Engaging & Impactful Quest & Open World Content Design
As Intrepid’s showcases display an increasing amount of questing and moment-to-moment narrative content design, I’m left feeling a little disappointed in how generic and outdated much of it seems.
I’m looking to see if others feel the same way - if so, do you care? Or do you prefer this sort of daily open world bread & butter content to be simple, ‘game-y’ checklists and isolated random events that have little effect on the surrounding world? How would you like this content to look and feel? What are some games you love moment-to-moment content in?
Personally, my favorite example of moment-to-moment content in an MMO is GW2. I was hyped for dynamic events for months on end leading up to the game’s release, and though I didn’t end up sticking with the game for too long afterwards, I think it did a lot of things right. One of these was the way every player got a customized personal story that built up and developed over the course of your leveling experience based on your character’s race and chosen role-playing attributes. More importantly, the other was the game’s Dynamic Event system and world design. There were flaws in its execution, but it was a huge moment for MMOs and could absolutely be improved upon all these years later with modern technology.
Enemy factions in each zone had very real places where they built up strength and spread out from. If they went unchallenged for too long, they would begin spreading into local residential areas and causing their own unique forms of havoc. Depending on how much time or interest they had in pushing the baddies back, players could choose to push further than a single event after some time had passed, going as far as the enemy’s base and dismantling the core of their operations. Sort of a tug-of-war content system.
These chains of events that actually impacted the way the world looked and functioned around you provided the sort of immersion that didn’t inundate you with written exposition, because it was part of the world. It was the way the environments were designed, the attention to detail, the way NPCs (friend and foe) were programmed to engage with you and their environment like actual inhabitants of it rather than robots, the way the story unfolded in real time with pieces of voice acted dialogue to help guide you towards an understanding of what was happening and what was needed of you in the moment without needing to stay glued to the UI to understand what was happening.
I really hope we see these systems evolve over the course of A2. The game is going to need more players than just those who have a neurodivergent hyper-focus on artisan skills and working the economy, the willpower to sacrifice the time and energy required to excel in PvP, or the hardcore devotion to beating the hardest open world dungeon and world boss content. It’s going to need people who just want to feel swept up into the world and the various tales of its inhabitants while doing an hour or so of casual open world content, a bit of light artisan work, some social interaction, and perhaps the occasional PvP encounter. If that ‘casual’ open world, moment-to-moment content isn’t dynamic, engaging, immersive, and, well, not stuck in the early 2000’s, or doesn’t provide a sense of purpose through impactful consequences to players’ success or failure, I think the game may have trouble staying afloat.
To paraphrase a YT video that circulated recently, “There’s no way the next big MMO is going to have a quest to ‘Kill 20 Goblins’.” I know we don’t need Ashes to be ‘the next big MMO,’ but I think the point still stands. Eventually, these systems will become outdated enough to noticeably impact the player base. I think that time is now. What do you think?
