Just kidding. When I was playing WOW, I was an alt-aholic and about 1/4 of my characters were Alliance.

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.

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.