[MUD-Dev] MMO Quest: Why they're still lousy

[Damion Schubert]

>>From Raph Koster
> Damion Schubert wrote:

>> Having played WoW and used Thottbot, I would have to say that if
>> Blizzard were to make a deal where they got the metrics about
>> which pages were accessed most often, they'd have a pretty good
>> list of which quests were too vague to complete.  Thank god for
>> Thottbot, life's too short to pixelhunt in a building you're not
>> even sure is the right place.

> So this is interesting, and not least because it comes from you
> (since I have fond memories of you closely watching over folks to
> make sure they didn't cheat their way past quests on Worlds of
> Carnage 13 years ago).

To be fair, I was a different designer back then.  For example, I
thought made up words with lots of apostrophes were cool NPC names.

> "Life's too short to pixelhunt" suggests that you're more
> interested in checking off the quest on a list than in the
> experience. That in turns suggests that either the experience just
> isn't that interesting, or it's interesting but far less
> interesting than getting the next ding. Which is it, and why?

Fair enough.  I'm a completionist, a strange mix of achiever and
explorer which explores in hopes that I -can- see everything.  I
also clear away all the black squares away when I play civilization,
and play every side quest in Baldur's Gate.  I explore because I
intensely want to see all of the content that a designer created.

All that being said, I've been cheated enough by bad quests, bad
boss monsters and bad designs enough that I have a threshold that
I'll reach before I'll go to the strategy guide.  At that point,
I'll determine whether or not I failed, or the designer failed.
Tragically, its the designer, 80% of the time.

> I still daydream of the experiences with questing where the
> "pixelhunt" isn't quite that reductionist and is something that
> players want to do because it is challenging in and of itself, and
> fun in and of itself.

> I realize that you're really talking about poorly designed quest
> experiences that do not provide sufficient hints, but it seems
> that this is a general attitude that extends beyond that in the
> audience these days. Another sign of the gameyness overtaking the
> experienceness?

Personally, I still daydream of the day that designers will realize
that MMOs are not movies or books, but their own medium, and do a
better job of designing content for the medium.  I realize fully
that that sounds a tad snotty, but consider: there are a lot of
things the printed word does well that movies do not do.  Movies,
however, are not an inferior medium - they do some things much
better than books.  Some of the techniques that work in the books
just don't work in the movies.

By comparison, I see quests over and over again that don't work well
in our medium (and WoW is far from the only offender here).  Our
medium does things very, very well, but our overall limitation is
interface.  Some examples:

  1. "Go find Mr Foozle in Foozletown."  Uh, Foozletown is huge.
  Where in Foozletown?  Should I go door to door?  That's not fun.
  In movies, the hero knows just the right place to go, or the
  boring 'looking in every tavern in town' part is excised from the
  game.  Also, door to door searches highlights that buildings and
  cities are often trickier to navigate with 3D cameras.

  2. "Find the old Foozletorium in the deserted town of Foozleton."
  The town has 8 buildings, none with any clear signs which is a
  Foozletorium.  All of which have monsters trying to beat you down,
  not to mention the threat of PKers hunting you down.  In real
  life, you have the option to ask the guy giving you a task "Which
  building is that, anyway?" - an option denied to you.

  3. "Pixelhunt."  One WoW quest ended up being a crate buried into
  the ground deep enough that only a corner showed up, hidden behind
  a table.  This quest resulted in me walking all over a fairly
  large area, scanning my pixel over every part of the area.  In
  reality, I can do things like flip tables over the way and move
  objects around to make the search easier - again, an interface
  feature that MMOs lack (or if they don't lack, that risk being
  subverted).  ANother time, I spent quite a while searching for a
  hammer the size of a screwdriver in a dungeon the size of a
  village, filled with dangerous mobs.  If "pixelhunting" is a
  despised term used to describe the failure of the entire genre of
  adventure games, why on earth would we try to incorporate that
  same experience into an MMO, only compounding the tedium of
  fruitless searching with the threat of impending death?

  4. "A plot twist in part 10 of 12!"  A lot of quest cuteness comes
  from designers who try to write epic quests, with lots of text.
  You wouldn't put a lot of text in a movie, would you?  But we're
  still putting a ton of text in MMO quests - it's just not right
  for the genre.  Furthermore, we expect players to -remember- what
  we read, several links in the chain ago.  Hey, I completed stage
  one in the quest 10 levels ago, I don't -remember- why this is
  such a shocking relevation.  And usually, I can't flip back and
  find out WHY it's a shocking revelation.  The long-term result of
  all this is players just get to the point where they stop reading
  the quests altogether and just start doing 'part one of two'.

I could go on, and on, and on, but I'll stop.  Moving forward,
trying to find the next generation of quest behavior for MMOs, I'd
probably lay out some keystone ideals.  Such as:

  1.  Stop thinking about the _story_, and start thinking about the
  _experience_.  Players don't care about your story as much as they
  care about the experience that they're having.  Make the
  experience compelling, and it will create far more compelling
  stories than your own.  When players talk about Magic the
  Gathering, they don't talk in story terms ("Lo, I stood over the
  valley, and summoned one of the feral Kobolds.  While unruly, they
  seemed suitable to my needs").  They talk in game terms ("I was
  almost out of health, but then I drew a Mox Sapphire! Then I could
  play my 'Tim', haste it, and kill off that pesky assassin...')

  2. Think about World Impact.  Probably the most disappointing part
  of quest behavior right now is that the results of the quests are
  still all personal - quests benefit your character, and not your
  guild, nor your kingdom.  They don't leave much of a mark on the
  world.  They aren't memorable for anyone but you.

To me, the exciting future of MMO Quests is not finding ways to tell
more compelling stories, it's finding ways for more compelling
stories to emerge from the players.  As such, I'm firmly in sync
with finding the best game mechanics to do that.

--d
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