Quests; What you want and don't want to see.

[Lohi]

Well, there are the old style single player RPG quests that took weeks to finish, and modern MMO micro-managed quests. For the former you have things like "rescue Imoen", for the latter you have "take this cup of coffee across the street".

 

The old style quests were very broad and leave it up to the player to figure out what to do, new style tend to be hand holding quests with rarely any thinking. Nothing tells you how to rescue Imoen, you have to figure that out yourself, earn some money, get a bit tougher, etc. In an MMO for instance you may discover that a certain enemy is the one you're looking for but if you kill it early you get no credit, instead you go see the quest giver who only then tells you "oh ya, now that we've figure out who it is, go kill him". Another good example of old style quest is Fallout, where you just have to find a water chip. Nobody tells you how to do this, you just figure it out and do it in any way you can.

 

Similarly old style quests gave you freedom of how you solve them: fight, steal, bypass, get someone else to do it for you, etc. Side quests were really side quests, as in you could do them right away or just wait until you're in the appropriate area or when you stumble across the objective. You don't even need to turn in side quests, keep the persons magic cloak instead of turning it in for a reward. Very often in older games the player is left to make up their own objectives.

 

That's what I want to see in quests again. Open ended, long term objectives, no hand holding, no being on rails, many possible solutions, make the player think if they want or brute force it if they want.

[Knurhiem]

I think what I *don't* want to see are the most simplistic form of fed-ex quests.

 

I have no problem with the idea that there are simple quests to "off-set" the more complex ones, it makes the world feel alive in a way. Sometimes you get smaller jobs. But ideally, even if you get a quest that is seemingly very simple, it'd be nice if there always was something there that made it interesting. If it be writing, or the fact that it turns out to be something much more complex than what I believed.

Basically, none of the Skyrim Radiant AI quest rubbish, none of the Dragon Age "job-board" stuff. It's just completely uninteresting in every way.

 

But yeah, other than that it'd be great to have some of those really big and complex quests, with different entry-points, several layers to them and them spanning over a large part of the game.

 

And ideally, having many options on how to solve quests of course.

 

I agree with you mostly, but I think the Radiant system was a good improvement up to a certain point; however, it is time to go a step further (like increasing complexity and length), I'm sure they can come up with something better in order to increase re-playability, consider for example what was done for inFamous 2 with the community made missions, that could bring some interesting things into the game.