[MUD-Dev] Quests

[Sellers]

Madrona Tree wrote:
> Raph wrote:
> > Your example of epic seems to be team-based capture the flag?
> > Yes, several muds have tried that. UO's try at it is going in within
> > the next few weeks as part of UO: Renaissance. I think Meridian
> > 59 had a coupleof versions of it. Players quickly see it as football
> > and not as an epic quest.
> 
> Do you think this is because of the players, or the quest?  Do you think
> that if UO was not a mass market game where people weren't really 'in the
> mood' in the first place, people would have different attitudes toward
> large-scale, capture-the-flag type quests?  Do you think they would work
> better on a more enthusiastic population, that was maybe smaller?

IMO, it has to do with the nature of the *consequences* -- or more to the
point, lack thereof -- of the quests.  If completing a quest can be undone
by someone else in an hour, or if the big boss creature you kill is going to
respawn automatically in an hour or so anyway, then the fact that you
completed the quest becomes boring.  Ho-hum, someone killed the shadow lord
again.  If the quest has an effect on your character, you tend to feel good
about it (less so if you know that the quest has a walk-through, even if you
didn't take it -- it cheapens the whole thing).  If completing the quest
took the combined efforts of many people and has a lasting effect on your
whole guild, or your whole city or race or world, then it becomes much more
heroic and epic -- unless it's just more of the same, repeated and respawned
over and over again.  Unfortunately, the greater the span and permanence of
the consequences of completing the quest, the smaller number of people that
can be involved.  In other words, one person gets to be the hero, and
everyone else is just frustrated or envious.  Not a good situation for a
MMPOG, at least as they're currently constructed.  

> 
> > I've written very epic, narratively based quests for Legend.
> > They take a long time to craft, aren't repeatable, and get
> > reduced to walkthroughs no matter how compellingly written.
> 
> You sound a little bitter about this.  Are you discouraged to the point
> where you no longer want to do write them?

We have a joke around where I work that I swear I'm going to put into
production: we want T-shirts that say on the front, "I develop computer
games..."  and on the back, "... but I'm not bitter."  Scratch someone who's
been in this industry for any length of time, and you'll find someone who's
crestfallen, frustrated, and disillusioned... but still somehow hopeful that
the *next* design/project/group/company will be different.  We're all a
bunch of eternal optimists, who if we stopped to think about it would
probably become so bitter that we'd all drop our current work for something
like beet farming.  Except that we all think that maybe, just maybe, on this
next time around we can finally find the solution to that problem that's
been eluding us for all this time, and this time with the right team and
enough funding and a good schedule and great artists and flexible marketing
people and... well, you get the idea.  

Mike Sellers



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