I make it no secret that I think quest hubs are one of the worst “innovations” to ever hit the MMORPG genre. I think they destroy the scale of the world and change how designers do their jobs. I believe they make players narrow minded and remove their sense of adventure. In all honesty I see zero value to them other than making it easier for players to be lazy. After all, if we didn’t have a neat little chain of quest hubs we’d be unable to figure out how to level, right? Absolutely wrong.
The quest hub has not existed since the dawn of time. Players, in fact, found good places to level and did so efficiently long before they were brought screaming into the genre. Quests could be found anywhere and you never knew whether or not an item was useless or important. Things were a little obscure but leveling was mainly done through the art of slaughter. Experience was earned in the blood of your enemies and that was a pretty great system. Players were unconcerned about where the quests were. They could tell where to level based on the level of the monsters they saw. The fun part was finding a great spot to kill them.
Due to the relative grind behind that wholesale slaughter someone decided that quests shouldn’t just be a way to get rare and powerful items. They should be the primary method by which players level. That is when the “chore” was born. Go out, kill ten rats, and come right back to me. I will then send you to kill ten bats and expect your return. No little player, you’re too dim witted for me to let you in on everything I need you to do. Just go and come back, repeatedly. Forsake everything you see in between!
Quest hubs have players and developers so focused on points A and B that everything in between is lost. Before they existed designers would place really awesome Easter eggs into the landscape for players to find. Exploration was fun and lucrative. Being the first to find a great spot with cool drops was a gift. Hiding the knowledge was like a mini-game. The world was so large you could duck into a nook or cranny and level for hours. Now if you see something awesome you can assume a quest goes there. If a quest doesn’t go to a part of a zone you can safely assume it is pointless to be there. There is little, if any good, from this system other than “knowing where to go at level X.” Players throw that fact out like it is the Holy Grail. Yet they forget that in EverQuest players had little trouble knowing where to go.
The system is just lazy play and lazy design in my eyes. There are a lot of ways to work around it. The first is quite simple, stop making it inefficient to level by slaughtering monsters. I get that people want to level through quests. No problem, let them. I don’t. Let me level by slaughtering monsters! Let me group with my friends and thin the orc population. Allow us to dive into a dungeon to destroy the undead it contains. Don’t tell me that I must have the appropriate quests to make that endeavor worth while. Content should stand on its own even if you don’t have the related chore.
Quests need to be more dynamic and less linked to an easily forgettable and oft annoying NPC. Nobody really cares why Farmer Jo wants me to kill rats in his field. It isn’t a quest. It is a chore. More importantly, everyone hates the guy that didn’t get the quest or is on the wrong part. It is simply unacceptable that I won’t get credit for killing rats in Farmer Jo’s field just because I didn’t’ talk to him first. The rats in the field should drop a quest item that starts the quest and then updates it. You start by killing and when you complete the task you can go to the farmer. MMORPGs already do this with a minority of quests. It is time to make it the majority.
“But Ferrel, if we don’t have the hubs we won’t know where to go?!” Listen up, it is quite simple. If the developers do the work correctly all you have to do is know which zone is next in the progression. Then wade out into it, explore it, enjoy it and just kill things. They’ll drop quest items. As you progress through the zone you’ll pick up the quests naturally. Once you’re done you can go turn them in. That will give you incentive to do more than just run back and forth from that foolish farmer. Designers can focus more on making an engaging world and less on creating a string of chores.
“But Ferrel, we’ll still have to run back and forth for multi-quest progression lines.” These things need to go too unless they’re part of an actual important quest. Throwing in a chore-line doesn’t make it special. It actually makes the problem worse. Players expect greater things when they do a string of chores. As I explained before it ruins a group when you get people on several different parts. You always have to start over and catch everyone up. That isn’t fun and it is frustrating as heck. Do we even need multi-quest chore lines? No, no we don’t. Removing these will remove a major barrier to grouping. The farmer shouldn’t send you out six times for minor tasks. He should tell you everything you need to do and allow you to do it on your schedule, not his.
I see no reasons to perpetuate this system any longer. I miss my large, expansive world with hidden temples and monsters in curious places. I liked choosing where to level based on what I wanted and not where the quests told me to go. Discovering lore and making up our own stories about places was thrilling. Spending more time in combat or exploring and less time running from point to point to point to that first point again to point to point is a good thing. It just breaks my immersion to see people run through orcs because “They’re the wrong kind.” Orcs are orcs, they all bleed green. That is what we need more of, bleeding orcs, not static chore hubs.
All characters are © 2007 - 2012
I do remember those days in which people tried to keep their favourite spots secret. But these days even if you had a game like that, people would be writing maps and guides and addons. That secret spot wouldn’t stay secret for very long (unless it was different for every player but that would be a bit weird.)
I don’t know that this is even all that recent of a trend. When I attempted FFXI back in 2006, you’d find a group and they would know EXACTLY where they should go for max exp at any given level, and exactly what those mobs would be vulnerable to. If anything, the secret grinding camp actually REDUCES the challenge of the game – you’re not going to pick a spot where there’s a significant chance of losing large amounts of progress to a death penalty, and you can pick and choose your opponents to make sure that they don’t have any challenging quirks (such as immunities, interrupts, whatever).
I’m definitely with Ferrel on the quest item drops though. Running past the “wrong” orcs (or, worse, accidentally killing them and wondering why you’re not getting credit) has long outlived its usefulness.
Here here!
I’ll agree with you on one thing. They definately lowered the XP rate WAY too far for slaughtering things when RoK came out and haven’t fixed it since. Getting a good XP grind group running through SoS was great fun. They really need to add this back in as a valid way to level. If they did that, I think it would take care of most of the problem you describe for people that prefer that playstyle. I think that’s about where we stop agreeing.
Apparently, you’d like to play EverSlaughter II, not EverQuest II. Do you bother reading any of the dialog when you pick up quests? Do you read any of the story given out through those multi-quest chore lines that we don’t need? You say “discovering lore and making up our own stories about places was thrilling.” But do you care anything about the actual lore or the actual stories that are told through the quest dialogs?
If all you do is click through the quest dialog as fast as you can until it finally gives you a quest, then I can understand why you don’t like them. Forget the story they just told you about WHY they need you to kill certain kinds of orcs, orcs just need to die. Maybe after you kill them they’ll drop something that will give you a quest to kill them. But why have the developers waste time on dialog if people don’t read it anyway? The quest drops should just say, “Kill 10 things”. Then, once you kill 10 of anything, it auto-completes and gives you a bit of an XP boost. Or they could just eleminate all but the “actual important quests”. That should save the developers some more time as well. They can design 20 quests per expansion and spend all that extra time coming up with new monsters, and open dungeons. They’d have to change the name of the game because it would be pretty silly to have hardly any quests in a game called EverQUEST, but hey, small price to pay for all that extra time the developers will have. And think of how many people will be out in the world competing for killing things since they won’t be wasting any time doing those pesky quests that used to spread people out across the world.
EQ Next: EverSlaughter. Forget the quests, just kill stuff. Coming soon from SOE.
Ah yes, this old argument. First and foremost I do read quest text on the more important lines. Not every line is important and a lot of quest text really is bad. It isn’t worth reading. Suggesting that they’re all gems just isn’t fair.
You do realize you just explained EverQuest right? From what I hear that was a really popular MMORPG! There weren’t quest hubs. You didn’t level primarily through quests. Developers DID spend more time developing awesome open dungeons and populating zones. That is precisely why a lot of people yearn for that experience again. I would actually prefer that. Quests were important for the most part and let the player access some really awesome gear.
All we do now is chores. So given the choice, I’ll take it the way you described it, yes. I can only hope that EQ Next is a bit more along those lines.
Must have been a grand ol’ time. 20 quests hidden all over Norrath for you to search out and stumble upon. Something tells me that the original EQ was a bit more than a handful of hidden quests + slaughter your way to level cap. Yes 20 is a rediculous number but it’s what I used above where you say I explained EverQuest. But I digress…
I guess for me, I just don’t get why they can’t do both. Here’s EQ2 as I experienced it:
Launch: Plenty of quests, group XP was great, dungeon XP was great
DoF: Plenty of quests, group XP was great, dungeon XP was great
PoF: Plenty of quests, group XP was great, dungeon XP was great
KoS: Plenty of quests, group XP was great, dungeon XP was great
EoF: Plenty of quests, group XP was great, dungeon XP was great
KoS: Plenty of quests, group XP sucked, dungeon XP sucked (eventually, dungeon XP got a small boost)
TSO: Plenty of quests, group XP sucked, dungeon XP mediocre
SF: Plenty of quests, group XP sucked, dungeon XP mediocre (quests in the hole were ok til they nerfed them but that was quest xp anyway)
So what changed? Group and dungeon XP changed! THAT is the problem. Fix that and you’ll be able slaughter you’re way to level cap again. Let me quote something you said above:
Now let me rewrite it for me: I get that people want to level through slaughtering monsters. No problem, let them. I don’t. Let me level by doing quests!
There are time when I want to group, and times that I want to quest. I like being able to do both. You make it sound like quest hubs are the root of all evil. I disagree. I think they take the rap for a bad decision: make quest XP more important than group XP. But you can fix that problem without changing quest hubs and then people won’t be forced into doing quests to level. You can still scatter quests around while having quest hubs. RoK had quest hubs and the Thugga line started down a wall over the edge of a ramp away from any of the hubs. If they hadn’t nerfed group XP with RoK, that would have been fine. Those that wanted to quest could quest, and those that wanted to slaughter could slaughter. But they didn’t go that route. They forced the slaughter crowd into the quest route and people have been complaining about it ever since. Hopefully they’ll fix the group XP and let that part of the game go back to what it used to be. But quest hubs didn’t cause that. A bad decision did.
The quest hub did actually cause some of the problems with modern MMORPGs. They’ve changed the dynamic from explore to running point to point without being concerned with what is in between. It has narrowed the world to just that. I consider that a big issue. As I said though, I have no problem with the remaining. I agree that the decision to make them the primary and best method by which to level is a bad one.
I wonder how much of the move away from “levelling by slaughtering monsters” is intended to discourage the use of bots for power-levelling?
That is a good question. It certainly may have played a role.
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Great article!
What has been bothering me a lot lately is “newer” MMO gamers who love to bash Original EQ when they never experienced it. I understand some of the arguments and some valid points may have been brought up about the grindy nature of EQ; however the bottom line is that EQ had more than enough quests lines to keep anyone busy for a very long time! Everyone can remember collecting some sort of tail, or camping Dorn for the Dragoon Dirk that was needed for something (I forget what). Yes, you had to go around and shout “Hail! Sergeant Slate” at every NPC to find these quests but that was just a product of the time in MMOs. Truth be told, I actually enjoyed this mechanic because it forced my immersion into the world that was Norrath. The story being told was great too! I’m sure anyone who played Original EQ for longer than 6 months can recall the stories of Nagafen and Vox… absolutely breathe-taking. Likewise, camp grinding allowed me to meet other people around the world for longer than the 15 minutes it took for me to run an instance now. I remember leveling on Goblins in Highkeep Hold for a few weeks with the same people day in and out; people who eventually became guildies and still remain in contact to this day.
Most quests in modern MMOs are merely a means to an end (leveling) now, rather than being the facet of story telling they should be. Most, I ADMIT NOT ALL, players accept Quest A without reading the dialogue and never care what they are missing. This is a product of questing becoming the preferred means to level. Because quests are SO important now, more are introduced to the player base, quicker and at a generally watered-down state. Honestly, who cares whether Apothecary Joe Somebody lost his formula for Bat-B-Gone…It’s nonsense!!
I’m just tired of people who never experienced EQ giving it this reputation as slow and boring. Doing so gives developers this idea that all players want is “BAM! G.I. JOE KUNG-FU GRIP, IN YOUR FACE ACTION”. All they will do is respond with some trash that keeps players subbing for another month when then inevitably it gets boring. I’m super excited for EQNext, and really, REALLY hope that SoE delivers on their promises on this one. Like a lot of other people, I have been searching for a long time for a replacement for EQ, with no avail. Bottom line is that game designers need to get out of this mindset that they have pigeonholed themselves into in which they think games should be super fast-paced and easy enough for everyone to become a master of the world in which they play.
Way back in the day, there was a mud called Genesis.
It had 2 types of xp: quest and combat.
Your xp gain was calculated based on the ratio of quest xp to combat xp. Basically the more quest xp you had the more xp you got for killing things. Ofcourse, by killing things you started the inevitable slide towards a bad ratio.
This led even me, who still hates anything resembling a quest, to actually go out and do a bunch of quests regularly. The enjoyment I got out of killing things when my quest xp to combat xp ratio was high was just glorious. It actually made questing worthwhile.
I do agre with Ferrel here and I do miss the parts on EQ1 where you could wander around and try to find a spot that was good for you in challenge and xp (depending on your characters and way of fighting). That is something I mis in modern games too but as I recall in EQ1 the whole just exploring and finding good spots certainly died during the Luclin Era (some people says it died with the Kunark express way of leveling), when there was an absolute BEST place to xp and if you where at anywhere else you “obviously did not know how to play the game”. As I see it it disappeared because it was useless from a developers point of view to spend the time programming mobs like this as the players still would only be in the BEST area all the time. Lets face it remember how many totally unused zones there where in EQ1 in the Luclin Era and earlier.
The problem is a lot about the players too let us not forget that. But do miss the exploration part of the game nowadays.
Sounds like a case of the classic equation:
Rose-Colored Glasses + Nostalgia