventure, aka travelling across maps while doing various tasks (read: it takes TIME to do them) .killing stuff should NOT be the main focus of actual quests, although killing a boss at the end as some sort of epic conclusion would be perfectly fine.
they should be meaningful and something to remember, not just crappy EXP GAINZ they have turned into today.
I’ve seen a few quests that aren’t “kill xx mobs” or “fetch xx item”. Unfortunately, I don’t have screenshots, but I do remember that there was one where you had to gather something from the ground and place it on a nearby pillar and you had to do this once for each pillar for a total of 8 times…all without getting caught by a certain villain that I shall not name.
Also, a good chunk of the killing quests I’ve done in CBT2 required you to do something to the monster before killing it.
I prefer long, but rewarding quest (chains) over lots of short miniquests. I don’t mind so much if the quest is unoriginal, but i would like to get a good reward at the end, instead of simply getting some exp and money.
Good rewards, besides good and/or interesting equips, would be a new shop in the wilderness, or a new shortcut between regions.
Long quest chains that grant your character acess to new dungeon levels and areas that are populated with more rewarding and unique mobs. It’s always nice when the quests are all linked, if not directly, through some legendary tale or the lore of the game.
I’d personally love quests with a great story line that would expound on the lore of the game but at the same time it won’t hurt to have those quick mini quests as well just when I don’t feel like doing long quests and reading walls of text.
Basically, one quest that would be long but give great rewards and quests that are your generic “grind” quests that give exp would be great.
I personally love the idea of big adventures I used to remember in other games (Specially RO), I used to walk from town to town just to get that feeling of adventure. (I walked from prontera to morroc to complete my acolyte quest.)
I’m not the most experienced person with Korean media, but from what I’ve seen comedy concepts tend to translate awkwardly, probably to do in part to cultural differences as well. I’d like come comedy thrown in but it might need its own “adaption to western comedy” department >.<
I don’t actually enjoy quests in MMOs, they seem pretty pointless.
I mean, why would I need to make a quest that another person already did? Wasn’t the problem already solved?
It feels like quests don’t really change anything in the world or affect it in any way, so they just get repeated over and over ad infinitum by different people with the problem never actually going away.
A good designed quest to me would be, for example, an invasion in a big city where people have to defend the citizens (NPCs) from monsters spawning from a portal, and the objective of the quest would make people figure out how to close it.
If they don’t succeed, the city gets destroyed, and if they succeed, the party that accomplished it gets big rewards.
That’s just an example on how to actually make quests suited for a massively multiplayer game, and not feel like you are just playing a singleplayer game with people around you, like the average quest seem to be.
EDIT: I realize my example would also feel more like an “event” more than a quest, and I can come up with an actual better example but I think you get my point by now.
I agree with you, in my opinion this is a design flaw in most of current MMORPGs. Their problem is that they try to add narrative to the game using single player RPG elements like “Single player tasks”, “Single player quests” and “NPCs that treat you as if you where the only player in the world”.
While narrative is an important element to engage a player in a game, it’s not ok if it ends up breaking the experience, MMORPGs are supposed to make you to get involved with their world and the other players, not the NPCs and their tasks.
The system that you mention is similar to the one implemented in Guild wars 2. There are several events happening on different places in the world (monsters attacking cities, merchants traveling between towns), and you have the choice to get involved or just let things happen, which ends up triggering other kinds of quests.
While the idea is engaging and you can participate with other people at the same time, in my opinion their implementation also has problems, for example:
All the quests end up repeating themselves at some point, so after a while it feels repetitive too.
The way you approach quests it’s a little bit awkward since you just need to be near to get involved, there is hardly any interaction with the world besides the task at hand.
When you finish the quest the reward is handed to you automatically, while this is practical, it’s doesn’t feel that engaging to me, you just pass by, end the task and run away, there are some places where people just cycle through quests like a zerg rush because of this…
Those kind of problems can be fixed, but bring other kinds of problems afloat… for example, if quest doesn’t reset themselves it makes the content limited, then not all the players can experience the full game, and adding more interactions to the quests also makes the game experience a lot slower.
One approach that I like a lot is the one that Elite:Dangerous has taken. Elite:Dangerous is a “MMO space epic” (or at least that is what their marketing team calls it). You get to be a space pilot, owner of a ship, in a futuristic world where you can travel through space and do what you want… and that’s all what you need to know, you can take the role of a merchant, a pirate, a bounty hunter, a space miner, an explorer, but not because there is a class system, it’s because those are the things that you can do in the game, each of them requires investment and risks, but also reward you if you do things right… In the end, the game is designed to make you feel engaged and pursue a path, and to write your own story. Some people don’t like this approach though, because it end’s up being a bit overwhelming…
I could continue writing about this topic all night long… i’ll just close up by saying that i have high hopes for whatever IMC desires to do in this regard.
You should check out Revival if you don’t know about it. It’s in early stages of development but they will try to do a lot of things that other mmos didn’t. :F But that will be quite different than ToS so maybe not what you are looking for.
What you want is actually pretty reasonable given the design of MMORPGs but at the same time it isn’t in effect on ANY MMO for a reason.
Implementing this system means that newer players will run out of content if they actually changed it to interact with everyone else.
Think of it this way, if you’ve watched sword art online 2 and seen the part where kirito and the gang went to get excalibur you’ll realize that every other player will miss out not only on that boss fight but on getting the legendary weapon excalibur.
the most common fix developers use is that NPCs react as if there are a lot of adventurers out there but you’re the first one to notice them. which isn’t the best but better than gating content.
like @Grillo said this has already been implemented in guild wars 2 (I dunno what they call it) and FF14 known as fates. In FF14 in my personal experience there would be no consequence even if you fail the event and you will still get experience but I do think that making it more interactive would be great like when a town gets attacked and you fail to defend it nobody would be able to access the town for a set amount of time so everybody on the zone will actually participate.
Well I only have 1 thing to say: for those that want to know more about the lore and immerse yourself in quests, don’t expect too much or you’ll be disappointed later. At the moment, most of the quests are just fan-translated (or to be more precise: roughly translated using translation tools). So unless some experienced translators help out or imc decides to hire a professional translation team, don’t expect too much.
, I played a lot of RO beause of that and I loved how some quests like the Friendship Quest in Lighthalzen or the BioLab Quests had some dark stuff going on. I loved the contrast in the game with cute monsters and dark themed quests!!!
! I haven’t seen too much of comedie content in games, but they could give a nice time between killing monsters (like organizing a party and that everything went really bad cofcofCakeInDaFacecofcof but you get your rewards anyway 
).
