[MUD-Dev2] The Future of Quests

[Damion Schubert]

On Tue, Nov 11, 2008 at 11:03 AM, Mike Sellers <mike at onlinealchemy.com>wrote:

> And
> in part it requires that the players care about the NPCs -- they have to
> have bona fide relationships with the NPCs, which in turn requires that the
> NPCs have enough emotionality (among other things) for the players to care
> about them.
>

The trick for the MMO/MUD designer is that the player is that the player can
only track so many NPC relationships at one time.  Overwhelm the player
with quests, whether hand-crafted or randomly generated, and at a certain
point that player will become simply swamped with stories and relationships
that he's supposed to track.  Your odds of getting the player to actually
care
at this point are extremely low.

As way of example, one of my pet peeves are long quest lines that MMOs give
at level 20 that don't conclude until level 35, but when they do, close with
an
awesome, unexpected twist!  Sorry, but along the way, I may have done
100-200
other quests, and have long forgotten stages 1, 2 and 3, and I didn't even
realize
stage 4 was part of this questline.  So while I'm sure that stage 7 was a
masterpiece
worthy of the bard himself, I have to rush to Stratics just to figure out
what the
hell is going on.  And I'm one of those people that actually *reads* my
quests.

--d


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