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Mar
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No offense to those of you who loved to sit on grassy, gentle, southern slopes of the Overthere, pulling rhinos, succulents, cockatrices and such until you heard the comforting ding of level 40, but grinding for experience to me seems kind of dumb. I wonder why is it that I should simply sit in one place and kill the same monsters ad nauseum in order to advance my level?
Want to have monsters drop occasional worthwhile loot, that’s cool – let the campers get a reward every once in a while, but I am thinking that to drive experience, characters should have to talk to people, take part in a lesson, learn a skill, complete pilgrimages, touch magic rocks, view the massing of an army, witness the execution of a mentor…
So, instead of simply having quests which contribute a little experience to the pool, but are seldom as efficient as just hanging around killing hordes of nameless minions, characters should also get advancement quests which must be completed to, you know… advance.
Developers and gamers alike complain that players rush through content to get to the end and miss a great deal of the handiwork and effort the folks who made the game sunk into it. Well, I think that if instead of catering to the players who are content to just sit and kill boars in the forest all day, the game should reward players who take in more of the game content. Many games have implemented gateway quests for zone access and in some cases for leveling access, but in most cases they were implemented as a tacked on series of hoops for the player to jump through after proceeding through other parts of the game in a more traditional (read: grinding) way. In order to take hold and not be simply rejected out of hand by the players, this system must be executed well.
The way I am envisioning this working is something like the Boy Scouts merit badge system. A player needs to complete a certain number of pre-set quests to achieve a level and by completing each quest, would learn an ability, skill or bonus. Players could choose to level after the completion of the minimum number of quests, or continue on to finish all of the quests and gain the remaining skills, etc. Or in some cases completing one quest would cancel the ability to do another, which could result in skill tree or bonus diversity.
The quests for players to finish could be quite varied to appeal to the interests of all players: craft, explore, kill a specific mob, etc. so long as each would be a reasonable approximation of the others. Rewards should be in line with the type of quest accomplished and difficulty.
Anticipated Positives:
- No level penalty for non-combatants. If players could gain equivalent advancement from other activities, crafters, wanderers, traders and socializers rather than those activities just being wasted time in-game.
- No more exp debt/lost exp nonsense. Quest is either done, or not.
- No need for unnecessary mob camps everywhere… just because. World design is enhanced by the designers only needing to add mobs for aesthetics, to regulate travel and quest objectives.
- More player exposure to content. If the quests force players out of their “camping” habits and into new parts of the world, players will see more of it.
Anticipated Negatives:
- Players don’t like to be told what to do. Most players want to play the game they want to play it, so forcing them to complete a series of quests as the only path to advance is going to upset some if you aren’t mindful of the types of things they would want to do when you set the quests down.
- Players like to be told how to do something. After the first few players complete quests, the walk-throughs will be on the internet. Also on the internet will be an assessment on which quests give the best return on investment for time spent, etc. If the quests aren’t incredibly balanced, all characters will simply do the same quests. Re: Everquest epics.
- Without some built in limiting/enabling mechanism, like mob kills/exp ratio, but a simple pass/fail litmus test, leveling for different players could be drastically different in difficulty and hard to predict an average level/time curve.
- Expansions to the original game become much harder to implement for lower level content. There will be a great hue and cry for those who will not be able to get the low level rewards of new content if they are in the form of new abilities, skills or bonuses which form a new tree, or scale up over time.
- Would likely limit the casual player. Without care, casual players might be hurt by a leveling model like this. Would there be something to do for someone only logging in for 30 minutes?
Could a system like this work? I’m not sure. While in Everquest the Epic weapon quests were incredibly painful, there were a great many players who endured them to get their shiny doo-hickey in the end. But in EQ2, the citizen quest each player needed to finish in order to level up after the newbie island and many of the quests to access different world zones were discarded as an unnecessary annoyance.
I think in order not to fail immediately, though, the keys would be that the expectation of the play-style has to be set early on, and the rewards have to be worth the extra effort.
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I totally agree with what you’re saying. Questioning the status quo like this is good.
I have a feeling that if you designed a game like this, those parties who write analyses would evaporate because the game wouldn’t attract crowds of them. MMOs and other “leveling” games attract bean-counters in disproportionate numbers, so the whole world bends to their ways. Trying to break that up at the core level (not just with little fixes) will bring adventure back to “adventuring”.
Korean MMORPG’s tend to have job advancement quests: Ragnarok, Flyff, Trickster, all three have them.
As long as advancement quests are among the easiest quests, they’re actually no problem. They should not, however, be even remotely frustrating as to become roadblocks.