The internet is a great thing. But for an MMORPG, I think it can also be terrible, because it lets so many people take the quick route, making a list of what they have to do to complete a quest, cheating themselves out of something that is supposed to be immersive. I remember when Everquest started, there was not a lot of information available yet, so you were on your own, except by word of mouth...much like real life. Then came Allakhazamm's, and it all seemed to change. While not everyone could accomplish all the quests, they know exactly wht to do and when, even to the point of optimizing hundreds of quests before they even became level appropriate. A min-maxer's wet dream.
So my question is...is there a way to introduce "customized" bits into quests without feeling like a "prove you're not a bot to post" thing, that still feels like it's a legitimate part of the game world, and can not be easily catalogued by some third party website?
For instance, a player would actually have to witness a phrase spoken, object, or event in order to know what the next input for the quest would be. These items would be percieved differently by other players, so would need to be recorded on an individual basis, instead of just everybody doing the same thing they read on a website. Players would actually be immersed.
From a programming stance, I guess each character would just have a bits that sorted it into however many groups needed to break the monotony. All invisible, of course.
I think the only way to really combat what you are talking about is randomness. For easy quests maybe there isn't any randomisation or very little. For epic quests the randomisation should be a lot so that everyone doing it has to work it out for themselves without being able to use external sites for reference.
How that would work from a game development point of view I'm not sure but it would very cool to have to work out how to complete quests on your own again just like you have to do in single player RPGs. I think when it comes to single player RPGs The Elder Scrolls Morrowind did it best. Give very little information in the quest journal and make the player work it out for themselves. I'd like to see something similar in Pantheon.
But in general I agree with you. If you are told how to do every quest it kind of ruins the fun.
We may have quests with different path options but I can't really go into that yet, but we will make the client as dumb as possible so any data/information will have to be collected manually, especially for quests and things like that, which we cannot stop and really don't want too, if people want to write a guide and share it online and someone chooses to blow through it by reading someone else's hard work, we can't stop them or tell them how to play, they will be paying the same money as everyone else to have access to the game, so I think the best course of action is to just ignore them and not use them if they annoy you and concentrate on enjoying the game and playing it your way.
I don't personally use sites like that, I enjoy the satisfaction of figuring things out for myself or with my guild/friends and what others do doesn't bother me or affect me in instances like this so I just ignore them and secretly judge them for being lazy and not clever enough to work it out on their own lol ;)
I mean, it's possible to an extent to have many quests that are somewhat random in path toward the same outcome but I have to wonder what the real purpose would be of putting all that time and effort. To me it falls into the line of an attempt to have people play in a certain way that they may not be interested in, many people are entirely tired of quests altogether. While to one person they may cheating themselves out of an immersive experience, but another could care less about a quest and just want to collect their reward and move on to something else.
To me it's kind of like those who enjoy going camping and scoff at those people who show up in an RV because the *real* way to camp is just a sleeping bag and a tent with a few bare essentials. Both people enjoy parts of camping, but in their own way.
Procedural generation has been in games since Rogue.
Dwarf Fortress, for example, produces entire worlds, races, histories, quests, stories, rumors, personalities, desires, appearances, and more based on single input seeds. Many other PC games utilize this feature. One of the most famous back in the day was Darklands, going back farther, Elite.
Essentially, it's seed based pseudo-randomness. What that means practically is given an input seed (typically a numeric value or numeric values) an output is predictable, but unique. A simple example would be an input of 1 would produce a floor layout of a dungeon that was unique, and an input of 2 would produce a similar, yet distinct/unique, layout of a dungeon floor. Repeat as desired for infinite content.
Unity even supports procedural dungeon generation. There are scripts on the Unity store for this. Clearly, it's not that you can't do personalized questing. You can. It's that Visionary Realms has chosen not to, at least, so far in their public reveals.
When you break down questing in games, it comes down to remarkably few variables. Designers do their best to make things seem different, and you can randomize things like task and location to keep things fresh, but there is quite a bit of illusion involved.
Typically, the most often brought up negative consequence of personalized questing is that you can't share the quest. While technically true if not a design goal, it doesn't have to be that way, and that doesn't mean you can't reward people for helping you. If, for example, someone helped you or was in in your group or raid for the entirety of a personalized quest, why wouldn't you give them some XP and/or coin for their time? They helped, they should be rewarded. There's also no reason why someone else can't be temporarily shown the personalized quest milestones in their quest journal/quest interface, while grouped with the personalized quest owner.
As far as larger plot milestones, the easiest way to create the illusion of personalization is to tie it to multiple factions. For example, one political, one economic/guild, and another racial/geographical. Reach a tier in all three and you move ahead in your personal plot. What quests you do/get for each of those? Could be completely different for every player, if you want. One player gets to collect fire hides from firecats in the caves of fire. Another player has to rescue 10 stranded ice cats in the caves of ice. Another has to blackmail a prince via a brothel con/sting.
Even in a single zone, you could make it so creature nests or ambushes spawn per player, in randomized locations and are locked to the quest owner prior to appearance, so there's no issue with kill stealing quest mobs.
Kilsin said:We may have quests with different path options but I can't really go into that yet, but we will make the client as dumb as possible so any data/information will have to be collected manually, especially for quests and things like that, which we cannot stop and really don't want too, if people want to write a guide and share it online and someone chooses to blow through it by reading someone else's hard work, we can't stop them or tell them how to play, they will be paying the same money as everyone else to have access to the game, so I think the best course of action is to just ignore them and not use them if they annoy you and concentrate on enjoying the game and playing it your way.
I don't personally use sites like that, I enjoy the satisfaction of figuring things out for myself or with my guild/friends and what others do doesn't bother me or affect me in instances like this so I just ignore them and secretly judge them for being lazy and not clever enough to work it out on their own lol ;)
I really like the random path idea. Although I do use websites for some quests like epic and long running quests I do not use them for all quests if there is enough ingame info. But the random paths should be a perfect way to keep people on the straight and narrow path to thier goal.