Ngruk said:
I"ll throw another "hot topic".
Quest limits?
Why?
I get the tech side of this now, but from a design standpoint is there a reason for limiting the amount of quests I can have ongoing at one time?
I am more interested in players perspectives than solutions.
From a design perspective, I"d look at it from the perspective of reading a fantasy or sci-fi novel. If the first 12 chapters were devoted to the background and lore of the 100 quests the hero was to undertake, would you be able to follow it? Would you want to? And in the next 24 chapters, when the hero accomplished whatever was required for smallQuest_63, would it make sense to you?
How often do we read either a developer claim or a forum griper"s rant about immersion? How immersive is it really to have so many quests that when you log off and then back in the next day, you can maybe remember one or two of the couple dozen active quests you"re working on? It"s nonsense really. Going back to the novel, you might have one main quest and some sideline extraneous stuff that occurs in the pursuit of accomplishing the main one. That covers 200-300 pages of the typical pulp fantasy rag. Now take a few quests that have overlapping purpose and characters, and you end up with, oh I don"t know, something like a bunch of books vaguely reminiscent of a dark elf ranger and his pals written by a guy I think you might have run into. How many "quest" type objectives span the Drizzt saga? It"s like two dozen or so spread over how many thousands of pages?
So from my perspective, the "million little quest to move the bar" theory sucks. I"d rather have long, involved quests that reward exp and meaningful gear at specific milestones, and the milestones themselves should have numerous paths for completion. Think Coldain shawl/ring, just with a lot more exp. Progressive difficulty, more than one specific target for completing most of the steps, and the final steps for each were tirggered and pretty well designed minus zone disruption, which is easily solved with instancing. Another cool thing about the Coldain quests was that they required tradeskilling and some amount of faction work, and some stuff could be solo"d, some single grouped, and the final parts at the time required a raid force. Change a few steps like the glowing biles from the shardwurms, and those quests were about as close to my definition of perfect as any MMO ever had. The epic 1.0s could have been great, but relied more on sitting in one spot and hoping that your target would spawn than anything else. So take every good idea you ever had about how you"d change those EQ1 epic 1.0 quests, and just add exp jumps at different completion points, as well as intermediate versions of the final epic weapon. That"s what I am talking about.
Another good example would be the Smarmy Sprocket quest line in EQ2. You started off on the ship and had to do 4 mini quests to get the ship to dock, then as you progressed into the pirate jail, the quest line expanded, but stayed within that instance. There was exp and gear rewards along the way, and it had a definitive beginning and end with a pretty good story all the way along. As big of a pain as most people thought it was, I really liked how you keyed for Onyxia. Start to finish, that was a really cool quest.
Don"t make the quest log bigger, make the quests better.
