And they did it all while presenting a set of challenges that exist outside the realm of combat or traversal. Uh...yes, the player has to fight and run their way through the town while on this quest, But the quest wasn't to kill X-numbers of enemies, or to get to Y-place https://specialolympics2017games.com/.
In fact, the mission can be completed entirely without fighting if the player's adept enough, and this sort of alternate challenges doesn't cost the developer any more to create, either. I mean, those sewer caps have got to be textured either way. Having their texture also be a surprising part of the design doesn't cost any more money. It just takes a little forethought. Missions can either be boring and routine, or a magic entry point for your world. Having them be the latter just involves a little bit of shift in how we think about design. And, in fact, The Secret World goes even farther than this. They really made sure to utilize all the elements of the game. There are times where you have to use emotes to pray or applaud in the right place at the right time in order to complete a quest. There are also a number of stealth missions which while clunky at times from a design perspective, simply involve placing incredibly hard enemies that will kill the player if they aggro them, and placing them in such a way that the player is able to move around them without pulling aggro if they think it through. It requires no new assets to develop it, nor does it require the implementation of new systems, and yet, it still delivers a new experience simply by moving the design mindeset away from seeing quest design simply as a method for guiding the player through the combat grind. And that brings us to a few other points: First, if you want quests to feel organic, they can't just be one of two dozen things that the player accrues every time they rush through town. By bombarding the player with the quest, you overwhelm them with text, and essentially create a scenario where the players incapable of really caring about the quest individually. The player's thoughts just boiled down to: "Alright, which one of these is closer on my mini-map?" The Secret World limit you to one main story-line quest, one big quest, and three minor quests, so you can only ever have five at a time. That's a manageable number, and it allows the player to think a little bit more about each quest, and invest a bit more in each one. This also lets you get rid of the ridiculous town hub that many MMO players know so well. That safe part of the zone that the player blazes through trying to find the 12 guys who have exclamation point over their heads. Instead, constraining the player to a small number of active quests, allows for environmental quests. You find an overturned car? That could be a quest giver. You find a note on the ground? That's a quest giver. Find a corpse in the woods? That's a quest giver. Environmental quests make the world feel much more holistic and alive. By having quest tied to small scenes or moments within the world. Environmental quests also create a much better flow to the game. Wherever you are when you finish a quest, there's something else interesting to do. And if you really run out of quests, just explore the world and you're sure to find a quest that pushes you to explore even more. That's way better than the flow-breaking return trip to town to drop off quests or get new ones. Lastly, most of what we call "quest" these days, I think should be reduced to what I call "tasks". The idea of tasks is a system used heavily in "The Lord of the Rings Online". In that game, basically everything has a task associated with it that functions sort of like an achievement. So, kill 20 rats? Task complete. You find all the major landmarks of this zone? Task complete. You kill 20 corrupted denizens of the lower abyss? Yep, task complete. But what made these tasks interesting, is that they all, in the loosest of senses, conferred a small permanent bonus to your character if you did them. Not enough to actually make you feel like you have to do all of them, but, enough for you to feel like it's really worth doing the ones you felt like doing. And this is the key: They created tasks for everything. I mean, seriously, there was a task associated with almost every monster in the game, and this is essential, because, what do these tasks do? They encourage the player to play how they want. Maybe today I want to grind neekerbreeker. Maybe tomorrow I want to explore all of Weathertop. Maybe the next day I want to see how many barrow wights I can take down, because those are super hard for me to fight at this level. Well, in "Lord of the Rings Online", you can do all of that, and the game encourages you to. It lets you track your progress, and reward you for playing however you want to play. This is a powerful thing. You can augment your quest system by putting in these types of tasks, and essentially letting the player choose when they want to create difference in kind for themselves. Oh, and in "Lord of the Rings Online", they did throw in one really manipulative task that I just loved. All it provided the player with was a title, but it changed the whole experience. Say, James gets to level 5 without dying once. That would earn him the title: "James The Wary" If he got to level 10 without dying, he'd be: "James The Undefeated" ...and so on. Now, I'm not saying that this is a good way to go, But it really makes you feel like your character's life has meaning, which helps you to really sink into the world of Middle-Earth. And there's plenty more on quest design that we could talk about, and maybe we will eventually. But one last thing before we go: "World of Warcraft" has evolved a lot over the years, and Blizzard is clearly tried to branch and build more than the treadmill/FedEX quest and kill quests that "WoW" launched with. But many of WoW's clones and the free-to-play games of today seem not to have learned this lesson, which is tragic, because especially in the free-to-play age, just because a game is a MMO, does not mean that it has to feel like a grind. See you next week!
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |