Your EQ2 example shows the flipside of this. The goal was to get access. Period. They can dress it up any way they want, but the main focus was to get access. That takes the emphasis off the story and puts it on the reward. You are exactly right, this is what Hecker was warning against.

Personally, I’ll read some quest text but some of it I can’t be bothered. I like reading the epic quest text in LotRO, for example; that’s half the reason I’m in the game is because I like the lore. But, do I really need to read the 100th quest that gives me some flimsy reason about why I need to go another dozen goblins? Not really. Unfortunately, this also means that I’m going to miss the few gems hidden in the mound of… stuff…. But, when the quests are so numerous they lose their importance.

In a subtle way this ties back to your post on the grind. When you make the reward for the grind getting to max level, then people focus on the reward and get frustrated with the “journey” they’re supposed to be enjoying. Killing stuff and doing quests becomes the boring routine stuff you have to do in order to get your reward. Oops….

Why? Because quants are quantifiable. They’re measurable. It’s a yardstick that can be trotted out when the discussion gets murky about “difficulty curves”, “itemization progression”, “story arcs”, or any of the other hard-to-nail-down features of a game that make it…well, a game.

When Everquest II shipped, there weren’t nearly as many different individual quests. Oh sure, there were a lot, but as a general rule a lot of the quests took longer to complete, had multiple steps and stages, and involved a lot more understanding than current quests. Then, around the time Rise of Kunark came out, we started hearing about “hundreds of new quests”. All that had happened was that old quests with multiple steps were now broken up into “quest lines” – a series of much smaler quests, each with its own reward and leading into the next part of the quest.

Oh sure, the quests were ultimately the same basic idea – in the old world design, you quested a long multistage quest that resulted in a reward at the end. In the new world design, we run a long multi-quest quest-line that results in a reward at each step of the way and a reward at the end.

Same effort…magnitudes more rewards.