Green Monster Games - Curt Schilling

Ngruk said:

I am not sure I agree with this. If there is a smaller quest pool, then doesn"t it stand to reason that more players will have more quests in common if there are fewer to choose from?

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I should clarify that while I said fewer quests, I mean that in a game-wide sense. WoW truly has a ridiculous number of quests, it wouldn"t hurt to cut that global number back a bit in favor of more involved multi-step quests.

Just to give an example, a quick glance at WoWHead shows me 136 quests for Zangarmarsh. Would it really be so bad if that 136 was cut down to 65 or so, but with multiple steps and progression. The different steps each giving exp would allow you tune the progression of leveling however you like, and you could focus on delivering a really solid questing experience and story, only using however many quests you wanted.

By doing things like making certain quests start from a dropped item (WoW already does this) or other ways aside from simply conversing with NPCs, you could end up with a lot of variance and ensure that most players have a different experience depending on which quests they choose to do.

Ngruk said:

The key is going to be allowing you to group up on these quests regardless of phase or step you are currently on.

Longer quests that you don"t have to do in exact sequence is partially a key to making this fun, viable and at the same time allowing you either style of play, group or solo imo.

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I definitely agree with this. While I didn"t play LOTRO much, I remember some complaints from players about always being on a different step of a major quest.

I"ll give some thoughts on potential solutions a little later, I"m at school at the moment. Glad to see some good discussion on this stuff going on though, as it really interests me.

Ngruk said:

Longer quests that you don"t have to do in exact sequence is partially a key to making this fun, viable and at the same time allowing you either style of play, group or solo imo.

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True, but to achieve that, you break down the "good ole rpg" model. Doing so requires people to know, in advance, what quest steps they need to do. It enshrines spoiler sites as "good gameplay", which is a detriment to a mass-market game (most people do not read spoiler sites). If someone invites you to kill Named Soandso, will you have him as a quest objective, or is that for a different quest line which you won"t get (to go back to the person who wanted lots of alternative quest lines a-la-oldrepublic, so each character would have a different way of doing the content)?

You end up deconstructing the quest narrative. You killed Soandso, yet you only learn later that why he"s important and needs to be killed. All the artifices that you use in the narrative to induce players to go there to do this have to be carefully rewrapped so it doesn"t clash when you have already done so. You can"t be sent to spy on those bandits, learn the identity of their chief, and then go to kill him, if you"ve already killed him and are recognised as having done it. You have to find some other excuse to tie the story together.

(and if you remove the story, why do you have fewer and longer quests anyway?)

An alternative is to offer various parallel advances. Your quest is to forge the Sword of Doom, so you have to find the pommel, the magic gem, the rune formula to inscribe, the strange green met... hmmm, maybe not the strange green metal. Your epic quest translates into many parallel subquests, allowing multiple intersection points with other people. Clumsy, but probably better (the clumsiness becomes apparent when you have to fork your main quests after each major advance, almost every time).

Ngruk said:

1) The one core basic feature would you 100% expect to be in, and expect to be perfected at launch, bug free and "cool"
2) What one thing that hasn"t been done well, or at all, in any MMO, would you most like to see as a thoroughly fleshed out mechanic/content piece/UI feature?

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1) The entire game. This "expect bugs to be patched later" thing is bullshit. Always has been, always will.

2) Customer Service. If my company had the same customer service as Blizzard or Sony or Mythic or etc...had we"d be out of fucking business. It"s shameful.

It"s a testament to the willpower, patience and understanding of gamers that we put up with all the bullshit companies put out. We can ignore the minor flaws for the grander fun.

But time and again some company thinks they can exploit this and get away with a shoddy product and time and again they fail.

Don"t be that company.

Ngruk said:

I am not sure I agree with this. If there is a smaller quest pool, then doesn"t it stand to reason that more players will have more quests in common if there are fewer to choose from?

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Not in the slightest. From what I gathered from Grave"s idea was that the quests would be quite epic. Instead of doing 30 different mini-quests such as "kill 10 orcs, kill 8 gnolls, get my necklace from the lake" ect.... you get a quest that is multi layered and has many steps to do within the overall main quest that would add up to the level of work that the 30 mini-quests would have been in the old quest systems these games give us.

Lets look at WOW, everyone on the main section of the world kills "Grubber" or whatever that pig is called in lakeshire, they also all do the orc killing, the gnoll killing, ect...

Instead of having 50 generic quests like WOW how about having 5 or 10 large quests that include many mini-quests within the larger quest and have these quests be of the scope that they take up the 5 or so levels that those 50 quests would have taken up? How about having those large quests require you to "kill x number of y" as a single stage of the overall quest, and the travel from some location to another is built into the major quest.

Smaller and less epic variations of these types of quests already exist in WOW. I am sure alot of people would tell you they enjoyed the storyline and ongoing larger quest feel of the "Stiches" questline in Darkshire then the more simple "kill 8 gnoll shaman and 8 gnoll warriors" of lakeshire. The Stiches quest was much longer, it kept you interest, it had a more epic feel to it and made you feel like you were doing something a little more important.

Why not try and create long quest storylines like the Stiches quest, only longer yet with more twists? I mean, you have RA Salvatore there to come up with some storyline ideas. This guy is not writing books where the overall quest of Drizzt is "kill 8 orcs and 8 yeti", that is an aside, that is something that comes up during the overall quest of "find Regis", which becomes some completely different quest when you find him and he tells you of some huge problem you now have to solve, which then leads yet again to something completely different. The orc slayings and gnoll slayings can be part of a much larger quest-line, and in different large chain-quests your options of those smaller side quests can be different which can actually lead to replayability if you make the large quests epic enough to be the single focus of the character during their trip through a specific level range.

I would much rather see far fewer quests and have those quests be much, much more epic in scope such that you cannot do all of the major epic quests in the game in one trip through. I would like to flat out see player choices have to be made, choose to take a certain path and the other path closes off to you, the quest branches off in two different directions and thus if you want to follow both branches that will require another trip through on a alt.

Look at the alternative we have in WOW, we do the exact same tiny quests over and over again and everyone is doing the exact same ones. When is the last time you went through STV with an alt and did not do the hunting quests leading to killing the named raptor and white tiger? Yeah, you probably never missed that one, nor did anyone else. I would rather have had some huge quest incorperate that whole hunting quest line within a much larger quest, and have the fighting in the cave with the militia and that whole quest line be part of an entirely different much larger quest. Put stuff together, give the players more actual storyline and more focus on major long term quests then all of the McQuests these games have right now. Quest lines can last the entire lifetime of your character if the developers put the effort into creating great storylines and reasoning, look at the greenmist quest line of the Iksar SK"s in EQ1, that was probably the greatest questline I ever did in a MMORPG and the reason I liked it is because of it"s depth and the fact it took up part of my characters time from level 1 all the way through to level 60 as the quest advanced and changed.

Take that kind of quest length yet with more focus and time put into it over each level, and then more plot building ala the stiches quest, and now you are getting somewhere.

Grave said:

Just to give an example, a quick glance at WoWHead shows me 136 quests for Zangarmarsh. Would it really be so bad if that 136 was cut down to 65 or so,

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I suspect those quest are already cut down to less than that. Most of the 136 quests can"t be taken out of the bat. They are the "multiple steps" you want to add to the overall quest line. Most of these larger quest arcs are quite short, but you do have some that go for dozens of steps, even in a non-epic Zangarmarsh zone (the Sporelok quest line, for example).

The Drakefire Amulet questline for Alliance side is a great example of an epic feeling quest that was fun as shit to do. More of that please, less of "Get me 10 Bear Asses please."

Longer quest lines that take you through multiple levels/tiers that give a feeling of a larger story would be pretty good and having multiple options of these types of quests at different points in the leveling process would be ideal, for better replayability through the game. Maybe having different quest lines that deal with the same overall objective but dealing with different aspects of attaining those goals would be something to look at. Allowing for these different parts to intermingle at different points would help some with getting people grouped up and working together.

Look at how an investigation/trial works. Multiple people working toward a similar goal, but taking different approaches at getting there, while still needing to intermingle to achieve said end goal.

Ukerric said:

I suspect those quest are already cut down to less than that. Most of the 136 quests can"t be taken out of the bat. They are the "multiple steps" you want to add to the overall quest line. Most of these larger quest arcs are quite short, but you do have some that go for dozens of steps, even in a non-epic Zangarmarsh zone (the Sporelok quest line, for example).

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One thing you could do that VG sorta did during beta and then abandoned along with every other semi-good idea they had was to separate quests into different categories and handle them that way.

In the quest log/adventure journal/whatever you have 4~5 tabs. One for "adventures" which are long quest series. The series updates as you complete objectives and the like. You could have adventures that last the entire game, guiding you from place to place. You could have adventures that tie several zones or even just a single zone together.

One for tasks. These would be your "Go here, do this, get that, talk to them, retrieve these" quests.

One for bounties. "Kill 20 x, collect 15 y, kill boss mob G". Simple enough.

Finally one for "rumor"s". This would be your item-spawned quests, activated from world objects, maybe even gained just from standing around an area.

Just separating them as such would go a long way. It"s ultimtaely just perception but look how much perception helps epix vs. rares in games. A purple is automatically equated to more value even if a rare item outclasses it.

Anyways...

Zehn - Vhex said:

1) The entire game. This "expect bugs to be patched later" thing is bullshit. Always has been, always will.

2) Customer Service. If my company had the same customer service as Blizzard or Sony or Mythic or etc...had we"d be out of fucking business. It"s shameful.

It"s a testament to the willpower, patience and understanding of gamers that we put up with all the bullshit companies put out. We can ignore the minor flaws for the grander fun.

But time and again some company thinks they can exploit this and get away with a shoddy product and time and again they fail.

Don"t be that company.

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Not sure what world you"re from but even MMO"s with shitty customer service have better CS than most companies I"ve had to deal with in "real life". Not that that"s an excuse, just sayin".

Bugs on release that will be patched later is definitely bullshit though. It"s always been a plague for PC games ever since internet connection became commonplace (and sometimes before - remember the patch disks in software stores anyone?). Sadly the problem seems to be getting worse as even consoles are infected with it now. And of course it"s worse of a problem with MMO"s as it"s a very different type of genre, where your continual satisfaction is necessary. You don"t have to have fun for every single second you"re in the game, but frustration that compounds is a surefire way to lose a customer. One bug that"s left unfixed with for a while can easily do this.

Zehn - Vhex said:

In the quest log/adventure journal/whatever you have 4~5 tabs. One for "adventures" which are long quest series. The series updates as you complete objectives and the like. You could have adventures that last the entire game, guiding you from place to place. You could have adventures that tie several zones or even just a single zone together.

One for tasks. These would be your "Go here, do this, get that, talk to them, retrieve these" quests.

One for bounties. "Kill 20 x, collect 15 y, kill boss mob G". Simple enough.

Finally one for "rumor"s". This would be your item-spawned quests, activated from world objects, maybe even gained just from standing around an area.

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This would be fantastic.

On the topic of how to handle the multi-step quests as far as grouping is concerned, I see only two scenarios:

1.) Let people join at any step in the quest and adventure with you. The quest automatically goes into their log at the step the person they joined is on, and they continue from there. The player that gets "caught up" would not gain the exp. from the previous steps but would gain the benefit of progressing their quest faster.

I don"t like that one at all, as it messily throws away part of the story for the player who is further behind, and creates other situations which may be bad for the game overall, such as people holding at a particular point in the quest and trying to sell "progression" to players who might just want to get to the end reward quickly.

2.) Allow people to meet the objective of a quest at any time. This one is the best solution I think.

To clarify, let"s say you"re on a step where you"re investigating the whereabouts of a dangerous Necromancer. You happen to see a group forming up to kill said Necromancer, but you aren"t on the step yet. You join anyway, and are able to loot his head, then you go back to soloing your own questline and when the time comes to slay the Necromancer for yourself, you say "no problem, already did it." It even makes more sense from a story standpoint, if you later realize the guy you killed earlier is the threat you were looking for, then the problem is obviously already solved.

This would have other benefits in the overall game as well when applied to all quests. Kill a guy and see that he drops some sort of medallion, but you don"t have the quest for it? The game should let you loot it anyway, and give you a hint as to what quest it pertains to. Meet someone at the GY who is killing skeletons and they offer to group? You can loot the dust they drop even though you aren"t on that stage of the quest yet, just save it until you do need it.

This encourages your players to justplay, to explore, to kill, do whatever they want with their time in game and ensure them that it wont be wasted.

TwiNCannoN said:

Bugs on release that will be patched later is definitely bullshit though. It"s always been a plague for PC games ever since internet connection became commonplace (and sometimes before - remember the patch disks in software stores anyone?). Sadly the problem seems to be getting worse as even consoles are infected with it now. And of course it"s worse of a problem with MMO"s as it"s a very different type of genre, where your continual satisfaction is necessary. You don"t have to have fun for every single second you"re in the game, but frustration that compounds is a surefire way to lose a customer. One bug that"s left unfixed with for a while can easily do this.

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I was in this camp until about 3 years ago. Nothing, and I mean nothing in the MMO space will ever come out bug free. I am not making excuses or saying we"ll suck, we won"t, but it showed a real clear lack of understanding on my part to be espousing a 100% perfect game at launch. There are so many reasons, big and little, that goes into this.

I don"t even know them all. What I do agree with is that there is another level to be reached in launching games in this space that hasn"t been done. We do have a community that allows us to get "paid" for later beta stage (or that 1st 60 day period a game goes live) and for the most part that business model is just rare as hell.

The patching process is the best and worst of evils because some companies, many, use the patching process to finish a game we"ve already paid for.

The issue though, is that you are talking about a game with content so far beyond your imagination in size and scope it"s scary. You cannot replicate the launch day server load to a degree that answers the questions around 500K plus players all banging on your log in service and billing, at once, around the world.

Also, you can test as much as you want but unless you open the end of your beta to the world, you cannot get close to that size/volume replication. Things are certainly better, but we are living in the day and age where we are ecstatic when an MMO launches with minimal server crashes. That"s the bar, that"s something to be ecstatic about? I may be naive but I don"t see it, I don"t feel it, and I don"t believe it. There needs to be more, and there needs to be better ways to making that happen.

But it is not even close to as simple as we"d like to believe it is when you get even the slightest peek behind the curtain. These things are massive on a scale I had no idea a few years back.

Those are not excuses, you need to stand by and be accountable to your company, and more importantly your customers on launch day. It"s those huge decisions made at Gold Master that you answer too then.

You want a perfect bug free MMO? I"d argue you are asking for a game with a 7-10 year dev timeline and easily a 9 figure budget, at a minimum. That"s a modern day large world MMO using up to date tech.

Those two things, to me anyway, only made sense for Star Wars and LotR. Both of those IPs had decades of history that would not lose interest, and were as non-tech reliant as anything the space will see from an expectations standpoint. I saw those two as build and sell IP"s, don"t mess with them, just give me the basic classes, races, and let me go play in that world!

Ngruk said:

I was in this camp until about 3 years ago. Nothing, and I mean nothing in the MMO space will ever come out bug free. I am not making excuses or saying we"ll suck, we won"t, but it showed a real clear lack of understanding on my part to be espousing a 100% perfect game at launch. There are so many reasons, big and little, that goes into this.

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Pretty sure there"s a significant difference between your servers shitting out on you because you weren"t prepared for 1 million users and a terrain exploit allowing one team advantage in a battleground for nearly 11 months.

One thing I"ll never understand is why gaming companies keep releasing their game right after beta ends. That to me just sounds fucked up. For us we put out our software for beta/testing, then we gather data, then we use that data to fix any bugs. Once the bugs are fixed, then we announce a release date.

We don"t release anyways and then fix bugs post release. And don"t give me that "Well it costs money and takes time and you gotta keep up with technology..." bullshit excuse. LOTRO did it. And that was fucking turbine. The game was boring as shit but that"s what happens when you have uninspired developers who phone it in after the first 2 hours of gameplay.

Look, we understand that shit happens. Like I said, gamers are patient and understanding. We know hardware can crash, we know conflicts can arise. Those of us that have done software/application programming know that when you involve multiple departments programming departments headaches can arise (Hrmn...this line of code seems redundant, why don"t I just dele...OH SHIT EVERYTHING IS BROKE NOW)

Shit happens.

The problem my dear friend is that -bullshit- happens way too often.

Ask anybody that played WoW how they feel about the phrase, "Uninstall your addons and delete your WTF folder." That"s the response a GM gave my guild after we zoned into a fully despawned molten core. And we were one of the lucky ones. Most guilds wound up in the wrong instance ID. Hell, someone should dig up the screenshot of Alliance ending up zoning into a Horde ID.

Ask us about the Rathe Council and C"thun cockblocks. Ask AoC players about half their feats not working. Ask WAR players how they felt about white lions gimping the shit out of certain scenario"s. Ask me about alchemy flat out not being doable for the first 5 months your game is on the market and not even being worthwhile until 4 years later.

Go ahead and ask me how I feel about the phrase, "Working as intended."

I was writing a nice dissertation about the difference in magnitude between some goofy mob pathing and the entire end game being unplayable/unbeatable. Then I refreshed the page, so I"ll just go with:

What Zehn said.

Along the "longer fewer quest lines" thinking it would be cool if besides having an epic quest for items etc, you had one for your race, class, alignment, sex, etc.

So some times you are grouped with a bunch of halfelves and other times its a bunch of tanks etc. You could even make custom tailor it so the bad ass boss for the tank line actually needs 6 tanks to kill it. Something like they don"t hit hard but if one is allowed to run free it blows up everyone else or other things like that. Whenever you encourage people to work together, and have some skill while doing it, its a win-win for everyone.

It was fun when you had a guild healer help with some type of quest then in return you have to help him/her with their own different quest. Granted these types of quests would be few and far between, but at least it shakes it up a bit.

If you"re going to have a lot of complicated long quest lines makes sure you make them update the instant a step is completed. Look at what happened with VG every quest that involved a group had 10 steps to it and everyone in the group was on a different step.

Well, to make a focus on long quest chains work you"d have to do what others have said. Essentially allow completion ahead of time in a quest chain. If you have a 30 stage quest line and while grouped with friends you complete steps 13~21 and 28, while your"e still only at stage 3, once you get to those points you auto update.

You could also tack on a reward for people who have already done it. A small but significant Faction/xp/money/whatever bonus whenever someone completes a quest objective in your group that you"ve already done.

Or just make the different parts of the quest chain worth doing if you aren"t on the quest/that step.

You were able to get a lot of people onto the final step of the Coldain Ring War who weren"t trying to finish a ring, just because the stuff that spawned for the quest dropped some nice shit for the time and it was a fun event. Expanding on that, there were a lot of quests where Quest pieces dropped off of names that also dropped decent loot that would get other people to show up.

In WoW, this only really applies to Instance Quests, since all the "named" out in the world that are for quests are mostly special loot-less quest update pinatas with no reason to kill them except to complete the quest.

If step 36 of the epic quest "Obtain The Ultimate Bear-ass Leather Chaps" is to collect 30490920403940 Mystical Mana Infused Bear Asses then Bear Ass Cave should be a good place for exp, with random chance at good loot on the Bear Cave general loot table, and toss in a named bear or two with superior loot, to give people a reason to go there if they aren"t necessarily on that exact quest step.Spoiler Alert, click show to read:bear ass

Zehn - Vhex said:

Well, to make a focus on long quest chains work you"d have to do what others have said. Essentially allow completion ahead of time in a quest chain. If you have a 30 stage quest line and while grouped with friends you complete steps 13~21 and 28, while your"e still only at stage 3, once you get to those points you auto update.

You could also tack on a reward for people who have already done it. A small but significant Faction/xp/money/whatever bonus whenever someone completes a quest objective in your group that you"ve already done.

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I don"t think you can do that unless you write the quest to specifically do that. If Steps 10-15 are Kill THis guy, Kill that Guy, then go kill X of these, then you should be able to complete it out of turn no problem. But if it"s story driven, then I don"t think you can.

That"s just a sacrifice you have to make for gameplay. The only alternative is to do it like other games where people wont want to group up unless they are on the same step. I"d still make the quests story driven, and if a player chooses to complete it out of order they"re just going to have to accept that they"re seeing events differently. It"s not perfect, but you have to do things like that sometimes. I don"t think it would matter too much in the end, as long as the overall story told is cool and the player had fun doing it, it"s good.

I also think most people solo while leveling up anyway, especially in a game like WoW, so most players would see it in the proper order. Quests that absolutely require a group could obviously be tailored to the fact that people may complete them out of order, so there"s no real problem there.

Draegan said:

I don"t think you can do that unless you write the quest to specifically do that. If Steps 10-15 are Kill THis guy, Kill that Guy, then go kill X of these, then you should be able to complete it out of turn no problem. But if it"s story driven, then I don"t think you can.

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Well you could always flag certain stages un-predoable depending on the logic behind it. It would rely heavily on how you design quests and if you made them with being able to complete stages ahead of time in mind it would have a heavy influence. It would still be doable it"s just how you build them would be different.

Though occam"s razor would suggest you just give some kind of reward everytime someone else in your group gets a quest update and leave it at that.

Example of a 5-step group quest that would work fine with the method in discussion:

Main Quest - The player must destroy Nal"kyrith, a powerful Dracoliche. Nal"kyrith has been defeated before, but the magic that binds him allows him to reconstruct himself only days after he is destroyed. It is believed that his summoning was the joint effort of multiple dark magi. Only by seeking out those who summoned him and destroying them can you be sure that Nal"kyrith will truly be defeated and his threat ended.

So, subquests:
(Optional) Find more information about the magi.
(Required) Slay Nelon and crush the orb of binding in his possession.
(Required) Slay Kelial and crush the orb of binding in her possession.
(Required) Slay Verith and crush the orb of binding in his possession.
(Required) Slay Dal"karda and crush the orb of binding in his possession.

Main Quest:
(Optional) Find out more about the summoning of a dracoliche, and the implements used.
(Required) Destroy Nal"kyrith

So, we"ve got a quest here that can be completed in any order and still make sense. The player can kill Nal"kyrith first and then destroy the summoners, or he can kill the summoners and then Nal"kyrith, or even mix it up. It still makes sense because it takes the dracoliche awhile to reform, so as long as they destroy the summoners and their orbs in time, they have succeeded. This means that the player is free to get a group for whatever step they may have and do it however they need to.

Each step of the quest would offer a little more of the story: what the summoners intent was, their goal, who they were working for. It could end up being a much larger problem than just this, and that would lead the player to later quests dealing with this cult or group.

The optional steps would be for players who want a little more story, maybe they need to go to a library and research the subject or speak with some NPCs who they know are knowledgable about such things. They"d get some bonus exp and story for their effort, but it"s not required so players who just want to get to the killing may do so.

Just design the group-required quests like that and you"re fine. Soloable quests will just have to suffer a little bit story-wise, but it"d be okay. Gameplay must come first.

Zehn - Vhex said:

Though occam"s razor would suggest you just give some kind of reward everytime someone else in your group gets a quest update and leave it at that.

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That"s a good idea also.