Green Monster Games - Curt Schilling

Lourdin said:

Actually, if the lastest EQ2 exp. taught anyone anything is that some people actually prefer to have grinding as an option to questing for leveling. EQ2"s only valid means of progression in the latest expansion was questing and after a while is became it"s own form of grind. Some potentially great zones like KC, a dungeon, were empty because there were only 5 quest in there and the exp per kill was useless.

Sometimes logging in and just mindlessly wacking the crap out of things is not a bad thing.

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Actually, I don"t believe a large amount of people enjoy grinding. To achieve a better success than WoW, something will need to be done.

Grinders can find skip quests or any other mechanism that may be put up at their leisure for all I care. Grinding doesn"t have to be bad exp as well (AoE classes).

Experience points needs to go away anyways. Another outdated mechanic. Quests are valued only because they grant significant experience over other alternatives so people find the highest xp-to-quest-time-ratio.

If you used EQ"s AA"s, WoW"s talents, LOTRo"s virtues and new/spells abilities as the reward for completing quests you"d see a whole new outlook. Suddenly that quest that takes 30 minutes is no longer pointless bullshit because it"s the same XP as a quest that takes 2 minutes.

Nothing to say you can"t have achievements or whatever that aren"t geared towards just logging on and whacking mobs either. You could have entire series of "mob slayer" achievements or whatever. Kill 50 goblins, get +2% damage to goblinkin. Kill 200 goblins, critical hits that do more then 30% of a goblins life in one hit now cause them to cower in fear for 3 seconds. Kill 500 goblins you gain the goblinslayer title. Do similar shit for all sorts of creature types.

Anyways...

Ultimately makes more sense to me then, "Hey, I just killed 1000 rabid raccoons, ding!"

Zehn - Vhex said:

Experience points needs to go away anyways. Another outdated mechanic. Quests are valued only because they grant significant experience over other alternatives so people find the highest xp-to-quest-time-ratio.

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Anyone else feel that quest rewards should mainly be about the time investment the quest requires? If I get a fedex that has me running from Desolace to Stonard it sure as heck better not be 1100 xp because that"s what fedex quests are worth.

I have felt at times that rewards were horribly done or unoriginal in implementation because it felt to me like someone slapped value X on a specific quest type and all of those type quests got me the same reward. No matter that one of them took 4 hours and the other 7 minutes.

Ngruk said:

Anyone else feel that quest rewards should mainly be about the time investment the quest requires? If I get a fedex that has me running from Desolace to Stonard it sure as heck better not be 1100 xp because that"s what fedex quests are worth.

I have felt at times that rewards were horribly done or unoriginal in implementation because it felt to me like someone slapped value X on a specific quest type and all of those type quests got me the same reward. No matter that one of them took 4 hours and the other 7 minutes.

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I"m actually with Zehn on this one...

Quests should be about something. Access to an area, getting a new spell from your master at the city, learning a secret to kill goblins(+2% dmg to goblins or whatever), being sent to a new area which then allows you to travel there via whatever speed system is in place.

I dont mind grinding as much as some do on these boards, but I prefer to level in groups doing instances or whatever as opposed to using QuestHelper(wow addon that sets up routes for most efficent questing) and just mindless running around and/or killing shit.

I think one problem with rewarding "long" quests with more xp than "short quests" is that people will always find a loop hole, always. I don"t care how you build the system, count on it. So eventually you have alts being ported around, or whatever the case may be doing the long quest in 1/4 of the time but getting all the xp. New fastest path to max leaving normal, regular players in the dust.

As said before, and evidenced in every game ever released people will always find and take the path to least resistence(in general, yes there are many players who just enjoy whatever natural path the game lays out....like the 8 million new players to wow). And I am of the firm opinion that making all quests fun is impossible.

Im a fan of grinding xp, to me its the best social aspect of MMO"s. Hours spent grinding decent xp, getting the occasional named to spawn for loot and bullshitting the night away with friends or making new ones was the greatest draw for me in EQ.

The way things went with WoW et al and the quest for xp thing drove me nuts and drove me away from those games. Form group, decide on a quest to do, 30 minutes later and one or more folks disband without a word. Glad I could help on that quest fella! Completely anti-social behavior in those game,for me.

Ngruk said:

Anyone else feel that quest rewards should mainly be about the time investment the quest requires? If I get a fedex that has me running from Desolace to Stonard it sure as heck better not be 1100 xp because that"s what fedex quests are worth.

I have felt at times that rewards were horribly done or unoriginal in implementation because it felt to me like someone slapped value X on a specific quest type and all of those type quests got me the same reward. No matter that one of them took 4 hours and the other 7 minutes.

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I definitely agree. I"ve been leveling a new character on WoW lately and, since it"s something that interests me, I"ve been paying a little more attention to the design of certain areas, quests, and compensation. In particular, the items awarded for nearly all low- to mid-level quests are absolutely terrible and not worth the time. Then there are the quests like you mentioned where they take far longer than other quests with similar objectives, yet give the same amount of experience.

Anyway, I don"t have a problem with experience points. I find it satisfying to level. My issue is with the way quests are currently done in a very back and forth fashion. You do one quest and turn it in, that gets you another one, so on and so forth.

I"d rather see quest chains involve the player a little more. By that I mean, say you"re given a quest to explore the inside of a cave and see what might be disturbing the animals of the forest outside it. Rather than stepping a few feet inside, getting your quest completion dialogue, and then running back to the NPC, why can"t you just analyze the situation yourself and act? Quests with multiple stages should just update for you, rather than requiring further interaction with the NPC (except in cases where it makes sense from a story standpoint). Each stage could grant exp so you feel rewarded as you go along.

Using the same example: You go into the cave and complete the first objective when you see some zombies ambling around inside. You recognize that they are wearing tattered clothing similar to that of the villagers nearby. This auto-completes your "see what is disturbing the animals" quest, as well as one you got earlier in the village to "seek out the missing villagers". Rather than turning back though, you get two new quests immediately that tell you to seek out the source of the zombies and look for any live captives. You go on and eventually find a tribe of hex-weaving goblins and a witchdoctor are behind the whole mess, and your quest updates telling you to slay X amount of them and the witchdoctor himself. So you"ve been getting exp the entire time from completing the different objectives, and then you finally go back and inform the original questgivers of the result and get more exp + item rewards. Sounds a lot more fun to me.

Mymn said:

for me.

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It"s definitely a your mileage may vary thing. Don"t get me wrong. I did the marathon xp camps with friends in EQ as well. The thing is I was having fun with my friends. We could have been playing Starcraft, Counterstrike or just hanging out in IRC. All EQ did was offer me a button to hit while I waited for people to reply to me.

It"s like looking at porn while talking to friends on AIM honestly.

Anyways...

As far as grouping goes, one thing I"ve seen a lot of is that developers are designing grouping as something to do besides soloing. The content is almost without fail seperated.

I don"t like this.

What I"d like to see is...well it"s hard to put in words. But I think we all know the concept. For exampe when doing quests, if you group with someone and that someone completes a quest you helped them with, you should get some kind of bonus. Whether it"s a faction boost or a temporary buff or, shit, while we"re on the subject, "Momma"s little helper" achivement where if you help other people complete 1000 quests you get some bonus, like 5% bonus faction earned or whatever. You get the idea.

Grouping should be an alternate means of accomplishing the same shit, but only you get a bonus on top of it.

I guess one way to explain this is like early WoW after the raid-quest nerf. You could still raid dungeons, but you couldn"t complete the quest. So while you could get the loot by being in a raid, you didn"t get quest completes. I"d like to see something similar.

So while you can flip a switch and spawn a solo/duo version of a dungeon, completing it in the normal group mode gives you more. Quests may require that you complete the group version or achivements may require group completions.

Well, I like to think that made sense. The game shouldn"t be 50% solo content, 50% group content. It should be 100% solo content but you get more for doing it in a group.

Now that we"re on the topic of quests, please make it so that quests are completed when you do the objectives, even if you weren"t on the damn quest. I absolutely loathe having to go kill Big Orc Boss mob again, because I wasn"t on the damn quest.

"What do you mean, kill Big Orc Boss? I already killed him like 5 minutes ago!"

Same with the stupid kill 100 rabid raccoon quests. If I"ve already killed 100 rabid raccoons, why should I go kill another 100?

Maleficence said:

Now that we"re on the topic of quests, please make it so that quests are completed when you do the objectives, even if you weren"t on the damn quest. I absolutely loathe having to go kill Big Orc Boss mob again, because I wasn"t on the damn quest.

"What do you mean, kill Big Orc Boss? I already killed him like 5 minutes ago!"

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I agree with this in some cases, but it depends on what kind of story needs to be told. But, yeah, there"s no reason you couldn"t loot his head even if you weren"t on the quest and get some small dialogue saying "Someone in town may be interested in seeing this." You take it to the Captain of the Guard who mentions the trouble with the orc leader and his goons, and you"re like "Oh? This orc leader?" as you hold up his head.

Of course, on the flipside it could prevent the player from experiencing the quest storyline the way it was meant to be told. For example, if there happened to be 2 or 3 quests leading up to taking out the orc leader, you"d have missed out on those. It would be difficult for the developers to make that work right.

I do get what you"re saying though, it"s a bummer when you want to help someone you met with their quest and then later you realize you have to do it again for yourself because you didn"t have the quest yet.

Zehn - Vhex said:

Experience points needs to go away anyways. Another outdated mechanic. Quests are valued only because they grant significant experience over other alternatives so people find the highest xp-to-quest-time-ratio.

If you used EQ"s AA"s, WoW"s talents, LOTRo"s virtues and new/spells abilities as the reward for completing quests you"d see a whole new outlook. Suddenly that quest that takes 30 minutes is no longer pointless bullshit because it"s the same XP as a quest that takes 2 minutes.

Nothing to say you can"t have achievements or whatever that aren"t geared towards just logging on and whacking mobs either. You could have entire series of "mob slayer" achievements or whatever. Kill 50 goblins, get +2% damage to goblinkin. Kill 200 goblins, critical hits that do more then 30% of a goblins life in one hit now cause them to cower in fear for 3 seconds. Kill 500 goblins you gain the goblinslayer title. Do similar shit for all sorts of creature types.

Anyways...

Ultimately makes more sense to me then, "Hey, I just killed 1000 rabid raccoons, ding!"

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I agree completely. A lot fewer quests, with a lot better and more interesting rewards would be awesome. In WOW you go to town and talk to everyone to pick up 11 quests as fast as you can without reading them or even caring about them. WoW is just so dull like that.

I would rather I spend my time every night doing 1 or 2 long quests that immerse you and when you finally finish it is more than worth it as you will be showered with XP, Loot, Access to area, and anything else that makes sense.

WAR will move the genre forward with Public Quests and the tome of knowledge, those two things should be required in any new MMO. PQ"s are really awesome, basically get into an area with some global goals, and everyone who participates helps moves that goal forward, and is rewarded a bit with faction/rep/items/potions/etc when the goal is met. You don"t have to create groups, you don"t loot mobs, it all just naturally moves forward. Absolutely brilliant in their implementation, and implementing dozens of PQs throughout the entire game makes leveling fun.

Of course it opens up to the "AV AFKer" exploit problem, of people just running scripts at the PQ areas hitting auto attack or whatever and leeching xp/rep/honor/blah from others who are actively participating.

Be nice to see more games get away from the mentality of "rush to max level, thats where the game REALLY starts!" No clue how to do it well, but yeah, would love to see quests be more meaningful and involved rather than all the bullshit ones WoW and others give you.

Grave said:

Of course, on the flipside it could prevent the player from experiencing the quest storyline the way it was meant to be told. For example, if there happened to be 2 or 3 quests leading up to taking out the orc leader, you"d have missed out on those. It would be difficult for the developers to make that work right.

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I"m all for story lines, but seriously you"ve lost my interest in the story when it starts off with: "Help us, a Big Orc Boss is threatening our village." and I"ve already killed off Big Orc Boss. At that point, I"m annoyed more than anything, as the game has made two things clear:
a. the story is bullshit.
b. my actions in the story are bullshit.

So unless the writing is so superb or the story so engaging that I"m just aching to read the next part, I"ve lost all my motivation story-wise. The only motivation left is getting the quest reward, which is a game play aspect.

If they want to tell a story I think there are better mechanisms, where the story revolves around your actions. Hence there is no Big Orc Boss roaming around unless you"ve triggered it as part of the story you"re developing. Otherwise, if my actions have no impact other than advance to the next wall of text, what"s the point?

Finally, you can still relate the story even if you"ve completed the objectives. "Thank you, Big Orc Boss had been terrorizing our village. Have this as your reward." Same message conveyed, just in a different manner to suite the situation.

spronk said:

Be nice to see more games get away from the mentality of "rush to max level, thats where the game REALLY starts!" No clue how to do it well, but yeah, would love to see quests be more meaningful and involved rather than all the bullshit ones WoW and others give you.

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It"d actually be pretty easy to do by simply making the player feel like a hero early on, which we discussed earlier in the thread.

Stuff like cool looking armor sets, major storylines that culminate in an epic battle with some powerful being, meaningful rewards that stick with the player like titles or permanent character boosts; these are all things that are for some reason nearly always stuck on at the end of the game instead of spread throughout it. If you rewarded the player meaningfully at all levels they would be much more likely to enjoy their time leveling and not feel in such a rush to get to the "good" stuff.

Some games are trying to do this. I know LOTRO and WAR both offer titles and other achievements a player can earn at all levels of play, EQ2 has some low level armor sets. It needs a step up though. I should be able to earn a full set of matching, badass armor through an incredible storyline that makes me feel like I saved the worldat level 20.There"s no reason to make the player wait until max level to do some crazy stuff. With enough creativity on the team, there will be plenty of stories to tell later on as well.

Less quests to kill bears at low levels, more engaging storylines and substantial rewards.

EDIT: @Maleficence: Certainly a valid point. One could also argue that if a major story needs to be told they could simply do it through instancing or have the "boss orc" not even spawn until the player is at that point in the quest, preventing anyone from killing it by accident. That frees up open world quests to be able to be completed in multiple ways.

Maleficence said:

I"m all for story lines, but seriously you"ve lost my interest in the story when it starts off with: "Help us, a Big Orc Boss is threatening our village." and I"ve already killed off Big Orc Boss. At that point, I"m annoyed more than anything, as the game has made two things clear:
a. the story is bullshit.
b. my actions in the story are bullshit.

So unless the writing is so superb or the story so engaging that I"m just aching to read the next part, I"ve lost all my motivation story-wise. The only motivation left is getting the quest reward, which is a game play aspect.

If they want to tell a story I think there are better mechanisms, where the story revolves around your actions. Hence there is no Big Orc Boss roaming around unless you"ve triggered it as part of the story you"re developing. Otherwise, if my actions have no impact other than advance to the next wall of text, what"s the point?

Finally, you can still relate the story even if you"ve completed the objectives. "Thank you, Big Orc Boss had been terrorizing our village. Have this as your reward." Same message conveyed, just in a different manner to suite the situation.

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Have you played Final Fantasy XI? I think they handled that portion of it as well as it can be handled.

It being the inherent paradox of being "the gratest hearo in teh landz" in a game where over 9,000 other players are also "the gratest hearo in teh landz."

It isn"t that hard of a problem if you instance everything. You don"t get the key to get into the Orc"s house unless you"re on that quest, etc. FFXI even had level restrictions so you couldn"t gimp encounters.

You"re right, of course, that one day every MMO will be able to store all of the quests you"ve completed if you have the quest or not.

I suppose that"s the "what the fuck is all this shit in my bag" nature of EQ versus the "i only can pick up the sparkling shit if I have the quest" of WoW.

WoW could stand to have some more quests that don"t lead you around by the hand like a chaperone. The flipside is, I wish there was a way to turn on quest notification for old quests because talking / interacting with NPCs randomly is fucking boring.

Horse said:

Have you played Final Fantasy XI? I think they handled that portion of it as well as it can be handled.

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I did enjoy that part of FFXI, and you"re right they did a good job there.

As far as quests go, I"d like to see them split into two main concepts: quests and tasks.

First, we have quests: they attempt to narrate a story. Quests should mainly focus on narrating the global and situational events that surround the player. They provide the atmosphere and setting, and provide the thread that guides us across the world. Quests create story lines out of global events and change the world as a whole, or at least change the world for the player by providing access to new areas, abilities, levels, dungeons, etc...

Then, we have tasks, which are the various assignments that are given to us by NPCs. Shit like kill 10 rabid raccoons, bring back 100 bear asses, the dreadful "quests" that get constantly mocked. For these we have the possibility of generating dynamic tasks where the focus is on the player"s interactions and decisions.

There is no point in trying to inject a story line here save as a vestige from table top RPG games. Instead I"d like to see designers focus development efforts on making tasks repeatable, enjoyable and dynamic based on player input. Player-driven state machines could be used to generate quests with various phases. The objectives change based on whatever state the task is in. Additionally, tasks shouldn"t be discrete and instead should allow for improvement and rewards based on personal performance.

Story has its place, but it shouldn"t be shoved into every aspect of the game. Some parts just aren"t worth writing a story about.

Grave said:

Using the same example: You go into the cave and complete the first objective when you see some zombies ambling around inside. You recognize that they are wearing tattered clothing similar to that of the villagers nearby. This auto-completes your "see what is disturbing the animals" quest, as well as one you got earlier in the village to "seek out the missing villagers". Rather than turning back though, you get two new quests immediately that tell you to seek out the source of the zombies and look for any live captives. You go on and eventually find a tribe of hex-weaving goblins and a witchdoctor are behind the whole mess, and your quest updates telling you to slay X amount of them and the witchdoctor himself. So you"ve been getting exp the entire time from completing the different objectives, and then you finally go back and inform the original questgivers of the result and get more exp + item rewards. Sounds a lot more fun to me.

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That"s essentially the AoC quest engine.

You also had LOTRO"s achievement system, which ran as an invisible quest engine (basically, you had all achievements as quests you already had; they just didn"t show up in the quest journal. You even had an interface option to add achievements in the monkeyquest-style righthand panel, along the "standard" quests)

Ukerric said:

That"s essentially the AoC quest engine.

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Interesting. What few quests I did in AoC seemed the same as WoW, but I admit I didn"t do a lot. If that is how it is though, here"s hoping future games will take a look at it.

I also think players would be more inclined to read the text and get the story if it just appeared on their screen at various intervals as things played out. As it is now, most people I"ve asked say they just hit accept on the quest and don"t bother reading any of the dialogue, they just look at the objective afterward or let questhelper guide them. I think that"s a shame since some of these games have very interesting storylines and writers are putting time and effort into delivering them. Still, if the players don"t want to spend time reading it, you can"t force them. All you can do is try to deliver it in a way they may be more inclined to accept, and I think a questing system like this is a step towards that.

Exactly, LotRO and AoC did a fairly decent job of making "epic storyline quests" that were involving, required multiple steps and sometimes even groups for better rewards and "Tasks" for random grinding / knock out a couple of quests before work etc.

I think this is a happen medium that allows the RP player to be the hero and still get his "phat lewts" while still allowing that min/max player push to end game content.

I think I heard Curt say it before, but you need to hook the player in from the start, and having some unique dungeons / zones from the start with cool quests that involve movies or cut scenes really does the trick.

Just cause you are level 10 doesn"t mean you shouldn"t be able to get a zone like Sirens Grotto (one of my favorite zones in EQ1) and have some long fun quests with multiple stage quests to go along with it.

On the flip side I can see the argument about time invested and players skipping content due to out leveling it too fast, but think about Befallen, Crushbone, Splitpaw etc. Noob zones that aren"t your typical "spider cave"

Quality before quantity please

Grave said:

I think that"s a shame since some of these games have very interesting storylines and writers are putting time and effort into delivering them. Still, if the players don"t want to spend time reading it, you can"t force them. All you can do is try to deliver it in a way they may be more inclined to accept, and I think a questing system like this is a step towards that.

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I think so too. I"ve always forced myself to read all quest text the first time I get a quest, but it takes actual effort to go through with it. Some times it"s worth the while.

However, the problem is that EVERY quest has text. You get 5-50 of those text pop-ups per play session as you do quests. After a while, you become indifferent, so all those efforts go to waste because no one"s going to care about the intricate story behind the rabid raccoon infestation. That"s why I say that stuff should be left for the important parts.

I liken it to exposition in a movie. A good director won"t waste 5 minutes of screen time elucidating the past of an extra in the background that won"t appear again in the film. Neither should MMOs. The effort and time required to make quest text is too high and people"s threshold is too low for what they will tolerate reading. They need to reevaluate when this exposition occurs.

I"m definitely intrigued by AoC"s quest system as Grave described it, but at the same time it seems they didn"t implement it thoroughly enough if people still came out feeling it was just like WoW"s system.

Speaking of hooking the player from the start, there"s all this buzz going around right now about the Death Knight starting quests being so involved and amazing, some even saying it contains the best quests Blizzard has ever implemented.

To that I say, why can"t that be the case for every single character?

Sure, it would take a lot of development time and effort, but if whether or not a player continues to play your game hinges on the first hour or so of playing (and it often does) whywouldn"tyou want to make a monumental effort towards blowing them away during that time?

Once again, games like LOTRO and AOC have tried to start down this path, but they didn"t really do much with it. Tortage is alright, I guess, but not very epic. The LOTRO intro scenes are kind of cool, but they"re very shallow and only last a few minutes.