I wrote a post last month that reached a similar conclusion. Then, later, I derived the reason for this problem out of core shortcomings with character advancement as it is presented in MMOs.

You can break down the grind-nature of quests into 4 parts:

* The story and character progression symbiosis present in tabletop RPGs is destroyed by modern MMO design.
* Quest content does nothing to the game world.
* Quests are the same for all characters who can get them.
* The action vocabulary of MMOs is extremely limited (most of the time it involves only the word “fight”).

Then WoW came along and broke all that monster slaying into happy little chunks. The real beauty of the system was that you could get some directions, go do a bunch of quests, then turn them in all at once for a big rush of rewards. It was different and it gave players some direction. Now, after doing that for several years, players are getting bored again and questioning if the old system was really all that bad.

So, there’s an assumption that EQ-style mob killing is the same as grinding. It’s not. This is a reason why we should be careful to define our terms. As I said at the beginning of this comment, grinding is doing the same thing with seemingly needless repetition. This can be killing, questing, or anything else, especially in the long run.

How socializing relates to boring, never ending questlines? Socializing makes any mundane task, like leveling, appear to progress faster through enjoyment. At least for me.

“Whether they choose to bundle it in tiny breadcrumbs that guide players through the game or leave things wide open, some will find it grindy and some will not.”

So why don’t game developers support both styles of play? It seems like it wouldn’t be very hard to do. I would have enjoyed more quests to do in EQ. In EQ, questing was usually not worth it from an exp. perspective. Also, there weren’t any tools to keep track of them in-game and it was really difficult to discover them on your own – you typically had to read about them on a website to know what was there and if the reward was decent. At higher levels I tried some of the epic like quests, which were really cool, but that was about it.

WoW and games like it are terrible for just exploring and looking for things you can kill. Zone progression is conveniently laid out for the player along with a slew of quests in each zone that can add much exp. on top of what players get for mob kills. One of my favorite things to do in EQ was to run around and discover new places to hunt. I tried running around zones in WoW in the same way, but found it to be a completely worthless and boring experience. You could never find a new place to hunt because zones typically progress out from cities. So you are encouraged not to explore, just follow the path in front of you and perform the quests in front of you and that’s how you are supposed to play. No discovery, no mystery, no real choices.

What I would love to see is a game where questing and just hunting without quests are viable forms of gaining exp. Also, I’d like to obtain nice items from both styles. I’d like to see more quests that take players to different parts of the world and more quests that weren’t just the “do something and return to me” type.
I’d like to see more longer, multi-part quests, where each part could be done separately from the other parts. I want to be able to play the way that I want to and not feel pushed into one particular style.

The industry shifted from gaining xp through grouping in dungeons to solo questing. The change was nice at first but after the 1000 quests the freshness has worn off. I can’t imagine how the next game designers are going to make quest hubs entertaining again, what can you really do with them?

I think it’s absurd, why is your adventurer some petty errand boy, doing menial tasks for ever Tom, Dick, and Harry? Experience should be awarded from things your character would be learning from – combat, obviously, and other more significant actions.

Oh look, I went to the hill over there and picked you 10 flowers. Ka-ching! It’s just silly.

I firmly believe MMO’s would be well off entirely eliminating menial “quests” and making the few that remain epic – worthy of the name “Quest”. Things that you’re character could be proud he accomplished, much larger in scope.

Definitely NOT just a long chain of simply menial tasks either (Get me some of these, some of those, some of that, and I’ll then you can finish this “epic” (read: long and tedious) quest!

I honestly despair at what RPG’s have fallen to. I grew up on tabletop P&P games; and today’s MMO’s (and, honestly, single player RPG’s as well) are a pale, pale shadow when they should be a glorious evolution.

If Mankrik wanted me to go get the Tchotsky of Doom from Mount Rushless, but there were different ways to do so (again, why is it always combat?), I’d be much more interested in his quest.

Instead of having the quests or tasks originate from fixed npc’s that stand in town until the end of time, developers could simply imitate WAR’s Tome of Knowledge system and have these quests originate from the player.

I absolutely love this idea. LotRO also does this through deeds. It would be so much nicer to find an area, kill a mob and have your book say, “Oh, Ferrel, Billy in Tiny town wants you to kill 25 of these and James of the Border Guard needs 10 of their feet.” That would eliminate the quest hub as a starting point but keep them as an end or continuation point.

What would probably a very simple solution to the fixed linear quest hub system and to the lack of motivation for world immersion / exploration would be the elimination of this fixed hub system. Instead of having the quests or tasks originate from fixed npc’s that stand in town until the end of time, developers could simply imitate WAR’s Tome of Knowledge system and have these quests originate from the player. Really, the whole purpose of the adventurer is to explore, see odd things in odd places, and then decide to meddle with it. See a cave inhabited by necromancers, you could get a quest to wipe them out and loot them. WAR’s public quest system was a step in this direction, which took the quest hub system out of towns and placed it in the world.

Now if developers could figure out how to keep the character progression system from destroying their own content and from dividing the player base, they would have something interesting.