[MUD-Dev2] RANT: The Future of Quests

[Mike Rozak]

Zach Collins wrote:
> And 2: the real secrets of open questing are that everyone (including
> NPCs) can give a quest ("Hey man U get me gold I give U potion") to
> whomever, by several different methods; and that NPCs are motivated by
> their personalities much like characters.

RANT MODE ON (not directed at Zach):

Whatever MMO scenario a player is in, designers need to ask themselves, "Why 
do players want to do X?" After designers have asked that, they need to 
design the gameplay and "story" so that players REALLY want to do X. 
(Designers also need to provide players choices, so players can potentially 
decide that Y would be a better outcome than X... but I won't get into that 
here.)

Designers also need to ask themselves, "Why do I want players to do X? How 
does it make the player's experience more "fun" or "gratifying" in the long 
run?"

One of the uses for "quests" is that they provide an avenue for "story" and 
emotion. Players want to kill 10 rats because they get a cookie as a reward. 
Fine, but that's simplistic "game" design.

The "story" part of the quest is that the rats are in an old lady's house. 
The old lady has been kind to the player before. The player feels sorry for 
her, so he kills the rats for her... not for the reward. After killing the 
rats, the old lady is noticably happier, and to show how happy she is, she 
bakes some cookies for the player. (Note: She doesn't just hand a cookie to 
the player. She invites them to tea, pulls the warm cookies out of the oven, 
and says, "Here, I baked these for you.") And everytime the player stops by 
for a chat, the old lady is happy and talks about the rats being gone.

AND, the player's relationship with the old lady draws them emotionally into 
the world. The player meets the lady's granddaughter, etc. And when the evil 
overlord's armies destroy the old lady's house and kidnaps her 
granddaughter, the player translates their care for the old lady into their 
hatred for the evil overlord. (Or maybe it was another player that destroyed 
the house and did the kidnapping...)

And, to tell the truth, if you can generate enough emotional attachment that 
the player cares about the old woman, you don't need to use the "Saving the 
world from the evil overlord" card at all. Saving the world is kind of like 
the ultimate emotional cop-out for poor writing/design because, by 
implication, saving the world saves everything in the world. Even if the 
player doesn't care much for the individual bits of the world (aka: 
poorly-written characters), they should  (theoretically) care about the sum 
of those bits. A good author gets the player to care about the individual 
bits in the world, making whether or not character X gets married (or not) 
the emotional center... not whether character X dies... not whether 
character X's city is blown up... or that the entire world is destroyed. If 
you can make players really care that character X gets married (as per any 
trite romantic comedy) then you don't need an evil overlord.

While procedural quests work as filler, you can't create a procedural quest 
with the impact of the old-lady quest because your 
procedural-quest-generating algorithms don't sufficiently understand 
emotions and human reality.

Procedurally-generated quests have the emotional depth of an obnoxious male 
teenager on a power trip.

Diku MMORPGs are INCREDIBLY naive / simplistic / childish / immature in 
their use of player motivation. Hence, the grind. The central reason that 
(core) players play diku-MMORPGs is that they want to grow up. They want to 
acquire. They want to become more powerful. They want to trample on the 
happiness of others in order to improve (or prove) their own self worth. 
Core players then pull in their friends, who play because they want to play 
with their friends, the core players... but really, they'd rather be doing 
something something else beside trying to keep up (level-wise) with their 
core friends. This enormous mass of players also pulls in wanna-be 
stock-market traders who play the auction house because they find the 
markets intellectually challenging and emotionally exciting.

No wonder MMORPG quests are so inane!

Because MMORPGs have degraded into catering almost exclusively for such 
players, people that play MMORPGs (and worse, people that design MMORPGs) 
think that all there is to a quest is a contract: "You kill X, and I give 
you Y."

PS - This rant was inspired by Warhammer Online.