This posting is a response to my recent exploration of SOE's new MMO FreeRealms. I couldn't help but notice that the quests in FreeRealms have highlighted to me just how painfully childish MMO quests are in theme and writing.
MMOs are famous for their quests which consist of vivisection and taxidermy of many fantastical beasts, and slaughtering dozens of foes for very childish reasons. FreeRealms really shows up so-called adult MMOs by asking the player to do the exact same things, for the exact same reasons.
Far from making their stories seem deeper, FreeRealms' quests shows just how dysfunctional and asinine a typical MMO quest can be. The writing intended for quick, tween-age consumption is the exact same as that for epic worlds with years of development and content creation under their belt.
I'll prove it to you. Guess which MMO uses the following quests?
B) I've got a real problem on my hands. I have a deadline looming for an order of lumber, and I'm running out of time. The wolves and bears north of here have chased my workers away from the bundles of wood that they've already chopped.
I've already talked to Deputy Rainer about clearing the animals, but I need someone to go collect the wood for me. If you could collect eight bundles of wood for me I might just make my deadline.
C) 'There's a terrible infestation of shrews to the east of here, beyond the Delving Fields, and they're burrowing deep into the soil and ruining the greenery! If you can find some of their burrows and close them up, that should keep the filthy little beasts from straying near to the town. It's your duty to help me with this, Bounder!'
D) "I don't quite trust you with the secret of how we shift our goods through the Warden's net. Instead, the Captain asked me to have you collect some ballast for our ship. She's coming in to port for a following tide departure, and we need to top off the ballast for the storm season."
"You need to collect the roundest stones from the ballast piles. They pack the best in our hold."
"Oh, and, well, watch out for the guards. They like to harass honest traders like ourselves. They'll want to 'inspect' you."
E) "... You're still here? Don't just stand there like a lump! Go get rid of those no-good Robgoblin Initiates! They're stealing from the camp, and that's just bad business! You know how to zap right?"
Your choices are: EQ2, FreeRealms, LOTRO, Vanguard, and WoW.
Full disclosure: I wrote one of those quests up there, though I'm a little ashamed of it now.
So let's look at these five quests. Taking them apart we have:
- A) Do someone else's job for them by killing worms infesting a garden.
- B) Do someone else's job for them by collecting lumber.
- C) Do someone else's job for them by stomping on mounds of dirt.
- D) Do someone else's job for them by collecting rocks.
- E) Do someone else's job for them by beating up minorities.
In all cases, quest writing consists of two things: doing someone's job for them, and performing a petty or ethically dubious task.
Seriously, collecting lumber? Finding rocks? Beating up ethnic groups? This is our best effort at telling fantasy stories? Are we really satisfied by spending hours in a world where no one has any personal responsibility, and our greatest impulses are presented in 512 characters and takes less then 10 minutes to complete?
The telling of stories is implicit to the act of creating entertainment. Stories may be simple, or complex, but no matter how they are told they stay with people for months and even years.
Many conversations with game players of all stripes yield memories of various games, and the stories I hear are detailed, explicit, and well-remembered - even after ten years or more.
For instance, I told a friend the storyline of the X-Wing/TIE Fighter games. It took about ten minutes and I spoke entirely from memory. Later, I checked to see if I remembered the storyline correctly, and was surprised to see I had gotten it correct. These are games I played over ten years ago, and yet the essential storyline for the game has stayed with me all these years.
This is an opportunity, and it saddens me to see storytelling cut in favor of bells and whistles that are actually best used to help tell your story! The computer game industry is poorly captained in this regard.
With poor storytelling, many games (and I would argue every MMO) sound like tin whistles in comparison to the orchestral music of the movie, book, and TV industries. Simply put, MMO quests sound exactly like something a ten year old would write. I should know - I had ten year old students once who very well could put out the writing complexity of an MMO quest.
So, why are we in this mess? MMO quests are markedly simplistic because "no one reads them anyway" and "too much text is daunting to the player."
But wait, is dialogue and text the only ways you tell a story?
In movies, for instance, dialogue is matched with visual action - environmental activity, motion, color, shapes. Poor storytelling in movies is typified by a "talking heads" scene. And yet, this is exactly how we tell every story in an MMO.
In MMOs, we have a figure standing ramrod stiff, spouting text that is often unconnected to the overall story of the game, the story of the world, the story even of the region the player is in. Rarely is the text in a similar voice as that of other texts the player encounters in the MMO, and rarely will the quest text be a part of the stories the player will later tell of his exploit in an MMO.
Games famous for their more adult storytelling, such as Half-Life, use much more of the game world, lighting, voices, and actions to tell their story. Far from asking you to kill ten rats, the basic story of the game and world are told in the principal goals given to the player, and the needs of the player in fulfilling these goals.
It is for this reason I advocate a re-thinking of how stories are told in MMOs. Eliminate text, eliminate stiff NPCs, engage the player in the action of the world and create fewer, richer quests that use this more active world. Create needs in players, and they will drive the story. A need is not "I need experience to level." A need is "I need to explore this dungeon to seek an item I need to craft a weapon of power to strike down the being causing the skies to go dark." The experience to level is a reward, not a purpose.
Take a page from television, or from movies. Heck, take a page from Bioshock if need be. More voice. More active NPCs. Less quests. I walk into a new region and instead of a christmas tree of stiff NPCs asking me to do murder on their behalf, I learn of a threat, and some clues to the solution. Make the story the gameplay. Make the player feel the need to engage the bad boss at the end of the dungeon for a single reason other than the massive sword he leaves behind when he dies (and strangely, does not use when he is alive!).
It is more than possible to build a quest with many sub-chapters and more than ten minutes of gameplay. Make the carrot of finishing a quest a goal of an entire playsession, rather than part of the minor rewards for playing the game. The same planning that goes into a massive dungeon space should go into telling one story for that same dungeon. And the quests attached to that story? Not 512 characters of throw-away dialogue that leads the player to a goal unconnected with the story.
Take away "kill ten rats", and tell a real story. If an MMO is not out to give the player a story, or if that story is matched by a game aimed at 'tweens and teens, then we can't start calling what we do art. We can't call it more than just spreadsheets and throw-away imagination.
(Answers to quiz above: A - EQ2, B - WoW, C - LOTRO, D - Vanguard, E - FreeRealms)
10 comments:
Agreed! You know, it has taken until WoW to perfect the MMO formula that got its first real momentum from EQ. Usually once that happens the copy cats come out en masse (just like hip hop, glam rock, torture porn movies) until its done to death. I really feel were at that point now, and with the formula burned into so many more peoples heads these days (thanks to WoW) it will be easier to take that next step.
I agree. Most of these so-called 'quests' are more menial labour and errand-running than actual quests. True, they are a functional means to attain several goals for developers - maintaining focus on a few narrow goals, guide the player's experience, and provide a constant stream of payoffs - but they are still little more than menial labor.
You are fundementally misunderstanding the function of quests in MMO gameplay. They exist entirely to give structure and guidance to the activity that, pre-WoW, would have been called "grinding".
When I started EQ, gameplay consisted largely of working out which areas had mobs of the right level, then sorting between those for the ones that were most efficient to kill and/or dropped the best loot. Quests largely existed either as a means to gain gear upgrades or for lore/roleplaying reasons.
Post-WoW, indiscriminate slaughter for personal gain is out and following instructions from NPCs leading to indiscriminate slaughter (or menial labor) is in. Evidence is clear that games that don't supply sufficient direction are shunned.
MMO gameplay isn't watching a movie or reading a novel. It doesn't require high-order narrative to succeed. It's more akin to hobbies like model-building or painting-by-numbers. You follow a set of instructions (quests) and end up with a finished product (your character).
Personally, I value well-written dialog and descriptive text in all media, but even I don't come to MMOs specifically for that. I also like simple, low-level tasks, and get a good deal of ironic amusement out of the apparent lazines and/or incompetence of the NPCs.
Fair enough, David. I don't think I misunderstand the function of quests in MMOs - I argue that they are counter-productive to what a heroic fantasy game should be about. The best games are the ones in which a story is told during the game. Even in early EQ this was more true than the quest-driven gameplay of WoW. An area had its story, its theme, its events, etc. I argue that the use of quests as a form of progression rather than a means of storytelling is wrong-headed.
You bring up dialogue, which I think is the ultimate enemy here. You can't and you shouldn't tell a story in 512 characters. And you shouldn't muddy your waters by asking someone to collect firewood when the story of the region is that a big bad monster is laying waste to farms.
I'm with you on the ironic pleasure of doing people's jobs for them - back in the first MMO I played. But now that I've played over a dozen, all with the same bad story-telling, it's more than wore thin - it's a lack of effort to place artistic merit to the medium - something all entertainment implicitly strives to do.
If you think about how stories of heroism are told, there are many, many tropes we can and should be trying.
A good first step is simply this: keep the current quest tools, and just make every quest serve these purposes:
- Make the player a hero.
- Give the hero a task that no ordinary person can do.
- Task the hero with aspects of the greater story in bite-sized chunks.
Imagine a restructure of current quests with these in mind. A good start?
Why write quest's at all? just make games with quest journals already full of level appropiate quests that upon completion gives the player a reward. It's been pretty much surmised that most players don't read quests and just click the accept button then follow the quick guide to complete.
The majority of gamers seem to just want to take the fastest path to max level with little care how they get there.
This was an enjoyable read from someone much deeper in the industry than I presently am, and I think you've captured what it is that's always been a problem for me in MMOs. The story lines are, for lack of a better term, bland. As an avid gamer and a writer as well I've always valued a rich thematic experience (I would cite the same title you did, Bioshock, as an excellent example. Mass Effect's story was also impressive) Sadly though, I've never felt the same drive to continue on in an MMO.
Once the initial excitement of exploring new game mechanics, visiting a few new lands, and getting the gist of the gameplay pacing wears off... you're generally left with a series of fetch or kill quests. I used to play WoW quite often until I found myself using a quest helper addon, and one day realized I'd been running from point A to point B, killing mob C, returning to NPC D over and over for about four hours. I literally canceled my subscription the next day.
I wonder though if the story telling techniques used are a combination of laziness and technical limitation. How does one create a persistent world that exists for all players present there, yet that is capable of delivering legitimately relevant quest and task goals? I believe it's certainly possible, but it would be the more difficult task in designing an MMO.
Then again, overcoming difficulties like these is generally what puts one on the map from what I've seen of this industry. Have you read anything about Bioware's design philosophy behind The Old Republic? It rings reminiscent of the ideas you've mentioned here.
This is exactly why I prefer LOTRO to many of the "common" games out there. After 15+ years of MMORPGing, I'm sick of drivel marketed as "content". Even LOTRO has it to some degree.
That's why I'm so excited about Bioware's Star Wars: The Old Republic. They are touting a 4th pillar of "story" as the main focus of their game, with 100% voice for every single line of text in the game. Total immersion.
I won't wax poetic here, but I think what you seek is just around the corner....
It's incredibly difficult to create an engaging "epic fantasy" environment where a regular Joe Player (pardon the phrase) can feel important. Which isn't to say it's impossible - it just requires thought, development, and perhaps even technology we have only begun to brush up against.
But, realistically, it's difficult to suspend my belief enough to consider myself a "hero" when I look over my shoulder and spot a few dozen other "heroes" just like me. It's a problem that the genre has suffered from since the word go.
Even so, thanks to interesting instancing techniques, WoW has come a long way in its own right with the release of its Wrath of the Lich King expansion. And Guild Wars, the almost-MMO does a good job as far as storylines driving player progression.
I don't think we'll ever be able to completely separate MMOs from the "kill ten rats" mentality, but with every iteration into the genre we see designers and programmers becoming more ambitious and more adept at both telling stories and crafting quests that feel relevant.
I simply think it's just a matter of time.
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First off that Vanguard quest is for the Raisoor and Captain Scarlet series and they are the COOLEST and most SEXY NPCs in any game anywhere!
But to the actual content of the article, I think the current “kill 10 rats” quests are fine but you are right they aren’t quests and as such should be renamed as a “task”. A quest is something like: take this ring and drop it in the lava at the bottom of Mount Doom. A quest has danger and exploration and should be the alpha event of a region and should be preferably multi-stage and multi-region. The best example I can think of at the moment is the Thurgadin ring war series of quests which requires danger and exploration in something like 5-6 zones in EQ. Quests should require multiple characters to complete and should focus on either item retrieval/kill status of Boss MOBs or access to areas behind a boss mob deep in some dungeon. The “story” we must realise is how you and your friends accomplish the task.
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