Guild Wars 2

Are MMO Quest Chains Dead?

I enjoyed the read.

http://www.ign.com/articles/2014/08/01/are-mmo-quest-chains-dead?l

Games evolve or devolve, depending on your perspective, based on the current generation of gamers. Many developers will design content to appeal to the new generation to bring in new players. There’s always going to be a rift between old and new gamers on what they expect.

Very spot on article, thanks for the link. I think this has more to it than just quest lines, I think it’s more of a comment on the entire social situation of MMOs. Why don’t we have large quest lines requiring groups? because that takes a level of devotion and time investment many players simply aren’t interested in doing.

Games now are a lot more casual. Not in the MMO connotation of casual = bad, but as in the actual definition, the more relaxed and convenient play styles that todays games allow. While I’m a big fan of many of the conveniences we have now (love me some waypoints) they certainly to detract from that immersion factor and with that from the whole social aspect. This article focuses on quests, but I think the waypoints are a good example as well. 2 of my best friends from EQ LONG ago were a couple I met while riding a boat, we had 30 minutes of nothing but riding a boat to do so we started chatting and there started a solid 3 year long friendship and a lot of good memories and times. Had we had waypoints, we would have likely never met. But, that said, I don’t think I’d be willing to give up waypoints, so I think it’s kind of a natural progression based on things we as players want, but in the end we’re losing a lot of what made MMOs what they were, which is unfortunate.

I miss the days when the quests were meaningful and slaying dragons were rewarding not only by items but also an inner sense of achievement. Gw2 fabricates those feelings and make every action rewarding as other actions do, no boss is so special in this world since i can not take a piece from it to carry on with myself. There are nothing but green thrashes and salvage items.

That was a good article! However, I would like to comment on the “Casual” aspect that was mentioned several times.

It would appear that “older” gamers in general make up the largest portion of players. This is the 30-40 year olds. The generation that started playing video games on the original NES and SEGA systems when they were new. (I am also of this generation of gamers) We started our online gaming with Ultima Online and Everquest. We moved to WoW and possibly Guild Wars as time wore on. But now, we, generally, have families, jobs, commitments and obligations. We just can’t spend +8hours on a game at a time anymore. Gaming compaies are recognizing this, and making their games much more casual. Yeah, there might be a large quest chain, or other event that requires long time commitments, but now we can stop in the middle and pick it up later. That NEVER used to be an option. How many remember leaving the Nintendo on overnight, hoping to God that it wouldn’t crash, so we can pick it up after school the next day at the same spot? As games were made to be more and more casual, to cater to the largest concentration of gamers, us “old timers”, the younger generation of gamers grew up with that. They find it difficult to think that if you were in the middle of a quest, you can’t just turn it off, or you would lose all progress and have to start over. They grew up with the ability to save at any time, anywhere. They never knew the pain of finally making it past the hover bike level on battle toads, leaving the game on because you had to go to bed, only to find that it crashed (or your mom turned it off) when you went to play it again.

Games have turned casual because a large portion of their players just don’t have the time to commit to a long quest chain, and the younger generation of players would think that it is too hard, because they are used to not having to do those things.

Just a thought

Clickbait article

I don’t think the lack of save options was necessarily a deliberate design choice in those older games so much as a technical limitation. Even relatively recently (late 80’s/early 90s) the ability to save your progress in a game required resources that weren’t always available. It was easier for console games because they could build everything required into the cartridge, but that pushed the price up. When you were running a PC game from a floppy disk on a machine that may not have much spare memory (and probably needed to do a lot besides play games) save files could be an undesirable extra complication.

A lot of older games did try to offer alternatives. For example you’d be presented with a ‘cheat’ code at the end of each level that could be put into the start menu to let you jump straight to that level, so you wouldn’t have to start from scratch every time. (Unless your mum threw out the paper you wrote them on for being “covered in nonsense”.)

By the time MMOs came along (I’m talking UO and later, not MUDs) that was less of an issue but I think it’s still debatable how much of it was a conscious design choice vs. what was familiar to the designers and their audience and, once again, technical limitations.

For example GW1 was pretty good about letting you continue quests from where you left off but you still had to start from the last town you were in and some things, vanquishing for example, had to be done all in one go. I think that was a limitation of the instanced design. If they let you log off in the middle of a map, and especially in the middle of a vanquish, the server would have to store that copy of the map until you logged in again, which would take resources away from the people actively playing.

Over time these limitations get addressed, either just in the course of new technology coming out or because someone in a position to fix it is bothered enough to work at it, and that enables new games to be more flexible.

That is when the design choices come in. For example many games (notably JRPGs) still only allow you to save at specific points, even though the technology to allow players to save at any point has existed for years. In that case it’s usually a tactical thing – you need to pick the right party members and/or equipment and that would be much easier if you could do one encounter at a time, instead you have to do an entire dungeon in one go, so you have to be prepared for that.

With quests in MMOs it’s harder to say at the moment because there is a lot of variation in the technology behind them. What’s easy to do in one game may be impossible in another. But I do think it will be interesting to see what the trend is in future.

@danicat

Oh I agree completely. But whatever the limitaions were, hardware or otherwise, they were still something we were accustomed to. And games have been built to allow for those things which is great. Even so the continuous quest chains, or tasks in general, are more difficult for “older” gamers as life takes pecadence and we get older.

Also I fondly remember the level codes, and the fears of getting them tossed out. Gauntlet was another one of those games. Although we did crack the code, so we could choose which character, level, how much gold, life, keys and bombs you wanted at will :P aaaah good times.