Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings borrowed from and diluted the gravitas of that original literary prototype. He may have been the first to borrow the majesty of the word quest, but he certainly wasn’t the last.

THAT’S when I just want to putz around and do anything I want. Now, granted…even then it depends on the game. It’s strange. Like, one of my pleasures are the Phantasy Star Online/Universe/PS Portable/God Eater type games; ie, make a character, go on missions, make/get/collect stuff. They’re great, mindless fun for me. The ‘extra’, optional missions are where all the fun is in those games for me. You CAN beat those games without messing with the optional missions. It’s possible, and I’ve even done it in a speed run test(Phantasy Star Online.) But I love going on the random missions. I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one out of the fifteen people who still play them.

Maybe though it’s more ‘exclamation point’ styles of quests in my non MMO RPGs i’m not into. The games i mentioned above do it in a more ‘mission counter’ style. Somehow this doesn’t bug me(and it’s actually somewhat worked into the game; you’re part of a team/company/unit etc, and it makes sense you’d pick up quests.) I was also fine with say, Quest for Glory style where sure, old lady, I’ll go get you this stuff. I was running around doing my own thing in that game anyway, I felt the quests made sense.

I do know one thing. I’m fine with no death penalty in my MMOs. if I want masochistic gaming I go back to my 8 bit collection/super-hardmodes of my console games(which I do enjoy at times.) My MMOs I like for other things, and that’s not one of them.

I think it’s time to go beyond the limitation of quests as they are currently defined in most MMOs. Every NPC should matter in a vibrant fantasy world; not just the ones with exclamation marks over their head.

By the way I have some more “screeds” planned. I’m gearing up my screed machine for a few more articles. Thanks for the mention

I do agree with Wolfshead though about some aspect of questing rant. Even in EQ2, there were NPC’s that if you chat with them a bit, you will get a quest, unless they don’t like your answers. It forces you to interact with the NPC’s and maybe even learn a bit about them. Isn’t (or wasn’t) that part of the point of RPG’s?

It would be nice if there were more than one way to accomplish quests. Even if it meant striking a deal with another npc to kill the 10 rats for you. I understand why having multiple paths of completion may be a pain programming-wise though.

And the focus on end-game is also part of the problem. Whether it is via grinding or questing, people want to get that over with as soon as possible so they can get their leet purplez. If they don’t have their leet purplez then they are fail and nobody wants to be the suxxors.

Quests were great. Quests gave you variety, a reason to move around without gimping your advancement, quests let you progress your character solo if you couldn’t get a group (again, for most characters in the pre-WoW days it was find a group to join or else log off and watch a DVD). But now we’re somewhat jaded. We’ve noticed how static quests are, and we’ve noticed how mundane a lot of the tasks are, and how pedestrian the writing is on so many of them (well, given how many of these things have to be churned out to make a current-gen MMO… hello, Sturgeon’s Law!)

What we want now is something more involving. Maybe it’s better story-telling (the SW:TOR route) or it’s something more dynamic (Rift has taken baby steps in this direction; GW2 is promising a lot more if it can actually live up to its own hype). Either way, we want our gaming to be entertaining again.

But it is interesting to compare with questing in single player games, as you say. I know one of the reasons I’ve stalled a bit on ME2 is quest overload – maybe MMO questing has ruined my ability to enjoy quests in single player games …

The special case that is WoW (actually, any theme park with a story I guess) has its own issues when it comes to questing. Uniformly spaced out mobs in every bleeding area are a massive, massive turn off. Knowing all the potential variations of buildings and caves before ever setting foot into most of them, the same thing. Leveling quests are so many, that not only is it impossible for them to be unique, but the player is swamped in them in such a way that it’s difficult to care for any particular one. There is very little reason to ever *want* to pay more attention to a quest other than “oh I think it said 10 of these in this area, what’s the fastest route to the next q”.

Quests and some more mundane tasks are a part of RPGs though, it’s my view that the approach to presenting them to the player is very limited. There has to be more to it than arrive at quest hub, collect quests, follow optimal route, cash in, sell loot, next hub. FTR, incidental/escort quests in WoW aren’t a step up to me, escort quests involve a starting location, a bee-line and a completion location. Invariably, through a mob infestated path, and typically done in one go from start to finish. How exciting. Is it unreasonable for escort quests to span over a longer time-frame and area? Sam escorted Frodo to Mordor and back again, but there was a helluva lot more to it than a bunch of 4-mobs spawning every couple of hundred yards.

As for Wolfshead’s post and even more so the Muckbeast post he linked to I thought there was a lot of sense. I’ve very uninterested in MMO quests although I absolutely loved the quests in Planescape: Torment and Daggerfall/Morrowwind.

Like you I find they fly by too fast, as Wolfshead and Muckbeast argued when you have done thousands and most are Kill Ten Rats or Collect Ten Rat-tails you stop seeing any interesting ones. For me every quest in Rift past about level 9 was follow the golden pointer, kill/click the things, follow the golden pointer back, talk to the blue tick.

It’s not that they’re poorly written, in fact when I specifically made a read-every-quest alt I thought the story quite good. However even with that alt I stopped reading them after a while. A lot of the quests simply aren’t anything other than fedex: collect X (you may have to hit it a bit first), deliver to Y. And there’s just too many.

I did love the deep one village though – I’d love to see that developed into a story quest rather than the stories they picked.