[MUD-Dev] Interesting EQ rant (very long quote)

[the_logos at www.achaea.com]

On Tue, 20 Feb 2001, Jeff Freeman wrote:

>   Good Quest: Npc Joe hates orcs.  Kill the Orc Chieftan and and
>   bring his head back to Joe.  This makes him happy.  He'll never
>   stop asking people to kill the orc chieftan.  There will always be
>   an orc chieftan (since as soon as one is killed, the orcs are just
>   going to declare some other chieftan).  Point is, it won't be the
>   *exact* same Orc Chieftan that you just killed 10 minutes ago.
 
>   Bad Quest: Npc Joe hates Bob the Orc.  Kill Bob the Orc and bring
>   his infamous Hammer of Bob back to Joe.  It's a single-player game
>   quest: In a solo game, once you kill Bob the Orc, then Bob the Orc
>   is dead, and Npc Joe will stop asking for you to go kill him and
>   return his unique Hammer, since you already did that.  For a
>   multiplayer game, the "solution" is to make Bob the Orc respawn,
>   sometimes without a Hammer, and to have NPC Joe keep asking for
>   that specific Hammer over and over, even though you just gave it
>   to him 10 minutes ago.

I see no fundamental difference between these two. The differences are
fairly pedantic and have little to no bearing on the player
experience, in my opinion.

> True, but quests can be a lot better designed than the "A to B to C
> and here's your cheese"-model which periodically just "resets" back
> to "A", implausibly, and for no good reason.

Your 'reasons' are barely-disguised fictions to allow the cheese to
effectively reset back to A. I can't see most players caring whether
the quest was the "bad" or "good" versions, as they are basically
identical.
 
> Well, I'd come up with an alternate 'multiplayer world' quest, then.
> But I definitely wouldn't stick single-player games' quests in a
> multiplayer world with no better excuse than, "I can't think of a
> better way to do it."  Really, I don't think there's anything
> especially difficult about it.

You certainly haven't convinced the player in me that your ideas are
any different from what is happening now. You're just concealing the
quest with a paper-thin story device. The quest is the same.

--matt


_______________________________________________
MUD-Dev mailing list
MUD-Dev at kanga.nu
https://www.kanga.nu/lists/listinfo/mud-dev