The Daily Grind: Do you favor random quests?

One of Star Wars Galaxies' content quirks, borrowed heavily from Anarchy Online, is the random quest. If you tire of themepark questlines, you can trek over to a mission terminal and ask it to generate a random kill-10-rats quest for you. In SWG's prime, these quests were terribly annoying; no one really wants to spend all of his time leveling up by taking missions to destroy a gubbur lair over and over and over. Thank goodness for this new era of individual, scripted quests brought on by World of Warcraft, right?

Well, not necessarily. More than once, I (and some our our forum-goers) have been irked at hand-written quests in WoW-esque games. They're usually trite and transparent, and the quest-givers rarely have good reason to entrust me with their tasks. We're still getting kill-10-rats quests -- we just have to click through a bunch of lame dialogue first.

What do you think? Do you prefer pre-scripted, one-off, linear quests, or do you long for the simplicity and honesty of random quest generation?

Every morning, the Massively bloggers probe the minds of their readers with deep, thought-provoking questions about that most serious of topics: massively online gaming. We crave your opinions, so grab your caffeinated beverage of choice and chime in on today's Daily Grind!

Reader Comments (57)

You know what's even worse? When some guy spends 10 minutes of voice acting telling me that the republic have messed up his life before asking me to pick up 10 items or kill 8 mobs.

Oh wait, thats the game everyone's making such a fuss about.

@BigAndShiny Including you.

@Lenn
Fair enough :)

@BigAndShiny
I don't think I had any voice acting for a single quest that lasted longer than 45 seconds. Maybe 2 minutes for the dungeons.

@BigAndShiny I'll take that over the text box thanks.

@(Unverified)

Text boxes are a lot less annoying then voice honestly. Sound can annoy me, I've yet to be annoyed or get a headache from text. Guess it must be a generational thing.

@Celtar

No, I guess not. I'm probably older than you, and the voice acting brings back the feeling of tabletop RPGs, when people made choices for their characters and stuck by them. No crying about loot drops, imbalanced classes, you played to your strengths and weaknesses.

Ah, maybe the new MMORPGs actually ARE a generational thing, and I stand corrected!

@BigAndShiny If you don't care about the story then it's not the game for you. There are plenty of game where you can skip right past it. Hell you can skip right past it in SWTOR. Switch to the second chat tab and it will have all the text for you. It's a really lame and a really lazy complaint.

@BigAndShiny its called spacebar. use it and quit QQing

@Celtar Wow you get a headache for voice acting that can easily be skipped by pressing the spacebar. Would you happen to be related to Larry David by any chance...?

@BigAndShiny

That's like saying you don't like a movie because the pictures move.

@BigAndShiny

Turn the videos off under the options. There you go your problem is solved and you can click your way to 50 in 3 days and then bitch on the forums how bored you are.

Skipping dialogue is not solving the problem though, i think that's what he meant. Minutes of recorded voice acting for every menial task is not a problem for players, in fact it's a bonus, but it's such an awful waste of resources on the game's/developers part that could have gone into developing more content and doesn't do much good in the long run.

@Dumac It's not a waste if thats what they wanted to do.

@Dumac
That's now how development works.

I highly doubt the sound team was full of expert quest designers. Sure, you could replace a sound team with more programmers, but then you're stuck with a ton of content with no life.

I'd rather have a lot of content that's got life to it than a ton of bunch of content I just blow through without paying attention to. But that's personal preference.

I don't favor looking at this as an either-or proposition, and neither did SWG. SWG used mission terminals to augment existing quests (albeit we all used the terminals).

Personally, I love the idea of going through storied quests and then, if I'm not quite the right level to move on to the next zone, doing randomly generated ones.

And at max level, I have to say I'd prefer randomly generated quests over dailies. The only caveat is that the mission would need more variety: not just different kill-quest scenarios but also maybe crafter quests, etc.

@Matix
When I played SWG, early on, all that existed were terminals if memory serves right.

Nothing more fun than taking two randomly generated quests to kill randomly generated mobs for hours on end!
Just don't forget to sit in the line for doctor buffs.

@KvanCetre Same here, with the added benefit of having to run what felt like a hundred miles to reach the "Kill the nest" location, only to find that someone had built a house there and getting a "mission complete!" message without having done anything. One reason why I quit the game early, really.

@KvanCetre There were quests but no one knew about them because you had to randomly talk to people. After WOW took off they added tags over quest givers.

And no argument about SWG being buggy as snot. That game was released a year early, at best. It took six month after launch just to get all the features implemented that were promised. Between the SOE-Everquest "Bugs don't matter, because they'll come back since they have nowhere else to go" mindset + LucasArts putting the squeeze on SWG to make money I'm surprised SWG was as good as it was.

Even now, sadly, when I look back at some of the cool things SWG did and that'd I'd like to see in a game, my thoughts are usually phrased:

"You know what SWG did that would be cool if we made it work right? [Insert mechanic with proposed fixes here]"

The closest I've come to random quests were the levequests in FFXIV and those bored me to tears. The story for each was minimal and you'd often repeat the same types over and over again. I prefer quests with more of an emphasis on story and better mechanics. Sure, WoW's quests boil down to kill 10 of these, but the way it's presented is better than many other MMO's. You can kill 10 mobs by character combat, or using a bomb from a quest item or take control of a vehicle to kill them. Not all in the same quest mind you, but they mix it up so you're not always doing such quests the exact same way.

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The Daily Grind: Do you favor random quests?

Reader Comments (57)

Posted: Dec 10th 2011 8:02AM BigAndShiny said

Posted: Dec 10th 2011 8:33AM Lenn said

Posted: Dec 10th 2011 8:54AM BigAndShiny said

Posted: Dec 10th 2011 9:05AM KvanCetre said

Posted: Dec 10th 2011 9:16AM (Unverified) said

Posted: Dec 10th 2011 9:23AM Celtar said

Posted: Dec 10th 2011 9:49AM (Unverified) said

Posted: Dec 10th 2011 10:32AM dudemanjac said

Posted: Dec 10th 2011 11:39AM DerpMchurson said

Posted: Dec 10th 2011 2:50PM (Unverified) said

Posted: Dec 10th 2011 2:51PM Ordegar said

Posted: Dec 10th 2011 2:52PM Rhazes said

Posted: Dec 10th 2011 3:26PM Dumac said

Posted: Dec 10th 2011 5:10PM dudemanjac said

Posted: Dec 10th 2011 6:21PM KvanCetre said

Posted: Dec 10th 2011 8:34AM Matix said

Posted: Dec 10th 2011 9:07AM KvanCetre said

Posted: Dec 10th 2011 12:52PM JonBuck said

Posted: Dec 10th 2011 2:00PM Matix said

Posted: Dec 10th 2011 8:56AM (Unverified) said

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