[MUD-Dev2] RANT: The Future of Quests

[Amanda Walker]

On Jan 2, 2009, at 4:10 AM, Mike Rozak wrote:
> 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.  
> [...]
> AND, the player's relationship with the old lady draws them  
> emotionally into
> the world. The player meets the lady's granddaughter, etc. [...]

Which runs into a problem, here in the future: player preconceptions.   
The "Fantasy MMORPG" genre has become so formulaic (because of its  
very success, from EQ to Warhammer Online) that even little UI details  
like keyboard accelerators are becoming standardized across games.

One part of that formula is that quest-givers and reward-givers are  
vending machines.  The story can be engaging or not (and some of them  
are surprisingly so), but the mechanics of the leveling/questing grind  
(which we've gone round and round about on mud-dev for years, possibly  
decades :-)) has become part of the genre, as have some others (the  
basic "health/mana" scheme, armor and weapons and "dps", etc.).

> Diku MMORPGs are INCREDIBLY naive / simplistic / childish / immature  
> in
> their use of player motivation.

Yep--but boy howdy are the popular (as continues to be the basic D&D  
gameplay that Diku was itself based on).

I adore the idea of engaging, immersive virtual worlds without grinds  
as a background for player story construction, but after experiencing  
Second Life (technically fascinating, but so non-linear it's not even  
a game, and which converged on "porn and gambling" thanks to its lack  
of structure), WoW (Fantasy MMO that finally managed to combine casual  
player accessibility with power-gamer achievement rewards), and Guild  
Wars (minimizes leveling grind and downtime, embraces PvP and "sport"  
aspects, plus a long multi-forked back story for people who like that  
sort of thing) has led me to conclude that virtual worlds and MMORPGs  
should be considered separate sorts of thing--the latter were just the  
first large-scale examples of the former, and so far the most popular.

--Amanda