[MUD-Dev2] The Future of Quests

[Damion Schubert]

On Tue, Nov 25, 2008 at 10:33 AM, Lachek Butalek <lachek at gmail.com> wrote:

> To put it differently, compare these three quests:
>
> * The king of the land charges you to slay four hundred goblins and
> return to him to receive a +2 sword.
> * The king of the land charges you, the valiant hero, to stop the
> invading goblin army. In return, he promises you a great bounty.
> * The king of the land charges you, the valiant hero, to stop the
> invading goblin army, for the third time. In return, he promises you a
> great bounty, for the third time.
> ...



> But the third quest, however superbly generated, will trigger the
> "uncanny" effect. It *seems* to be part of an integral, seamless
> narrative, but to the player it is obviously impossible that the same
> goblin army would attack three times in a week, and that the king should
> happen to possess a whole armoury full of heritage weaponry to hand out.
>

We have an interesting case study on this.  Until recently, WoW players who
raided were forced to grind for cash by killing foozles for foozle drops, in
order
to pay for potions, repairs and enchant materials.  (In WoW, you can only
complete quests once, and most 80 players would be out of quests).  This
was considered by pretty much everyone to be no fun at all.

Blizzard then added the concept of daily quests which were (perhaps
unsurprisingly), quests that players could complete once a day, for a cash
amount not terribly far from what you could get if you were good at
grinding.
The popularity of the daily quests were widely varied from quest to quest,
and were based on whether or not the activity the quest bore repetition
well.
Yes, some of them were despised.  Did this have anything to do with any
'Uncanny Valley' arising because repeatedly rescuing the princess didn't
make any sense?  No, it was solely because the fun of performing the
activity did not survive frequent repetition.  Blizzard has vastly expanded
the daily quest concept since then, to general approval of the players.

--d