Quest Design
I have really been enjoying my time back in Lord of the Rings Online. I am just about to hit level 30 with my minstrel and it is a lot more fun this time around since I am in a kinship with a fun group of people. Though one thing that strikes me as I am leveling up is how many of the quest chains were designed. They remind me of some of the questing flaws Jeff Kaplan talked about in his recent lecture on quest design.
One thing that I noticed Turbine changed with LotRO is when you pick up quest items, you do not really pick up quest items. They do not go into your inventory. If you open up your quest interface, the quest items you picked up are shown under the quest they are for. This is nice since LotRO does well enough already clogging up your inventory with useless items.
On the other hand, the quests in LotRO are far too wordy, far from interesting, and far too great number too quickly. I enjoy games having a lot of quests to get through content, but I feel there needs to be a more streamlined way. The "Christmas Tree" effect that Jeff Kaplan talked about really bothered Rynala when we were playing LotRO together before. We would walk into a new quest hub and walk out with 15 different quests. If we logged in again two days later, we could not remember who wanted what done and why.
While the epic quests in LotRO are pretty grand, the other quests in the game are your standard kill ten rats affair. In the Lone Lands alone, I think there are about five different quests to collect boar meat. I would be fine with that if the quest did not take 500 words to tell me it wanted me to collect boar meat. I would venture to guess that at least 90% of players in Lord of the Rings Online do not care about the reason why any given NPC wants us to collect 20 boar pelts or 30 wolf claws. It has come to the point that I look at what the quest wants me to gather or kill and then I decide whether to read the quest text or not.
I wonder if it is maybe time to shift from this design of quests. If everything is presented in this wordy quest design way, the meaningful quests become just part of the mix and do not stand out anymore. I would almost prefer a "contract board" where you could go pick up the kill quests for that town. If you went to the board in a new town you might see quests to "kill 30 wolves" "kill 15 orcs" "collect 2o boar pelts". The contracts would need little to no reasoning. Perhaps "Wolves have been terrorizing the countryside. Farmer Joe is looking to hire someone to eradicate the wolf population." That is all the text that is needed and then you go along with the task. Then when you finally come across someone with a quest that has a page of text, you would realize that it might be something meaningful and actually read the text for a change.
June 2nd, 2009 - 13:28
A contract board would be nice. I loved that mechanic in Privateer; you would have contract jobs that paid for killing stuff or shuttling stuff. There was minimal back story, since it was pretty clear that you were, well, a privateer, doing whatever came by to make money. You would sift through the requests and just take whatever looked like it paid well and worked for your sense of personal risk. (Or took you where you wanted to go.)
There were special story missions that functionally weren’t all that different, but because they actually *did* tell a story, they stood out. The kicker was that you could do whatever whenever and still progress, since there was no leveling (or overleveling), just money and the ability to buy gear.
…short story long, yes, a local contract board would be awesome. Make it so that players could post requests (I need 55 Light Feathers, please go get them for me?), and you’ve just leveraged the “need” for kill quests and made it a social and economic function.