Hello,
I've played around 400 or 500 games in my life. I love RPGs. Thing is, 90% of them revolve around killing, murder. And only that. I'm getting bored of it. It also often comes from a lack of work or imagination from the devs, and from some people that only want this. But games could be different.
In some other game i won't quote, you learn to perform hang gliding by ... killing mobs with a flamethrower. When you have killed enough of them, you learn to fly with a glider. What's the relation ? None. Need to level ? Kill more. Pff.
I would like that, for a change, this game has more varied objectives than murdering mobs and bosses, especially when there is no connection with the reward you're getting.
If you need some rare plant for a quest, the biggest problem could be to climb difficult heights for example. Where in most games i know of, the devs will simply put it on the ground with a tough boss to kill guarding it. Easy to do, but boring in the end and brainless.
Imagination. Logic. Killling everything, all the time, defies any logic and has no connection with learning in the life most of us have. I also think what you learn through killing is limited, even when it comes for fighting skills. Kung fu comes from imitating animals in a big part of it, and practice in the wind, not killing masses barehand. Etc.
So please make original quests. Fetching quests, conversation challenges, puzzles, racing, crafting challenges, group activities, god-offerings system, whatever. Some good fights is ok, but please don't make a constant butchery with no other goal ingame. Please put original quest mechanics and make the biggest part of progression made by quests, and reduce mob killing xp gain.
Thanks in advance.
Gideon
Questing gets pretty boring pretty quickly, though. If I wasn't able to park myself somewhere with some friends and socialize while grinding out a bunch of kills, I'd just walk away from the game after a while.
Questing is a largely solo activity, in my opinion. When you quest in a group, is just becomes "spacebarspacebarspacebar, lets race through these quests as soon as possible and move to the next hub"
I would enjoy that very much. I enjoy grinding mobs sometimes, other times I want to explore and do something different.
If the reward is meaningful and the challenge interesting, I think a system like that can be successful.
What do players want? Gear and skills. So as with your flower example, put a skill book, or a piece fo gear up at the top of that mountain. Make it so getting there requires some climbing, maybe underwater swimming, or finding a way to open a door or cross a chasm, even fight some mobs along the way. If people want the item, they will be encouraged to develop different skills.
It would definitely make the world feel more real and add fun to the gameplay.
Murder and robbery is without question the way to advance in a typical MMO. I would say racism was an essential element but technically invading orc or kobold or troll villages on sight and killing every one you see, man, woman, child, as you rob their homes is speciesism not racism. Obviously a "good" thing - just ask any paladin that is low on cash or needs experience.
I too prefer quests to mindless grinding but sometimes the difference is rather slight. As in the ubiquitous quest to go out and kill 10 orcs, or trolls, or kobolds.
It is very hard to make interesting quests that aren't kill x mobs or click Y plants or the like. Quests involving a lot of back and forth without killing aren't exactly popular with the typical player. And elaborate storyline quests, perhaps done best by FFXIV, are far from what many of us think of and look for as "sandbox" and limit replayability with later characters.
So yes let's hope for interesting and engrossing quests but let's not expect most of our experience to come from them.
I agree emphatically with the hang glider point. Skill in harvesting, crafting, miscellaneous skills and the like should come from doing things related to those activities and not be related to adventure level (i.e. the number of orcs, trolls and kobolds slaughtered).
This opinion has been sponsored - one might almost say crowdfunded - there are a LOT of the buggers - by the kobold protective association. When you see a kobold think of your sainted mother and leave her in peace The kobold will be thinking of your mother as well (whenever she sees a cookpot).
There are a number of roleplaying games which promise "there are multiple paths to the end, some of them without using violence". Usually that involves playing a sneaking class (rogue) or such. In Pantheon terms which will (probably) only have one such class, this would limit the quest too much. Maybe you could also allow casters to do these quests (with invisibility spell), or make a general invis potion available (EQ had this)? Then this would be a valid approach.
Of course there's also other ways to implement such quests. For example, think of distractions ("start a fire in room x, so everyone runs there to fight it, and in the meantime you sneak into the bosses room and steal the important item"). But that would require pretty well scripted quests, and mob AI.
Or infiltration. Instead of killing the guards at the front door, how about sneaking into the castle through a hidden sewer? Or hiding under a cart that is moving into the castle? Many possibilities...but they have to be implemented reasonably :)
Gideon said:Please put original quest mechanics and make the biggest part of progression made by quests, and reduce mob killing xp gain.
Think you maybe in the wrong game here ...
While there will be quests, old school gaming never revolved around them. This won't be a "pick up all quests here and run around the area doing them" type game at all. XP will be gained from mobs, not from quests. You will get rewards and probably some xp from them but it wont be the way to level
There could be a lot of different non-combat quests, just think of what one might be asked to do in a real life situation while living on the frontier of an unexplored land.
- Help somebody build a house
- Discover and remove plants/ore/whatever that poison a water supply
- Take a cursed object away from a village and find a way to get it sanctified/destroyed somehow. Maybe find the solution by talking to NPCs, reading books in a library, etc The process of sanctiying/destroying can be a quest in itself.
- Find and capture/tame wild animals to help NPC/village
- Rappel down a cave and find the invaluable/sacred item somebody dropped/lost in there - no need to have many/any mobs - more of an environmental challenge
- Gather resources from hard to reach areas
- Discover who commited a crime (different crime, method and perpetrator each time you repeat the quest)
- Escort a merchant to market while trying to avoid putting him in danger during the road. Finding ways to avoid mobs would be better than entering fights.
- Test how a wagon behaves across different types of terrain, so a crafter can improve on their design. Give feedback on what improvements are necessary (different every time you repeat the quest). Later drive or help drive the wagon across the land (different terrains) to win a race
- Find a way to stack the maximum number of crates ona ship in the shortest amount of time (ships, cargo hold, container sizes and weight differ every time you do the quest)
- Track people/animals by looking at environmental clues (footprints, broken branches, bent grass, dropped items, talking to people). Again - different origination and finish point, different person, different combination of clues when you repeat the quest.
The majority of the game will always revolve around killing, but it is very much possible to add a good amount of different quests to break up the monotony.
>old school gaming never revolved around them. This won't be a "pick up all quests here and run around the area doing them" type game at all. XP will be gained from mobs, not from quests.<
I must say my memory of old school gaming is a bit different than yours. But my history of old school gaming included Yserbius and The Realm briefly (both before EQ), Asheron's Call also briefly and Dark Ages of Camelot for four years. It did not include EQ.
I remember quest hubs, many quests, and xp from quests being rather important. A lot of the mob killing wasn't simply to grind it was for "kill x mobs" quests. I do agree that pure grinding was more important then than it typically is today - and most of us complained mightily about the boredom and asked for more quests.
I know VR has said that quest hubs will be less important in Terminus and quite a few quests will be picked up in other ways such as from NPCs outside of hubs, perception and the like. I don't recall them saying that quests in general will be unimportant and this will be a game where you mostly gain levels by grinding. I hope that this is not correct - a game with goals and stories is far more appealing than a game with thousands of mobs scattered around the world and a majestic figure telling level one characters "Go forth and kill, my child".
Interesting idea, but for the time being, I would think such advancement would have to be voluntary or alternate, and not required to advance in the game.
Your climbing example is good, one must work their climbing skill up to reach the heights that only a certain flower grows needed for crafting. You gain some experience and skill with each advancement of your climbing skill.
Now tieing that in with the grouping concept this game is going for might be more difficult, and the devs, nor many of us, want a path to progression that is completely soloable (although I'd concede a solo path to progress if that path was much slower than the "designed" path). How someone progresses is not important to me, other than them learning their class, but if someone has no intention of seldom grouping for raids or dungeons, or their sole focus is crafting, so be it.
dorotea said:>old school gaming never revolved around them. This won't be a "pick up all quests here and run around the area doing them" type game at all. XP will be gained from mobs, not from quests.<
I must say my memory of old school gaming is a bit different than yours. But my history of old school gaming included Yserbius and The Realm briefly (both before EQ), Asheron's Call also briefly and Dark Ages of Camelot for four years. It did not include EQ.
I remember quest hubs, many quests, and xp from quests being rather important. A lot of the mob killing wasn't simply to grind it was for "kill x mobs" quests. I do agree that pure grinding was more important then than it typically is today - and most of us complained mightily about the boredom and asked for more quests.
Very well I'll rephrase it then, based on Brad's past, this is likely what we will see. Some older games did use a quest based system but Brad did not.
I sometimes wish guilds could create their own quests
Find the naked captain only wearing the hat and boots
Or something like a ratrace to a certain place,only mentioning the name of the place they have to get to.Guilds have to set reward and place in advance.
The tools to set up a crime investigation where the guild gets to select between juicy choices to show off the poor victim on the crime scene <3
dorotea said:>old school gaming never revolved around them. This won't be a "pick up all quests here and run around the area doing them" type game at all. XP will be gained from mobs, not from quests.<
I must say my memory of old school gaming is a bit different than yours. But my history of old school gaming included Yserbius and The Realm briefly (both before EQ), Asheron's Call also briefly and Dark Ages of Camelot for four years. It did not include EQ.
I remember quest hubs, many quests, and xp from quests being rather important. A lot of the mob killing wasn't simply to grind it was for "kill x mobs" quests. I do agree that pure grinding was more important then than it typically is today - and most of us complained mightily about the boredom and asked for more quests.
I know VR has said that quest hubs will be less important in Terminus and quite a few quests will be picked up in other ways such as from NPCs outside of hubs, perception and the like. I don't recall them saying that quests in general will be unimportant and this will be a game where you mostly gain levels by grinding. I hope that this is not correct - a game with goals and stories is far more appealing than a game with thousands of mobs scattered around the world and a majestic figure telling level one characters "Go forth and kill, my child".
DAoC was one of the games that began the quest hub/chain leveling paths. It was the single most annoying thing in that game. It didn't last long though. The quest hub stuff mostly was a tutorial that ended quickly. Quests were given in the towns and such. Very few were discovered out and about. The way that game was built had more to do with there being "hubs" then a hand holding quest leveling path.
I am reverse from you in this. I would like to see quests give no exp at all, and instead quests would be done for the reward you get at completion. Be that some item or some money. If not no exp, then fairly little. Quests should be the drive to explore the game. Exp would happen on the way, by killing things, finding new areas, maybe some achievements. I see quests as nothing more than the narrative driving my adventure, not the focus of the game.
Hanging out with friends, exploring the game, and having fun adventuring should be the focus.
dorotea said:>old school gaming never revolved around them. This won't be a "pick up all quests here and run around the area doing them" type game at all. XP will be gained from mobs, not from quests.<
I must say my memory of old school gaming is a bit different than yours. But my history of old school gaming included Yserbius and The Realm briefly (both before EQ), Asheron's Call also briefly and Dark Ages of Camelot for four years. It did not include EQ.
I remember quest hubs, many quests, and xp from quests being rather important. A lot of the mob killing wasn't simply to grind it was for "kill x mobs" quests. I do agree that pure grinding was more important then than it typically is today - and most of us complained mightily about the boredom and asked for more quests.
I know VR has said that quest hubs will be less important in Terminus and quite a few quests will be picked up in other ways such as from NPCs outside of hubs, perception and the like. I don't recall them saying that quests in general will be unimportant and this will be a game where you mostly gain levels by grinding. I hope that this is not correct - a game with goals and stories is far more appealing than a game with thousands of mobs scattered around the world and a majestic figure telling level one characters "Go forth and kill, my child".
I think I know what Enitzu is referring to and iirc Brad stated at one point that Pantheon will not revolve heavily around questing. At least not like today's standard in MMOs and definitely not like Theme Park MMOs. Do not expect as much questing like WoW or Rift or AA or etc. I think a good comparison would be either EQ1 and/or VG, probably VG would be the best comparison. EQ1 had very little questing involved especially compared to today's standards. VG definitely had more questing compared to EQ1 but still nowhere near what we find in MMOs like WoW or Rift.
Questing in VG was some of the better questing I've found in MMOs. It usually required a group, lead you to a gigantic dungeon or castle or zone, and fitted you with enough to do for a few hours all the while giving you good xp killing things to complete the quest and rewarding you at the end with a nice item or 3 or 4. I like the long chained questline format where each quest finished rewarded you a nice item and opened up the next part of the quest. These items usually came as a suit of armor or a set of items.
I was perfectly happy with the Vanguard mix of questing and killing. I am not hoping that most experience will come from quest rewards - even in more modern MMOs the actual quest reward tends to be significantly lower than the experience you would get just spending the same time killing things.
To some of us quests seem to be a form of hand holding - a means of directing us where to go and what to do rather than encouraging pure "sandbox" exploration. To the extent quests are mandatory - each area has a mainline quest series and you can't progress until you finish it - I agree. But I find quests that tell stories - side stories if not "save Terminus and here is how" stories - add so much to a game. And if I am level 7 and Sally in a bar just happens to have a problem suitable for a level 7 to solve I don't at all mind learning that way that Mosquito Plains is a good place for a level 7 to go. As long as I also have the option of exploring in other directions as well.
Wasn't there some guy in WoW's MoP expansion who hit the level cap by staying on the panda's starting island and only did herbalism / tradeskill node exp for like a year?
That's a totally different kind of grind, nightmarish in scope if you ask me.
There were the messenger quests in EQ where you could deliver parcels or letters to different cities.
Quests like the Stein of Moggok, etc.
But let's face it.. overall, when it comes down to it, MMO's are battle oriented. I doubt anyone is getting their Fiery Claymore of Destruction by delivering a letter to the hermit in a hidden cave on Mount Doom. Sure, maybe you find some obscure, tedious, unintended way to hit the level cap by never harming a soul, but what are you left with? No combat skills in a world that's obviously going to revolve around combat. Watch the streams for proof.
If non combat advancement occupied even 10% of their plans for Terminus, this would have already been discussed, thrown out there by the devs, and likely shown in some fashion on the several streams thus far.
You're barking up the wrong tree me thinks.
Locuus said:There could be a lot of different non-combat quests, just think of what one might be asked to do in a real life situation while living on the frontier of an unexplored land.
- Help somebody build a house
- Discover and remove plants/ore/whatever that poison a water supply
- Take a cursed object away from a village and find a way to get it sanctified/destroyed somehow. Maybe find the solution by talking to NPCs, reading books in a library, etc The process of sanctiying/destroying can be a quest in itself.
- Find and capture/tame wild animals to help NPC/village
- Rappel down a cave and find the invaluable/sacred item somebody dropped/lost in there - no need to have many/any mobs - more of an environmental challenge
- Gather resources from hard to reach areas
- Discover who commited a crime (different crime, method and perpetrator each time you repeat the quest)
- Escort a merchant to market while trying to avoid putting him in danger during the road. Finding ways to avoid mobs would be better than entering fights.
- Test how a wagon behaves across different types of terrain, so a crafter can improve on their design. Give feedback on what improvements are necessary (different every time you repeat the quest). Later drive or help drive the wagon across the land (different terrains) to win a race
- Find a way to stack the maximum number of crates ona ship in the shortest amount of time (ships, cargo hold, container sizes and weight differ every time you do the quest)
- Track people/animals by looking at environmental clues (footprints, broken branches, bent grass, dropped items, talking to people). Again - different origination and finish point, different person, different combination of clues when you repeat the quest.
The majority of the game will always revolve around killing, but it is very much possible to add a good amount of different quests to break up the monotony.
I like your ideas. You have given a good series of examples of what could be introduced. Others could be thought of. It's not because you don't kill anything that you're not having fun. I hope all of you are having fun IRL often enough without killing things. Lol.
I also remember i had a lot of fun with thieves's guild in skyrim. It was stealth based, with a nice narrative storyline. You killed nearly noone (don't remember exactly but very few kills). Playing consisted in positioning, hiding, stealing keys to open doors, picking locks, studying your operation. Was lot of fun.
You could also implement puzzles, a wide variety of them. I remember Baldur's Gate 2 had interesting enigmas.
Some skills could be thought of to be used for non-combat situations too.
Some people think combat is the most interesting content in a game simply because it's true in several games. But there is a reason to it, one being combat often uses the most complex mechanics in a given game. For this very reason, it seems more interesting. But it's a matter of content development. If a non-combat quest is easy as pie, with no possibilities for player, no choices to be made, it will of course end up being more boring than combat, which will have hundreds of skills to be selected from. You can't expect non-combat quests to be interesting if you don't put enough content around it too. But if you think twice about a non-combat quest, open possibilities, create skills that could be helpful for them, if you use exciting and complex mechanics, then it can be way more interesting than what people usually expect and they might be suprised in a positive way.
Cheers
Iksar said:The problem with non-combat quests is that they can't really be worth a ton of experience as they are typically very low risk if any at all, often only taking time.
Risk ?
Think about everything you have learnt, the massive amount of knowledge your brain has been through (school, work, family, home, travels, movies, games, etc). How often did you risk your life for it ? Now imagine you climb tough mountains and fight people to the death for 20 years. And only that. Do you think you would have learnt more with that in the end ?
Personnaly, i doubt it. Of course, a game has no reason to be 100% realistic, but i think that if it doesn't fit your logic you end up feeling weird about it one day.
I have personnally stopped playing several games for that very reason. Now i often have more fun doing crafting, fishing, collecting stuff, and i like combat to be a minor part of my gaming experience. Also, i must say that when combat is not permanent, that i wait for it to come, i often like it better than when it becomes a daily routine.
It's even scientifically proved that stress prevents learning ability, so let's talk about leveling through killing and doing risky stuff.
Also, why not reward the time spent playing one way or another ? Most games reward that and it sounds pretty fine to me, as long as it is balanced. Performing achievements can't be everyday's routine. I rather think an achievement to be a result of leveling, not a way to do it.
In another MMO i know of, combat is not a necessity at all. Raid fights on my server happen randomly and scarcely. Well, i'm always happy to get this piece of massive fight, whereas i'm bored with games specialized in them pretty quickly. Fun often comes from varied activities to me. Doing lots of different things often makes them all look better than if i did them all day individually.
Cheers
Jeron said:Questing gets pretty boring pretty quickly, though. If I wasn't able to park myself somewhere with some friends and socialize while grinding out a bunch of kills, I'd just walk away from the game after a while.
Questing is a largely solo activity, in my opinion. When you quest in a group, is just becomes "spacebarspacebarspacebar, lets race through these quests as soon as possible and move to the next hub"
When questing is used in a hub to hub format as the primary means of advancement, I completely agree. But questing in my opinion should be more epic in nature. Epic item quests, epic story quests, and other epic quests such as the Coldain Ring War that ropes in large groups of people or maybe even the entire zone. I think that's the best way to do quests as well as maybe random PQ type events like zone invasions or zone events.
As for advancement, along with killing and the standard adventuring, I'd like to see a return of diplomacy and a very detailed crafting system not unlike Vanguard's but maybe taken to the next level. The Perception system can be a great tool if done right. Just imagine the possibilities of that triggering a random zone event if you just chance into something and follow through on it. It's something that could potentially create some random content for everyone in the zone. Though it should be something used sparingly and kept somewhat rare. For bonus points, add a world consequence for failure.
I can definitely appreciate the idea behind this thread. I would like to share an excerpt from a post I made in another thread that I feel is somewhat related:
"Let's assume that there is a viking tribe that has faction merchants that sell desirable gear, and then also assume that this same viking tribe hosts a monthly fishing tournament and that the top 10 finishers qualify for significant faction gain. The important thing to balance into the equation is risk vs reward -- there isn't a lot of inherent danger involved with fishing (though there could be exceptions to this) but I like to think that there is still some degree of risk.
If you participate in the tournament, you are spending time (a very precious resource) in order to participate and have a chance to win. You could go the tried and true route of farming NPC's for faction the old-fashioned way (or do something else entirely), or you can risk your time (and possibly an entry fee) to potentially walk away with nothing but the fish you caught if you don't place high enough in the tournament. It's impossible to speculate too deeply here without knowing exactly what the rewards are that the faction merchants offer, but I do think it's possible to implement this sort of content in a way that makes it desirable, scarce, and rewarding. The challenge is balancing the risk vs reward but I don't think of that as an impossible obstacle."
Looking at the above, I feel that there could indeed be ways to progress outside of just killing things. This wouldn't necessarily advance your XP bar but it would allow you to increase your faction and I think that's another important measurable when it comes to horizontal progression. I think the perception feature is also designed to allow players to progress in meaningful ways outside of just killing things.
It would be fun to have some optional stuff people could do to earn special crafting equipment and crafting materials that didn't require killing stuff, or earn faction by doing some non-combat things, but the main source of XP needs to be from killing stuff. If quests are like they were in EQ, rewarding quest completion with XP is great. I hardly feel this needs to be said, but no quest hubs. If VR said they planned to introduce quest hubs as an important part of progression I'd be done here.
The fact is that most people--especially people hoping Pantheon will be very similar to EQ--want that combat-centric style of play. Killing, farming, and adventure. The quickest way for this game to lose its target audience, IMO, is to significantly alter its focus away from combat. That's not to say that some of the stuff being mentioned here wouldn't add a bit of flavor to the game, but I will say a lot of the non-combat stuff seen in games these days I find to be tedious, cheesy, and contrived.