Glorious Alpha Two Testers!
Alpha Two Phase II testing is currently taking place 5+ days each week. More information about testing schedule can be found here
If you have Alpha Two, you can download the game launcher here, and we encourage you to join us on our Official Discord Server for the most up to date testing news.
Alpha Two Phase II testing is currently taking place 5+ days each week. More information about testing schedule can be found here
If you have Alpha Two, you can download the game launcher here, and we encourage you to join us on our Official Discord Server for the most up to date testing news.
Comments
I am hearing you say "Good quests" take more thought and design time.
It's like... what a waste.
The content is limited to leveling and making alts.
That time could have been spent not having quests at all and having more engaging mobs and open world dungeons with resources to fight over.
A good open world dungeon and engaging mobs will provide content for a games lifetime.
This is my personal feedback, shared to help the game thrive in its niche.
Killing players, finding items, gathering resources, commissioning items to be created, completing a trade run or caravan, leveling up a node, building a ship.
Anything at all you can do in an MMORPG can be a quest objective.
As I said above as well, the individual goal of most quests in most games is something I can see being boring. Killing 25,000 of the same mob is tedious.
However, give players options as to how they complete that quest and suddenly the quest is more interesting.
Archeage had a small amount of this.
There were often (not always) multiple mob types you could kill to advance a kill quest, and you had the option of overdoing the quest in order to get a bigger reward (sometimes it was best to do this, sometimes it was bedtime to move on). I'm fairly sure GW2 did similar as well.
The point really is that the more options developers give players for how to complete a quest, the more thinking players do. This makes questing less mindless, which is always good.
This is what I mean by people not liking a specific content type probably only having had experience with bad versions of that content type. Can't blame anyone for that, but I do wish more people understood the concept.
The first type offers no solution to Ludullu's point.
The second one is much better for presence in the world. It's great in single-player games.
One thing I've experienced in MMOs though is that people are so used to doing their formulaic quests that when they receive quests that can't be completed immediately, they *still* act as if they were on that quest the entire time, without interacting with the world around them, until all their quests are completed. Because they want all the quest rewards first and have no eyes for anything "lesser." If that means spending 30 minutes to run from special-resource-node-across-the-map to resource node 20 times for 10 hours without talking to anyone, that will still be how they go about that quest.
And you can't blame them, because in other games, completing quests before doing anything else is how you make sure you get all the quests in the most efficient order to progress through levels.
That's where I think you have to be careful in how you present the quest to the player so they know they will need to approach this quest more gradually. Otherwise you get quests that will be perceived as shitty while players will still be removed from the world.
Point being, you can pour a lot of effort into making quests good, but little details can still cause everything to be a waste. Much easier just to make the farming/dungeons/bosses/caravan-war-siege loop good, instead of trying really hard to make quests good, only to end up with a ton of mediocre quests that keep players separated from all the other content that's much better at naturally leading players from one interaction into the next.
This is one of the few times where I think just 'telling the person to go play FF14 if that is how they prefer it' is entirely valid. Sure, everything is a matter of degrees, but if we want quests and Story Arcs (and Intrepid says they do), making too much concession for the player type that tunnelvisions the latest quest they got, doesn't seem like it would be worth it because that player won't be particularly successful in the rest of the game anyway.
For me personally, a good quest is anything that adds context to something that was probably a thing a player might choose to do on their own anyway. The big ones are kinda cool, but I don't pay as much attention to them as a source of content because they are generally a formula and they're often too rewarding.
It's a roleplaying game, for there to be roleplay involved for me, I need to be able to see why I am the type that chooses to do, or ignore, a quest. So players who 'don't even view it as a choice' or 'complain that they got tired of a quest that didn't seem to suit them but felt they needed to finish it anyway' don't really seem to me like they're 'playing the right genre'. Or at least, if they want to play Ashes, they're far away from their end of the bell curve.
Due to the node system, no.
The node system - to me - is little more than a guarantee that all non-PvP content will be the worst version possible, as the developers simply won't have the time to create multiple versions of good content.
I'd like to imagine it wasn't the case, I'd like to think the game would actually have good content, I would also rather discuss this game as if the following were not true.
Fact is though, core decisions made early on in the games development kind of guaranteed that the games content itself will be kind of shit.
They made the decision to go for quantity over quality, but then also decided to not give players access to all of that quantity.
Actually puzzle can keep player inside the world, dungeon and dragon online did it quite well. Also NPC dialogue is a weird type of quest - I'll call them exploration quest, and those are likely to bring player inside the world if there's stop point - usually puzzle come handy to oblige the player to interact inside a specific zone -- but it can also be done with the level design forcing the player to go threw a path where he has to interact with other player to push through.
It's honestly a design situation.
That is like saying mobs are just for leveling and alts.
In the way some people like just killing shit mindlessly, others like running quests.
You say it's wasted time - and to you it may well be. However, to others, mobs that aren't attached to quests are a waste.
An MMO should be building the game for both extremes, knowing that the vast vast majority of people fall in between the two.
Quests as a content type is kind of core to MMORPG's, or RPG's in general. Saying they are a waste of development time because you don't like them is like someone else saying crafting is a waste of developer time because they don't like it.
There will be quests:
https://ashesofcreation.wiki/Social_organizations
- Social organizations start to patronize Nodes once they advance to Town (stage 4).[5]
The whole idea of these societies is that they are a mechanism for progression that do not have to rely on your level progression. These are different progression paths that players can participate in. If you don't want to leave a node in your gameplay experience and you want to find as much as you can do within that city, these offer those things. Now, some quests might take you outside of the city to hunt and pursue things, but you could also perfectly be a person that is a merchant and purchases them from other travelers instead of having to go do it yourself. We want to offer players a diverse method of progression; and these systems house those benefits.[6] – Steven Sharif
- Social organizations offer quest lines to assault other organizations, but they are not permanently flagged against other social organizations.[2][7][3]
- Social organizations are run by NPCs, however there will be ranks that certain members can attain that will grant some influence over the organization.[8]
- Social organizations cater for solo players who don't wish to engage in guild-oriented organizations.[9][10]
There are already far more MMORPGs that focus on quest grinding than those that don’t. Seriously, if that’s what you’re after, just play FFXIV or WoW.
Ashes is centered on PvX and the concept of "risk vs. reward." Fighting over mobs and resources is the heart of the game, and this focus sets Ashes apart from its peers.
Any time spent improving the game’s mobs and open-world dungeons aligns with what Ashes is striving to excel at, far more than quests ever could.
Quests should be the lowest priority for Ashes—and they already are in Alpha 1 and 2.
I’m not going to get baited into a discussion about the definitions of terms like "RPG" or "MMORPG." These are genres, and their definitions are subjective.
I’ll just say this: quests are not necessary for a game to be an RPG. Many early RPGs didn’t even include them. Player-driven content is far superior for a game like Ashes.
This is my personal feedback, shared to help the game thrive in its niche.
If you make Questing the main go to for leveling, then its just like Thrones of Liberty and none of the named mobs or special events below max lvl matter anymore.
When I think of questing I remember Everquest, the class Epics and the long road to get an ultimate weapon for your character that benefits not only yourself but your party and guild.
Or the 10 Rings quest , another Everquest quest that was a long quest that involved crafting (jewlery), faction building, mini raids and ultimately a large scale (raid) war to defend the dwarves from the giants. the got the player doing the quest a really nice ring and a lot of unique drops that only come from that triggered event.
Or the quest (also from Everquest) to craft a Key to get access to the Dragon lords at the top of a volcano, which involved raiding, farming, and some luck in fact on collecting all the piece to fashion the key.
Everquest even had quest to craft mid-lvl armor, around lvl 30, max was lvl 50 at the time. Which alot of players did these quests to get this mid-lvl armor.
Questing should be inclusive, either with a small party or group or as a raid. It should not be a means to getting max leveling in my option.
You view quests in a very unusual way, seeming to view them as something that is at odds with other parts of the game as opposed to being things that tie the other parts of the game together.
You say that Ashes should be focused on players fighting over mobs and resources rather than quests - you seem to be forgetting that it is quests that see players wanting to fight over those mobs in the first place.
WIthout quests, players just fight any mob. With quests, they need *those* mobs, and will fight for you them.
You can see this happening on the alpha servers all the time, even with bugged spawns.