Melmoth’s quest-ly pondering set me thinking about related subjects, like the supporting tracking and logging mechanism for quests.
Back in the Proper Good Old Days, the quest log was a piece of paper. You ran up to an NPC and asked if there was anything you could do for them (none of this glowing punctuation nonsense), and if you were very lucky they might drop some hint about something that might be relevant. Nothing so vulgar as “go kill Bandit Leader Geoff in the bandit camp on the outskirts of Swindon, two miles north east of here, I need his sword.” No, more “I hear there are some bandits in the area. Yes, they might well have a leader, people say his name is Geoff. Apparently Bandit Leader Geoff has a lovely sword. Yes, I would really like a sword very much like that. It would be terrible if something happened to Geoff, though, WINK WINK. No, I don’t know exactly where he is. Maybe over there somewhere *waves vaguely to the west*.” The game wouldn’t insult your intelligence by recording this or anything, you’d jot it down on a post-it note, and get confused when going around a supermarket later “bread, yup, milk, yup, Bandit Leader Geoff’s sword… huh, probably down the kitchenware aisle with the cutlery…”
I think it might have been plausible deniability, in case the NPC was investigated for Incitement To Murder or something, though it could go a bit wrong if you misinterpreted the hints, came back with Geoff’s sword (with Geoff’s bloody hand still clamped around the hilt) and the NPC shrieked “I just wanted you to go to a blacksmith and have him make something similar, you maniac!” Still, at least it was better than the proposed Mime Artist faction in an early alpha of EverQuest who would’ve given all their quests through the medium of charades:
“It’s a… quest! Three words. Right. First word… sounds like… eat? Swallow? Oh, what you’re eating… tablet? Pill? Pill, yes! Sounds like pill… bill, fill, kill… Kill! First word, kill. Second word… tenth word. Wait, I thought it was three words? Second word… oh, that is the second word, ten. Kill ten…”
Anyway, over the course of time the quest mechanisms evolved, quest givers became more obvious, add-ons or in-game features recorded objectives and your progress towards them and things generally improved (or “were dumbed down to the point of infantilisation, here I am, brain the size of a planet and you’re patronising me by recording all this information that I’m perfectly capable of writing a large spreadsheet to support, cross-referencing three years of accumulated research, oh all right I’ll go and kill those ten boars but I won’t enjoy it you know”, depending on your point of view). When Warhammer Online launched, its vaunted Tome of Knowledge was a splendid thing, recording where you’d been, who you’d spoken to, how many of them you’d killed, and what weird random things you’d clicked on in case they were an unlock. Warhammer’s quest log is also part of the Tome of Knowledge, where the splendidness is slightly tempered by being coupled to a straightforward “go to camp, talk to the punctuation, do quests, return to the punctuation” PvE quest-hub structure, and further shackled by a limited number of quests it could track, as m’colleague and I posted about at the time. I suspect “so near and yet so far” features like the Kill Collectors were great ideas that proved tricky to implement really well, and with RvR being the main post-launch focus it just hasn’t been worthwhile to go back and seriously revamp them.
I’ve been hitting quest log limits in Lord of the Rings Online as well; where back at launch it seemed there was a bit of a barren patch in the 20s were you had to do every single quest you could get your hands on to eke out enough XP to level up without too much grinding, there are now a plethora of options; from assorted skirmishing, festivals, questing and crafting I’ve pretty much out-levelled the Barrow Downs without setting a foot in the place so I just cleared out a bunch of quests around there to make room for new ones in the Lone Lands. It’s not really a problem, the old quests were all obsolete so I wasn’t missing out on much (apart from scratching the nagging completionist itch), though a bit of an expansion in the quest log as a whole could be nice (for a mere 1,995 Turbine Points, perhaps). What’s slightly more irritating than the overall limit is the active tracker, that can only monitor five quests at a time. I frequently have to fire it up, deactivate all the quests it’s tracking, find the (possibly) relevant quests in the log and activate tracking for them, and then repeat the process whenever you go somewhere else.
Here’s hoping The Old Republic and other forthcoming games might solve some of these minor annoyances. If nothing else, the Star Wars universe surely allows for remote communication such that you don’t have to physically return to a questgiver every single time, something a little more difficult to plausibly work into fantasy settings without resorting to good old “magic”. Though maybe…
“Right, Mayor, here’s a tin can with some string through it. I’ll take this tin can on the other end of the string, and when I’ve killed ten thugs I’ll shout into it, and then you can shout back to tell me to kill the ten ever so slightly different thugs who stand really close to the first lot who’d completely slipped your mind when you originally handed out the quest.”
SW:G has something like the tin can. I’d get sent out to kill 12 enemies of Jabba and upon completing that he’d remember that he had more enemies, so I’d kill them. Sometimes he’d remember 3, 4, even 5 different types of people who were his enemies. At times I wondered why I was never just sent out with a quest saying simply “commit genocide until we ask you to stop”, since it would have been much more efficient.
At times I wondered why I was never just sent out with a quest saying simply “commit genocide until we ask you to stop”, since it would have been much more efficient.
That’s not a bad idea for a lot of MMOs… first NPC you meet just hands you a bit of paper saying “Kill Everything”, would save a lot of time.
WoW implemented some of this with their Cataclysm expansion and DCUO has it as well. When you fulfill the requirements for a quest, something will pop up and allow you to “complete” the quest and get the next one in the line while on the run. Quite a handy advancement.
@Zoso “That’s not a bad idea for a lot of MMOs… first NPC you meet just hands you a bit of paper saying “Kill Everything”, would save a lot of time.”
Better make that “Kill Everything But Me”, or the quest will be hard to turn in afterwards. Some players would take it rather literally.
@KIASA I really want that tin can with a string in LOTRO. Just yesterday I was slaughtering everything that moved in a Tarkrip camp to get the 12 stolen goods (plus XP and loot naturally), only to turn in that quest and be given a quest to go kill 16 Tarkrips. In that camp. What, it didn’t occur to you that I might be killing Tarkrips there already to get the dozen boxes of stolen goods that I can only get by killing Tarkrips? (we won’t ask how I’m managing to carry 10 boxes of stolen goods around while also wielding my bow and dual knives as appropriate, of course).
In the vein of “the quest log”, I really hate it when you’re sent on a quest to find a missing person, only for the wording of the quest objective to give away that they’re already dead. Usually its the difference between “talk to” and “find”, but it still sucks. I remember this as particularly a problem in WAR — maybe it was because of the ‘darker’ atmosphere, but I’ll be damned if I ever found any missing person alive.
Worse, they had usually been sacrificed to the Dark Gods.
Since I still habitually talk to most NPCs when I meet them for the first time, regardless of whether or not they have Quest Indicators over their heads, I would be fine with going back to the old method.
Why do I talk to them? Becuse they frequently have odd fragments of dialog that are sometimes funny or intriguing. I get the impression that more creativity goes into the background dialog of NPCs than into actual quest dialog. Yes, I read all of that too.
I always thought it would be good to have animation differences for NPC’s with quests. They are looking for help, they should point, wave and jump about! If an NPC ignores you, they’ve probably not got a quest.
The “!” above heads does rather smack of immersion breaking metagaming.
@Pid: Certainly makes sense in DCUO… “So, you can leap tall buildings in a single stride, but you still haven’t mastered the cellphone?”
@Jonathan B: Oh lawks, don’t go tugging on that thread or I’ll start thinking about the Perfectly Preserved Bear Corpse I picked up the other day that takes up exactly the same space in my inventory as a copper ring…
@AH: I suppose people have complained about searching around an area for somebody to talk to, not noticing the vividly glowing corpse making “VWORP! VWORP!” sounds. Does rather take the surprise out of things, though.
@Bhagpuss: I’ll still do that in single player CRPGs, like you say there’s often some fun dialogue to be had, but a lot of MMOGs only seem to let you interact with an NPC when they actually have a quest now. Pirates of the Burning Sea is good for ambience, though, with some fully voiced NPCs just standing around certain areas chatting you can do a bit of eavesdropping.
@Dr Toerag: That’s a good point, for people who seem pretty desperate for you to go and perform some menial task for them, NPCs aren’t exactly forthcoming about it. “Play it cool, Neville the Trainee Questgiver, play it cool, you can’t look too keen, it puts ’em off. Just stand there, with a bit of glowing punctuation, let ’em think it’s their idea to come and get a quest off you…”