So here we are 2022 and as Gamers we are still running around with quests that have us spending hours trying to find and bring back Nine Ladies Dancing, Two Turtle Doves and a Partridge in a Pear Tree.
Once we return with said things the next quest in line has us going out to kill 12 Viscous Rabbits and bing back 12 Viscous Rabbits tails.
After that we must fight a Boss probably an oversized angry Turnip. And the rewards? Lets rummage through our adventurers backpack to see what treasures we were rewarded:
3 copper coins, a rusty dagger, one set of muddy boots and a feather.
Where are the EPIC QUESTS that would make us feel like true Heroic Adventurers who accomplished monumental tasks? With Fantastic extremely useful Rewards?
To make it worse Wow as well as most rpgs then hide the route we must take behind Convoluted Quest-Lines. that functions as follows:
Go talk to Quest Giver NPC Martin. But NPC Martin wonât talk to you until you are a certain level, and have eaten a danish at the Inn at Stormwind. But of course no one tells you that.
After googling the quest you may get lucky and find this out. You also find out that you also must have completed 30 other quests in the preceding quest line you werenât even aware of. Yeah you just hit a stone wall.
Because of this type of nonsense people are getting tired of these worthless low reward. Over convoluted. Make mindless time consuming trudge work Quests. I think the key words here is WE ARE BORED TO DEATH! Hence gamers will leave in search of a game that actually feels Epic. They probably wont find one so they will turn to the next best thing; Checkers.
They try adding long quest chains but people revolt if itâs anything more complicated than a âpick x bear buttsâ endeavor. Youâve made a complaint yourself that exploration to unlock other chains and characters was annoying and needed to be streamlined.
Look at the complaints people had over the optional jump puzzled in ZM. Devs are between a rock and a hard place.
Aside from a handful of âsecretsâ where the obfuscation is the whole point, when has WoW done that?
At the end of zones and campaigns, where you would expect them.
I mean, you canât expect every quest to be an epic endeavor that showers you with epics - partly because thereâs only so many epic things to do at a time, but mainly because itâd get boring if they were all like that.
Compare to an open world rpg type of game that is done well, and the quests are more engaging. âSteal the thing from the place!â âKill the bandit leader to took our stuff.â
I know itâs not anything groundbreaking, but I much prefer it to the numbers game that wow and others tend to play. âGo bring me 5 peltsâ but they are not a 1:1 drop. wtf?
Go into that field of roaming monsters and kill 18 of them. Why? It just kills my desire to do quests.
Regardless of reward, I would personally just wish to see less chore type quests and more adventure type quests.
I realize that there is not much difference between âgo kill dragons until you have 12 dragon teeth.â and âgo to that cave where there are dragons and bring me back the gold inside.â
But to me, there is a huge difference in how it feels.
I kinda like GW2 type of leveling/questing. Made every zone from start to finish viable at all times and there were different ways you could do a âquestâ. It just felt kinda meh because you didnât really get lore or text from NPCs and the quest ended as soon as the bar for the quest filled so it felt kinda hollow.
OP do you have examples of the types of quests youâre looking for?
There have certainly been âepicâ quest chains but most of them have involved portions that are group-only or take place in dungeons or occasionally even raids, which seems to turn a lot of questers off. An example of this would be the You Are Rakhâlikh, Demon questline from Vanilla (not the watered down post-Cata version), which has portions dealing with elites that arenât easily soloâd.
I donât mind group/dungeon portions personally, it makes sense that I need to go into dangerous places to retrieve rare items to take down dire enemies⊠if what it took were just laying around for any solo Joe to pick up at their leisure, someone wouldâve taken care of the enemy already.
Vanilla had some of this, but that kind of quest was pretty much extinct by TBC, and by now the game basically drags you by the nose through everything. Iâm not sure how much easier things could possibly get.
Unless youâre talking about doing current xpac patch content after the patch is no longer current, in which case yeah Iâd agree things can get confusing. Blizzard should start rolling previous patch intros into simplified summary quests.
At least they usually run normal player run speed or just follow you these days.
Iâm reminded of that stupid Defias Traitor escort quest from Vanilla, where the dude ran somewhere between player walk and run speed, making him a pain to keep up with.
Hereâs my contribution to the discussion. Itâs not just wow that pulls this make mundane work to keep the player wasting time while we (game company) makes money. Its all modern games do this to one extent or the other.
I just bought a newly released game âStar Ocean: The Divine Forceâ It is a very good game regarding the beautiful huge open geography landscapes. Characters. Action battles. Artwork. Story. Etc. But some of the quests are really boring. This aspect of the game I think reduces the score of from 10++ to around 8. At least for me. I do wish gaming studios made really unique exciting quests for a change.
I will add this. In wow I have noticed that I also have gotten bored with the quest system. I think the best term I can use is bland, the quests have gotten bland.
âBring me bear brains!â kills bear⊠no brains âThis just in from Azerothâs greatest scientific minds, bears are dumb!â
Also just as often as not the quest markers donât even work⊠the yellow circle or quest area marker or something will indicate ONE place and the ACTUAL place is a hill over or somewhere else and you spend like 20 minutes looking for the CORRECT place.
Another thing that Iâd like to add is that personally speaking, Iâll take âboringâ but normal quests over âepicâ but gimmicky quests, every single time. Collecting bear butts is fine when the other option involves piloting a vehicle or some other gimmick thatâs been similarly hacked into the game. At least with the collection quests Iâm actually playing my class and character.
I think theyâre fine as an occasional âtreatâ at the culmination of a questline, like in the original DK starting experience.
It really does need to be occasional though because it wears thin quick. I actively avoid Cata and MoP questing because of how often they lean on vehicles and similar.
