I’ve never played World of Warcraft, or any MMO for that matter, but a recent Penny Arcade Comic made me start thinking about how the “quests” in so many RPGs simply require you to travel to a faraway location, and either find an item, kill an enemy, or simply visit point A, then point B, then point C. This has been the case going as far back as Ultima 3, where you had to visit the bottom of dungeons to get brands, or Legend of Zelda, where you had to visit the bottom of a dungeon to get a raft or flute. As games evolved, quests began to take place outside of dungeons, dark enchanted forests, and mad wizards’ fortresses.
Sidequests, at one point, were a great innovation in gaming. Here was a purely optional mission that could get you extra experience, more equipment or gold, or simply tell portions of a story that a player could choose to skip. But they’ve grown cumbersome.
In all fairness, these quests have evolved beyond fetching and killing. In Baldurs’ Gate, you could talk a man out of commiting suicide. In Fallout 3, there is a section where you have to come up with a “creative” way to kill a woman, such a rigging her stove to explode, dropping a chandelier on her, or reprogramming her security robot to kill her. But despite these evolutions, these are all conversational-model “quests” – just an evolution of the old text adventures. I crave something more.
Today’s sandbox RPGs have become nothing more than a series of endless fetch quests. I don’t have a suggestion for a solution to get beyond this, but when a game developer comes along and gives us something new, an RPG where you’re doing something more than killing ten molerats or collecting twenty cans of Nuka Cola Quantum, it will be innovation. And I think people will love it.
I think quests as you described them are “old and busted” plots on rails. You might hit the occasional switch at the station, but they’re fairly linear. You’re familiar with that feeling when you’re given a quest and think, “Gee, this sucks. I really don’t want to be doing this.” Sometimes you luck out and the quest is optional, but it’s not often enough.
A few games offer dynamic questing where quests are built on the fly… but the engines that build the quests are bastard children of Ad-Libs puzzles. You must travel to location x,y and fight 2-4 of creature type A to obtain B. I think I like static quests better because there’s an actual living mind behind them.
I’m starting to think quests themselves are dead ends and the player will need to start taking responsibility for deciding their own goals and creating their own story… like when we did as children playing in the sandbox with our Star Wars figures or when we played tabletop RPGs. It will be on the game designers to create the tools and perhaps provide a little inspiration. Games like The Sims and Animal Crossing are a start… but I’m hoping for something much more grand and something that seems less like a game designer’s playground.
I agree fetch quests are tedious and unimaginitive, but what exactly is your Lvl 1 Rogue going to do for xp? Undertake an hours long epic quest to discover the mysterious identity of your parents murderer? And then what will you do at Lvl 2?
Fetch quests suck but they exist to introduce you to your early class mechanics and typically serve as a tutorial for your given game’s quest and NPC system. Every aspect of an RPG builds up from a starting point, your character, the quests, skills, the complexity of the combat system, etc. I can agree that more creativity at the end-game stage is needed, I’d love to experience more types of quests that just leave you floored at the revelations you’ve uncovered and truly place you at the center of the story, while still working within a sequential “quest” system. Greg, see if you can start designing that.
Sometimes fetch quests can be fun though. I still enjoy stealing candles from those hideous Kobolds in WoW’s starter fetch quests. “You no take candle!” never gets old.
Uh oh, Frank’s Alliance. :/
Just kidding. When I was playing WOW, I was an alt-aholic and about 1/4 of my characters were Alliance.