Hate on Quests
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People hate on “busywork” so much but those small things add to the experience. If a game has only one thing for you to do through out its entirety then something that would be considered epic will end up being mundane and possibly boring if everything you do is just more of the same “epic”.
If the game had just events it would be even worse off than it is today. The hearts though some tedious manage to add to the experience. They’re used as a mean of breaking up the repetitiveness of the game.
They break up repetitiveness by… adding repetitiveness? That seems off-base. I see busywork as a cheep way to pad game hours while filling up the xp bar; it’s a way to add rewards to the game on a relatively fixed interval since that tends to be highly addictive on a psychological level (what I like to call “The Ding”). Quests/hearts simply give you a reason and reward for killing those 10 rats when you’ve been killing stuff all game, or to pick those flowers that have a unique graphic but are mechanically the same as all the other clickable widgets throughout the world. I can get on board with the idea that hearts aren’t rewarding enough and don’t “flow” very well in terms of story, and that’s the reason that I tend to skip them.
One thing that quests really do well that simply can’t be repeated with hearts is the environmental object type of quest where you get a new set of skills (like http://www.wowhead.com/quest=10347 since these types of quests are basically mini-games). There are a lot of hearts that allow you to use special environmental weapons to complete the requirements, but the devs stated that they didn’t want people to be running around the map with these things instead of using their regular skills, so they neutered their power and thereby killed the specialness of these types of events. The power level of environmental objects tends to be much less of a concern in a quest type of structure since they can much more easily leash off the area that you can use the objects or take it away when you turn in the quest, while the free-form structure of hearts makes it so that these objects need to be more readily available. I wish they’d change their design philosophy on these types of objects, since their worthlessness kills all the fun of using them in the first place.
Mechanically, a well-designed “quest” (as in MMO “quest”) is one which uses existing gameplay in a way that’s not often experienced elsewhere.
For example, “kill ten rats” is a terrible quest from that point of view, whereas “dodge attacks of ten rats so you can lure them into a trap you’ve set beforehand” is quite decent.
Mechanically, a well-designed “quest” (as in MMO “quest”) is one which uses existing gameplay in a way that’s not often experienced elsewhere.
For example, “kill ten rats” is a terrible quest from that point of view, whereas “dodge attacks of ten rats so you can lure them into a trap you’ve set beforehand” is quite decent.
Still a pretty boring quest with no story.
Mechanically, a well-designed “quest” (as in MMO “quest”) is one which uses existing gameplay in a way that’s not often experienced elsewhere.
For example, “kill ten rats” is a terrible quest from that point of view, whereas “dodge attacks of ten rats so you can lure them into a trap you’ve set beforehand” is quite decent.
Still a pretty boring quest with no story.
It’s true, it is. He didn’t say it wasn’t boring.
It’s just that simple things like that can make a big impact, changing up what a player does every now and again is good for a game.
Even “boring” activities can be fun when you introduce new ways of going about things.
Still a pretty boring quest with no story.
Point. Writing is also an important aspect of a “quest” (unless it’s a breather “quest”). There are also things like setting, pacing, notability, distinction, reward… Not an easy task overall.
Even “boring” activities can be fun when you introduce new ways of going about things.
Someone talked about watering plants earlier. That’s a perfect example of a “breather” quest: boring and repetitive by itself, but nonetheless important to make sure the player’s perspective doesn’t change to accept all-out all-combat all-epic “quests” as being normal, and therefore boring.
In fact, this kind of “quest”, when set against its proper backdrop, can be one of the most impacting and memorable.
(edited by Draco.2806)
@ Silentsins
In a perfect world games would be rich and full of fantastic things for us to do and every second of gameplay would be filled with ecstasy. Sadly we don’t live in a perfect world, sadly companies and people have limits, restrictions, time constraints, budgets etc.
It’s understandable that a game needs some (some) padding and “filler”, that doesn’t mean it has to be boring and bad.
After all limitation is the greatest fuel for innovation. The person/company just needs to be creative and smart with how they design things.
They can make repetitive and boring filler, or quirky and interesting filler. It’s the difference between “kill X rats” to “avoid being hit by X rats while luring them to traps”.
Of course it’s not that simple, but that’s the idea. It’s still filler and just filler gets boring fast, but a game needs more than just one thing to succeed.
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