How do we prevent quests from being boring and redundant?

I think one of the methods they are working on is to make quests less obvious to acquire. You have to work to get quests. One of the issues with this is; how do you know if they add new quests? Where do those new quests start? Stuff like that.

The second way they could make quests more interesting is making them have multiple ways to complete them. Instead of just killing 10 wolves, what if you tamed 10 wolves and moved them or just poisoned some meat and dropped it so the wolves could get it and kill them that way, or whatever. The end of the quest should be the point and the code should allow you to do it multiple ways.

Third quests should not be one goal and done. They should start with a single thing (kill 10 wolves) and then develop into further adventures (the wolves are gone and now you have to kill the over population of rabbits which pisses off the local druid who you find out is the mayors long lost daughter, etc.)

Just my ideas but I'm certain that there are tons of ways to make things different, interesting and better.

 

Argument by Laziness.

Ignorance is bliss.

 

Argument by someone who has experience with player-generated and driven stories and quest in MMOs.
Do you even care about RPing? If you don't, no wonder you don''t know much about quests and storytelling.

 

Everyone posting in the Quests and Lore section of the forum seems to forget that SotA has a much different vision for quests.

It will be very rare that someone is just telling you "Go here and do this." You are not going to see any NPC's with a golden exclamation mark over their head - you'll learn things from NPC's, find out about lore, read a legend, or possibly even just stumble into areas that have story driven elements behind them. For example (this is not in any way a DIRECT example but a thematic example), you might talk to an injured town guard in the infirmary that was bitten by a werewolf. You might have read in a book about werewolves that if someone who is bitten drinks the blood of the werewolf that bit him before his first transformation, he will be cured. You remember that the guard told you he was bitten on patrol in the forest outside the town, so you head to a village in that forest and talk to some of the locals. When you mention werewolves, several of them mention something about how they hear howling near the lake in the center of the forest (hunters or loggers might tell you this). So, after your bit of detective work, and remembering what you read about werewolf blood, you slay the werewolf, bring the guard it's blood and tell him about the cure, and he thanks you by rewarding you with a ring that's been in his family since before the moon shattered. The guard never asked you to hunt down the werewolf... you took the initiative because you know it's still in the area. Maybe you hunted it down because it just sounded like a fun monster to kill, or you never spoke to the guard in the first place and you just stumbled upon the wolf... then you saw the Werewolf Blood item drop, so you ask about it at the village's Apothecary, and he tells you that it can be used as a cure. He then tells you that he heard about a guard who had been attacked by a werewolf and that you might be able to cure him.

Quests like the example I provided above will likely be dynamically generated, with some important storyline quests being static in a given area. From a programming perspective, it's very much (and very easily) within the limits of the Unity engine and the development team that Lord British has hired. I have personally created similar systems in the past, completely alone. Plus that's the currently stated design goal for quests in SotA.

This game isn't going to hold your hand and tell you where to find adventure and reward. You're going to have to seek it out for yourself. LB and the team at Portalarium know that you're a grown up, you're a clever person and you don't need to be babied. Sometimes you might feel lost, sometimes you might feel like you have no idea what you are even looking for... but for those who really look, for those who immerse themselves into the "RPG" side of "MMORPG," the content will be there, and just as rewarding, exciting, and driven as any other game you have played... and all the more gratifying because you will know that you really earned it. This won't appeal to everyone - there are many gamers who will feel like if their character is not "max level" he's not a good character... that's not what games with this sort of progression system are about. There's no end-game here.

 

There -WERE- the "fetch this, deliver that" quests in the Ultima games, but they were generally more for extra coins, or if you felt helpful while hooking up the baker and innkeeper together.

Sure, there will be quests, but as pointed out, the numbingly repetitious activities of other games that shall not be named have even pointed out by RG, and I'm expecting more interactive and story-driven actions that will propel your character's path. And yes, sometimes Avatars have to kill worms for the fate of the world, just hopefully not often.

 

I would've thought you could have permanent staff with nothing else to do but create/facilitate content and engagement. Combine that with giving the players tools to create content plus the interaction that will naturally occur and the game should remain fun for many moons! That's what I'd hope for anyhow

 

Instead of being told by a shopkeeper that he was robbed you could see the thief running out of his shop with the shopkeeper running after him screaming "Stop! Thief!" Orcs are attacking a caravan right in front of your eyes and a Dragon sweeps down, burning a whole city just as you arrive.
One thing I hope SotA will NOT have is repeatable quests. Resucing the princess over and over again or killing the Boss who keeps respawning. This would totally break immersion.

 

"Hey, didn't I kill you before?!" "Nah, that was my other brother Darryl"

Some of that may be a little unavoidable for some questing, but I agree, it gets old very quickly when you're beating up on the same boss for the hundredth time, all in the hopes for that one shiny piece of loot to drop.

That's also why I'm hoping SotA is more skill/gameplay driven towards player rewards, versus just the constant gear grind.

 

Whatever may be said about the quests like bring me 10 boar skins , I really want to see in the game quests and crafting quests hunter. That is the daily quests or quests chain where you need to bring something special and receive each time the best rewards . Or fixed income. This will create the world's need of any thing , even the most useless trivia . Market from this will only get better . And at any stage of the game, any novice can earn by selling what he collects from mobs that he can do . After all, it will be necessary for something. I hate games where pretty much just useless things with which nothing can be done .

 

Be interesting to see if they can turn player economy into this sort of quest. Sure, it will be done informally, but advertising a 'quest' or 'job' for say 500 bits of leather so someone can make a truckload of leather armor could add something extra. Like perhaps they get 'karma' or virtue points (or whatever the term is) or some additional bonus for conducting this through an in game system.

May be exploitable by friends and could have problems, just thinkingn aloud!

 

I really like this idea, however I can see it would definitely need testing, especially if some of the keywords that would trigger the person jumping are words you'd use in a reasonable conversation to convince them not to. (Like definitely not having the word 'jump' being at trigger )

And of course without a save/reload option, if you had a conscience you'd be staring at the broken body going 'Noooooooooooo' ;_; 'Oh well, at least he'll be seeing his family off in pancake heaven.'

It reminds me of when Ultima went from the free form text conversations of the Age of Enlightenment to the clicking on the keyword in 7 part 1, where the urge to click down through all the dialog options ended up with multiple suicides and deaths by self defence. You had to pay attention, and I'm glad we're going to the actual typing conversation system instead.

 

When I think of "quests", I bypass the past 20 years of BS and go back to the Ultima 6 and 7 frame work where a single, very broad, thing set you on a path....which permeated the entire game. IE "Figure out whats up with the Gargoyle invasion.", "Figure out what the deal with the Fellowship is". That overreaching theme was so "loose" that it successfully dragged you all over creation. Although on paper it sounds trite, the device of pursuing the couple...and finding you always just missed them, was in game terms absolutely brilliant. It kept you moving and by consequence of inquiry running into all sorts of little sidelines, none of which were the "kill 20 turtles so I can make soup" crap which passes for quests these days.

 

There were some of those even in U6 and U7, but they were side quests generally and mostly optional. Occasionally you -had- to go collect certain stuff (the Cadellite ore comes to mind), but even then, it was part of a larger challenge.

The problem is so many online games ONLY give you that style of quest, over and over and over until you pretty much just immediately ignore any other information the NPC may be giving you for lore or backstory reasons, so it's ultimately a waste. I don't mind if you want me to kill stuff, but dress it up and give me a compelling reason why I would, and tie it to the overall story.

We need epic bread baking quests, damn it!

 

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You said this so perfectly, thank you. I also believe over time what you have said to NPC's will generate more things to do. The developers will be there watching and listening and stories will develop out of our interactions with NPC's. It will be ongoing so no worries.

I am playing a bit of Neverwinter, and really I can only play for an hour or so before I have had enough. I play it just to zone out here and there, plus I do like my characters fight style, it's pretty fun for a while. There are player generated quests that can be really cool, but it does get old too. Getting from point A to point B can get old for sure.

The idea Richard has let's us be a detective and sounds so much more satisfying. I'm sure there will be very surprising dynamics in an ever-changing world, and it will be just because we are there. That is what will set the SOTA world apart from any other gaming world.

 

Its been a while, but my memory of those quests were what I called "chain item" quests. You'd need info from x, they ask you to get a widget from y, who in turn asks you to make/fix/break something, and so on. Again just going from sketchy long term memory here, but these were never as tedious as they sound in that the next link was usually the other side of the world and so you wouldn't follow the chain through, rather you would work it by and by as you traveled around. If you ever found yourself with nothing to do you'd pick up the trail, maybe go somewhere you hadn't been yet, and open up a bunch of other stuff in the process.

 

Isn't that handing over your responsibility as a player? Isn't it essentially asking them to play the game for you? It seems terribly dependent on the game designer to say that 'my boredom is your fault'.
I disagree. I think the player has a role to play in a game. If the game is complete and enjoyable then boredom is the player's responsibility. The player should be thinking to do something himself, not sitting passively waiting for another movie. The game can't play itself for you unless it is also going to have fun for you.
You have the environment and you learn how it works through the quests. Once that is over the rest is up to you. Either you can get creative, or you can sit there bored in the middle of the road.
"Boredom is a symptom of the lazy mind." ~unattributed (I don't recall who wrote that) If you're bored go figure out how to cure cancer or something.

It would be great if we could. You can get a copy of Unity free to try it. I think if user generated content were to somehow be offered in the shared world it would have to be vetted by the devs.

 

Ive come up with another idea...

Perhaps there should not be a story with a beginning or an end. Real life has no beginning or end. Quests are the result of the world, the NPC's and the people in the world. Story's result from what occurs in the game, not the game results from a story.
I would like to see the same basic game everytime I log back into it for an entire 20 years(or however long it lasts) no graphic changes or anything, but a constant shifting of things within the game, constantly new quests being created(this would probably mean that devs would be constantly pulling strings for this game).
There would be no "beating the game" there would be only completing the quests as they came up. The game would have quest after quest after quest. Once the game gets too old and stale, it would just resemble UO today where you got players and NPC's doing their thing but nothing new arising because the game is "out of date".
Video games age and die out, way faster than humans which is an unfortunate fate that we must take into consideration when we create a new online video game.

 

I guess the best quests are those made by players themselves. I ever played a game where everyone is closely tied to a nation. You have to have meetings like on a weekly basis to decide what do next, mostly diplomatically. The council made up of players will have to manage human resources such as "who will do what". For example, in order to succeed a siege, you have to, say, arrange 6 groups of people/guilds to do the different tasks. Some have to take down certain outposts. Some have to gather certain resources, some others have to grind some loots dropped only by certain monsters in a certain area, and so on. That is to say, you don't need too many static quests if the game mechanics can drive players to achieve their goals. The dynamically developed player missions should be much more fun than the statically planted quests.

 

If meteorites cause random PvP zones it should never get stale.

PvP quests will always be different because the characters are not programmed. I'm glad people are finally starting to look past their immediate gaming satisfaction and thinking about the future.

PvP coupled with quests is something UO didn't have. If they balance it right the game should be infinite.

A PvP quest to deliver an item from point "A" to point "B" will never be the same. Not only can the points be randomized, but the way it plays out will always be different.

Once the PvE-Only players move on (end of game 5) all the devs have to do is open the PvP threshold ...the game will become infamous as well as infinite.

 

Well, if done right the PVE-only crowd shouldn't want to leave. There should be things going on and possibly future chapters if popular enough. They do have the potential to keep things interesting with economy and what not....The pvp threshhold is open right now as it is if you have the players there to back it. I wish this didn't become another pvp issue thread.