One of the big challenges in designing quests is that many players don’t want an intricate, detailed quest. They want to focus on the primary gameplay element or loop, and more complex or intricate quests distract from that.
Also, as in The Secret World, it’s incredibly easy to turn good design into abyssmally bad results. I tried this game long after release, and found its “online” puzzle-solving more obnoxious than fun, especially with years of online cruft having accumulated between launch and game. Also, many of the quests had weirdly specific triggers, or some awesomely tedious tasks. Much of what it was trying to do with the game simply didn’t work well with the interface, and of course the gameplay was almost entirely built around Warcraft-style MMO combat. A for effort, but in my opinion it didn’t work that well in practice.
Guild Wars 2 does it it very differently, almost to the point of iconoclasm, yet I do have to say it’s the most genuinely fun MMO I’ve ever played. Quests were entirely made of open-world events, which everyone could and did join in. And there were always several related tasks, so that you could help even if you weren’t up to spec in combat or just wanted to try something else.
The thing is, the entire world is under threat every damned week. If you gave loot away for free to whatever schmuck was saving the world this time, then you’d have no chance to ever profit at all. Besides, it’s not like they can’t afford it, anyway.
See, it’s people like you that will cause the end of civilization. Everybody knows that the Blood King won’t get around to writing that final note until the hero walks across his threshold, whether that be minutes or months from now. By valiantly sending the hero out after the knick-knack of ultimate kitsch or the +5 yarn of tangling, you’re slowing down the villain’s plan. Have a long enough set of chain quests, and you can put off the end of the world forever.
I like the idea of apocalypse vendors, people skirting the edge of world destruction. If they sell their gear for too much, the hero loses, armageddon comes knocking. If they sell it for too little, where’s the profit in that?
Next game I run is gonna have a guild of these apocalypse vendors.
You guys have it all wrong. The shopkeepers know they can’t sell their +5 Daggers of Evisceration unless a Big Bad is trying to destroy the world. So they get together and pay the local Big Bad to announce an intention to destroy the world.
This is why adventurers have so much time to prepare. The shopkeepers need to fleece them out of everything they own.
In the end, the Big Bad only pretends to die. Then the shopkeepers rebuild their inventory and convince another Big Bad to be a world-destroyer. Works every time.
Plus everybody knows the hero will only be tough enough to survive being stabbed with a sword 25 times after he kills 4000 rats and finds 25 lost heirlooms.
I’m not just giving my stuff to the heroes. They’re going off to fight the god-king emperor who wields unlimited magic power. They’re clearly not coming back, so I’m not so stupid as to put it on their tab.
That plus level matching you to the zone was brilliant. Others have started to do this, and I’m not sure if they were first, but they were the first where I experienced it. It was so great to be travelling through a zone and be able to participate in the fun no matter what.
The only think I didn’t like it Guild Wars 2 was the limited number of abilities and the weapon swapping in combat. I know limited abilities is all the rage these days, and I don’t like where WoW got to with an excessive number of abilities. I’d like it to be somewhere in the middle. A bit more than GW2 and a bit less than WoW, although I known they have been trimming back the abilities in WoW a bit overtime.
Hey, I’m all for putting off the Ultimate Showdown With The Lord Of All That Is Evil due to frivolous reasons including but not limited to “Because I want to built an epic home base with a museum containing at least one artefact from each of my adventures and some of the artworks I’ve created from stuff I found”, but suggesting I take my Gatling Rail Gun and Everything-proof Armour off to deal with some troublesome molerats crosses the line from “overly optimistic” to “extremely condescending.”
They’re world-hoppers. They show up in dimensions with impending cataclysms specifically to sell high-end items to wealthy would-be heroes. If the heroes fail, they bail out before the apocalypse hits and set up shop in the next world. It’s a risky business, but the margin is high.
Easily the worst quest structure in Fallout 4 is the radiant quests. “Go help X deal with Y for the Zth time.” And don’t get me started on the terrible quest design in Nuka-World’s main line. No, I’m not attacking my own settlements just to proceed in the DLC.
That and the main questline where I actually didn’t hate any of the main factions and spent ages doing everything except the main quest because I didn’t like the Brotherhood’s unreasonableness on all things Synth related, thought the Underground Railroad had some good points, and thought The Institute were pretty decent, albeit unethical with all the sweet tech.
And yeah, I got to the “Start raiding your own settlements” stuff in Nuka World and noped my way on out too.
That’s why I’ve never finished the game. I mean, I had done a whole bunch of quests for the Brotherhood and the Institute, built a nice rapport with some of their people, and now I was supposed to kill them all? The hell with that. I’m not the Big Bad here.
Interesting. I had the opposite problem of never really caring enough about any of these people or factions to want to advance their cause to the detriment of the others. IRL I’d be perfectly fine just letting them fight it out amongst themselves and picking through the ruins of whatever was left. So I never finished the game.
Same here. I’m waiting until someone mods in an ending that doesn’t suck, though it’s starting to look like I’ll have to write one myself.
[spoiler]There’s no reason the player character should be stuck doing the bidding of any of the short-sighted, unreasonable factions. It’s a Fallout game–by the late stages, your character is pretty much an unstoppable force. You are, potentially, an immortal superhero who can kill legendary monsters with your bare hands. You can infiltrate any place in the game. You’re backed by a small army and have artillery emplacements strategically located throughout the region. You’re probably the wealthiest individual around. You’ve got the tech and resources to rebuild and secure any place you take a fancy to.
All this, and you can’t intimidate or persuade the factions into a reasonable solution? Hell, worst case, you could murder your way down each chain of command until you find someone who sees things your way.[/spoiler]
Eh, I bought Fallout 4 in the Winter Steam Sale, finished the main questline earlier this week. I managed to keep friendly with the Railroad/BoS/Minutemen (no thanks to some poor coding–"Hey, Des, I know you’re annoyed that I let the Minutemen build the teleporter instead of you guys, but I have some kinda important information about Bunker Hill. No, you just want to whine about the Minutemen? OK, then, I’ll just grab all the Gauss guns off of the Heavies that the Knights and Synths kill…).
But as for the Institute? Man, I went through that one town where they slaughtered everyone because the one girl found some old tech. Screw those guys.
Anyway, moving more back to the original topic, I think part of the problem of having puzzle or multiple-ending quests nowadays is all of the information on the internet.
Yeah, if those types of things are the focus of your game, you get the type of people who like to solve them, but if you just throw a few of them into a game that’s otherwise a lot of shooting, many people are just going to go to the internet for a guide. I’m not going to play through FO4 again just for that little bit of difference to see the Brotherhood/Railroad/Institute endings, if I care, I’m just going to do a search on Youtube.
“Multiple ways to complete” also frequently runs into balance issues. More of an issue with MMO/multiplayer games, where the most efficient way becomes “the” way. I know I’ve seen complaints from stealth classes in MMOs that they’d reached a point where they are underlevelled and out of quests because the designers made an assumption that roughly 70% of XP came from quest completion, 30% from killing the things in your way. If you stealth by everything, you miss that 30%. But if you make it 100% from quests, then your gimping anything that’s not a stealth class, as now that have to slog through all the trash for no gain. Tough to juggle.
I’m playing Divinity: Original Sin, and one of the recruitable NPCs regularly loses his shit over the party wasting their time with petty side quests, instead of hunting down demons. It also lampshades one of the more ridiculous quest cliches: it’s got the standard “facilitate a romantic relationship between two NPCS” quest, except the NPCs in this instance are a pair of house cats.
On the other hand, it also plays one of my pet peeves completely straight: the fake treasure horde. I’ve defeated the Winter King, and broken into his treasure room. It looks like this. Huge mounds of gold, all around the place, easily fifteen feet tall - and I can’t pick up any of it. I should have effectively infinite gold at this point in the game. But that’s not actual treasure. It’s just… scenery.
Also, as far as Fallout 4, my only complaint with the end is I had to choose just one way to destroy the institute. I opted for the one that left an enormous smoking crater in the ground, and it was immensely satisfying. Almost as satisfying as tracking down the head of the Institute, and basically being all, “You’re such an irredeemable piece of shit your own mother is going to kill you.” BANG
I really, really hated the Institute.
Actually, it did kind of bother me that, when it’s revealed that your kid wanted you to inherit the Institute, you can’t just be all, “Deal! New rules, everybody! Synths have the same rights as humans, and we’re sharing our super tech with everyone in the wasteland. Oh, also, I’m an unkillable murder machine, so anyone who wants to object to this new direction I’m taking us in, feel free to share!”
