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Quest Waypoints
Everdark
Member
This might have been addressed at some point and I missed it, if so forgive me. What are peoples thoughts on quest waypoints? (You pickup a quest and you're shown exactly where to go via your map).
Personally, I'd like to see it removed or drastically reduced. Reading the quest NPC dialog, reviewing notes found on enemies or in the world, or revisiting your quest journal to figure out what to do and where to go drastically increases your interaction with the world and also means you naturally ingest more of the world's lore. It also prevents questing from feeling like a chore where you just run from point 'a' to waypoint 'b' and do 'c', rinse and repeat. Player knowledge the world's geography, lore, and enemies becomes more meaningful.
Lastly, it slows down questing and level progress, and that's a good thing. More time spent completing lower level content increases immersion and helps prevent a race to endgame, as often happens. Indirectly, this also would likely fuel the creation of quest wiki data - which again is not a bad thing as its further incentivizes community involvement.
The only downside I can see here is developer time. If no way points exist, NPC dialog and quest instructions have to tailored with a narrative so as to direct the player, without coming across like blunt instructions. Which would likely be time consuming.
Thoughts?
Personally, I'd like to see it removed or drastically reduced. Reading the quest NPC dialog, reviewing notes found on enemies or in the world, or revisiting your quest journal to figure out what to do and where to go drastically increases your interaction with the world and also means you naturally ingest more of the world's lore. It also prevents questing from feeling like a chore where you just run from point 'a' to waypoint 'b' and do 'c', rinse and repeat. Player knowledge the world's geography, lore, and enemies becomes more meaningful.
Lastly, it slows down questing and level progress, and that's a good thing. More time spent completing lower level content increases immersion and helps prevent a race to endgame, as often happens. Indirectly, this also would likely fuel the creation of quest wiki data - which again is not a bad thing as its further incentivizes community involvement.
The only downside I can see here is developer time. If no way points exist, NPC dialog and quest instructions have to tailored with a narrative so as to direct the player, without coming across like blunt instructions. Which would likely be time consuming.
Thoughts?
5
Comments
Everything you said here is correct. Personally I would rather just grind as much as possible, and not deal with NPCs. Since we are likely going to have to deal with some quests. I prefer the old school approach with little hand holding.
In fact, the more you hold my hand the less I read the quest text. The game quickly becomes get to the real content as fast as possible. There has to be a balance though. I actually read a lot of the quests in Lineage 2 and FFXI because quests were both sort of rare, and somewhat convoluted. The writing in WOW and FFXIV may be stellar, but I will never know. The reason is that quests are both constant, and there is zero reason to read them.
Waypoints also remove some possible player interaction from the game. If the game tells you where to go. You are less likely to ask someone for directions. That is a interaction that could lead to a long term friendship, but the game robs you of this possibility with way points.
I would also wager that it is more DEV time to get all the waypoints working correctly for every quest, than it is to have the writers be good at stating the quest objectives.
I just hope the majority agrees with us.
If I had more time, I would write a shorter post.
https://forums.ashesofcreation.com/discussion/45931/dev-discussion-21-quest-breadcrumbs/p1
It was a dev discussion a short time back.
I actually posted in that thread that I would prefer to see that waypoints be like WOW or FFXIV. I would like to say at the time I was under the impression that leveling was going to be a constant onslaught of quests with no end. Which for that type of game my mentality is just "Tell me where to go so I can get back to playing the game"
I have since come under the impression that with a 45 day cap time at 4 to 6 hours a day. There can not possibly be a constant train of quests. The less quests there are, the more I want to deal with them.
If I had more time, I would write a shorter post.
I agree with @Everdark and @Vhaeyne with all of their points on quest waypoints. I want the immersion in the game and if I am just following a minimap X-marks the spot I feel like I would lose out on that. In The Witcher, which I only played for a short time, I'd just button smash past the text because I knew it didn't matter much. That made me lose interest in the game once I completed the main quests.
At this stage in my character planning I want to be a master gatherer (herbalist), I want to be known as the gatherer in my server and I want to be able to sell to all the processor, being able to find that secret stash of super rare goods is part of what I am looking forward to the most, and if its just "Go Right Here" its not as interesting of a hunt, where as if I overhear an NPC saying that he's heard from someone that heard from someone that there's a rare flower that can be found a top a snowy mountain, you can bet yourself I will be going through every snow mountain until I find that flower. (I understand this and quest waypoints are not necessarily mutually exclusive but it can be applied to larger quest items).
Thanks to IS and the AoC community for being so dedicated,
Skylarck The Botanist
I hate the leveling paradigm that most games have where you simply follow the queues given from the first quest you are given as a new character right up to the level cap and beyond. To me, that whole process feels like a tutorial on a game - as far as I am concerned, games only ever start when you as a player are expected to find your own way.
That said, I actually really enjoy proper, well written, well designed quests.
Old school players like me know this is untrue. It’s not that MMOs are not there yet, it’s that they aren’t there anymore.
EQ for example had precious few actual “quests” when it was new. 95% of what you did was solid grinding for XP and loot. We called it “EverCamp” sometimes because we spent hours sitting at one spot, killing the same spawn(s) over and over until we got what we wanted. I even pulled all-nighters with my then-girlfriend to do it.
It was miserable in comparison to modern MMOs. We put up with it because there was nothing else. When DAoC came out one of the greatest things it had over EQ was that there were tons of quests that had you actually engaged in doing things with some variety and with a bit of a story.
Don’t ask for an MMO to devolve and lose what took them out of the dark ages. I’m all for quests that challenge you and don’t hold your hand (play Secret World Legends for the best example of that; I have for years) but nobody who has actually experienced a game without quests can sanely ask for that nightmare again.
We have enough MMOs that fail on launch as it is.
E.g. the player direction in Minecraft is to survive even one night, and that's all the incentive you need to begin upgrading and building a base, etc.
Dropping people into an open world without direction isn't quite going to work. Quests have a bad reputation because they are usually explicit instructions with 0 challenge.
... I am yet to find another solution to this other than having wilderbeasts chase around the noobs when they first drop in to Verra.