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#1
08-17-2013, 09:23 PM
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Questing, meaningful gameplay and EQNext
There is no better way to start this other than to flash back to EverQuest as it was in 1999. The NPCs didn’t have a blip on the minimap (which wasn’t there either), or even an icon over their head that would tell you if they were interesting or not. If you needed to know, you did much like anyone might do in the real world: you walked up and talked to them. Some said nothing, some welcomed you and some sent you on your way rudely. Then there were the ones that invited you to embark on a journey to the far corners of Norrath, forming friendships, making enemies, and exploring the unknown territories in between. The spoils at the end were often epic, but sometimes they were the journey itself.
And it a journey it was, truly. You read every word that NPC said carefully and more often than not you even wrote it down. No objectives popped up, no arrows or magical guide brought you where you needed to be. You either pulled out a notebook and figured it, befriended someone who had before, or looked up the spoilers. Figuring out a quest could take days, weeks, months and years. Some you never finished. Most importantly this made gameplay feel meaningful. We all knew we had a long way til end-game so we let ourselves get lost in our exploration while it was fresh. This of course was to our advantage at times, and at times just a distraction or even a setback. But it was the only time I even remembered being sucked into the story of a MMO. Returning to the modern day MMO, the “quest” has long since resembled any of such. It’s been replaced entirely with tedious, repetitive tasks where you follow the arrows on your minimap until the quest disappears from your tracker. Perhaps you don’t even read a word of it. You don’t even remember where it came from and soon you’ll forget you did it altogether. Considering the modern quest structure came to be in order to address the “grind” issue -- I would say it has become a grind issue of its own, far more severe, being quite toxic to the entire premise of the game. It all becomes a quite impersonal grind where we spend more time staringi at a minimap than the fantastical world around us. I’m not saying everything about questing in EverQuest was beautiful. There was nothing elegant about it really. It was often literally impossible at times, far beyond enjoyable for the average end-user. But in refining this we have gotten lost and our formerly epic quests have become a shitty whack-a-mole game. Looking at your quest log has become a perpetual nausea. The EverQuest Next team seems to have approached the old problem from a new angle, boasting StoryBrick’s “emergent AI” system, permanently changing persistent world and far reaching social faction consequences. When you consider the chaotic combination of these systems, the new Norrath is very much a living system with the limitless potential to redefine what the name “EverQuest” really means. SOE is wielding all of the right tools in the equation to take our gameplay to a new level of personalization and meaning. The possibilities for genuine, rich and perpetually expanding content are endless. Where do you think they might take us? Thank you for reading. Gamescom starts this week -- maybe SOE will throw us some more scraps! “Patiently” waiting... (I originally wrote this as part 2 for an editorial series on my blog at http://eqnextpvplobby.tumblr.com/ -- check it out if you like what you see! I know a lot of p99ers who feel the same.) | ||
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#4
08-18-2013, 08:14 PM
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nice
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#5
08-18-2013, 10:42 PM
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Quote:
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Linear Mode
