A Note to Funcom concerning their current direction with Quests.
I’ll try to keep this brief (but will fail miserably), so let me start off by saying that I’ve played Everquest all it’s life. I currently play Dark Age of Camelot as well. With that in mind, I can look at both of their quest systems and give you an honest opinion of which I prefer, the problems they may have, and which direction I hope Anarchy Online takes their quest system in.
Currently, I’m very disappointed to see that Funcom seems to be going in the Everquest direction of questing. If I had to bet, I would say the reasoning behind this was largely due to Everquest’s success. They were a successful product, so their methods must be sound and desirable, right? Well, I don’t believe that line of thinking is necessarily correct. My personal opinion is that Everquest’s success is largely due to it’s timing. It filled a large void that existed in online gaming, and whether you cared for it’s gameplay or not.. it was the only truly 3D MMORPG available to play at it’s time. Thus, I believe it got a much larger audience than it would have had if other comparable games been available at the time of it’s launch.
Some weeks ago I did AO’s Alvin/Dodga quest. To my great sadness, I immediately felt like I was playing Everquest all over again.. a game that I happily left after many years to enjoy the supposed uniqueness of Anarchy Online. Instead, I was back to doing the same sort of chores I had labored through in Everquest:
-Camping monsters in search of rare drops.
-Camping in a line with other players waiting for a quest NPC to spawn so that I could speak with him.
-Getting frustrated and eventually loathing other players who would jump in on my combats to kill monsters I was currently fighting in an attempt to get their own rare drop quest pieces.
That last part was by far the most frustrating.. because unlike Everquest, Anarchy Online does not have a “Play Nice Policy”. From what I can tell, there are no rules on “kill stealing”, and generally many people will act like total rear-ends and do whatever it takes to advance themselves at the cost of someone else’s fun because nobody of authority has come out and said “don’t do that”.
For the record, none of this is fun. Sitting in a line with other players waiting for the quest NPC to spawn, wondering which one of them is laying low now but will eventually reveal his or her true colors and jump ahead of you in line at the moment the quest NPC appears is not fun. It’s how you get ulcers, not enjoyment. The feeling of dread that washes through you when you see a higher-level player showing up where you’re hunting for quest pieces isn’t fun.
Representatives for EQ used to state that, while it could be frustrating trying to complete steps of a quest or hunting for a rare-drop, the emotional feeling of accomplishment and victory you gained at the end made it all worth it. They were wrong. The emotional feeling of joy you get after completing one of these arduous tasks is not a feeling of accomplishment or victory, but usually one of “oh my god, after 6 freaking wasted hours of my life I can finally get out of this hell”. Everquest designers never quite understood that.
On the other hand, we have Dark Age of Camelot’s quest system. It is definitely ‘less challenging’ in a way of gaming where ‘challenging’ is unfortunately defined by how close we can get a player to screaming in frustration. But it’s quest system is fun and enjoyably pleasant.. oh is it pleasant.
For those of you who are not aware of how DAoC’s quest system works, it’s very simple. A typical quest, for example, will send you out to recover an item from a particularly fiendish monster, and then return to the quest NPC to inform him of your victory. You set out to accomplish this, which is often easy enough as very specific directions are usually given. Upon arriving there you may find a few other players working on the same quest. So you talk to them, and offer to form a larger group. And they will accept. Why? Because in DAoC, everyone in a group who kills a quest monster will automatically get the quest item dropped into their inventory the first time they kill the beast in question. That’s right, every single person in the group, all at the same time. And that’s it, everyone cheers for each other’s good fortune, thanking each other for their help, and you can leave. It’s that easy. And you don’t have to worry about non-quest people camping the monster.. because he doesn’t drop anything for you unless you have the quest, so it’s pointless to hunt it.
Then you return to the NPC, he acknowledges your victory.. and he stays there, ready to give the quest out again to anyone who is of the right level range and hasn’t already been given it once. He doesn’t despawn, there are no lines, no waiting. No competition, just cooperation between players. And you can then move on and go do another quest, or whatever fancies you at that moment.
Maybe for some players that’s a problem. After all, competition can be fun, no? Yes, the right kind of competition can be fun. But the kind of competition that Everquest (and now AO) is trying to promote is not fun. There is nothing fun about logging into Everquest and waiting in line for Lord Ragefire to spawn every 72 hours or so, having to call in a GM to play policeman every time another group walks in on your camp and attempts to cut in front of you. There’s a difference between competition and absurdity.
I would also like to point out that a typical Everquest server has around 2500 players, and that an AO server is (theoretically) supposed to have a whole lot more than that. Let’s say you have just 5000 players wanting to do Dodga’s quest. You have to wait 2 hours for him to spawn to give you the mission, and then 2 more hours (because he will immediately despawn upon giving you the mission) for him to respawn again so that you can hand him the item he requested you to collect. That’s a four hour turnover per player, and with 5000 players waiting to do that quest, you’re looking at two and a quarter years to shuffle through that queue.
I’m sorry, but that’s just silly.
The current quest system will breed nothing but contempt and anger between the players. And that’s a shame, because not only is there a better way to handle quests (DAoC’s system), but AO has some tricks available to it that none of these other games have available to them, like the (albeit small) variety of tasks in their randomly generated mission system, the ability to spawn temporary private playfields, etc. These features could be combined with the best features of DAoC’s quest system to make for a truly fun and entertaining experience, and I really wish this would be considered for future quests.
It would be nice if Cosmik set up a poll that very simply asks something like “Which quest model would you prefer AO to be more similar to? A) Everquest B) Dark Age of Camelot”, while giving examples of how both quest systems work. I honestly believe more people would choose “B” over “A”.
Gaming is supposed to be fun, not work. Anarchy Online is, honestly, very much in need of some fun elements. Please don’t waste the opportunities to make it so.
The tricky thing for any online game is gonna be breaking those attachments and getting the players to try something new. The best way to do that is to offer some of the things they like, improved, and some new things that will be more appealing.
