Of course none of that is true, very few people pony up when something really new comes along ( Seed anyone??? Hullo….? Wish…who said that???). No; the fact of the matter is that people love the tried and true, the commonality, the comfortable, the, I can measure my advancement by tiers, quest logs, and how many hit points I have.

The good thing that will eventually evolve out of all of this is what I hope will be a niche-if-ication of MMOs, things like Multiverse, SOEs Station Access, and very likely Kosters Ariea will contribute to this, the idea of personal or smaller gamespaces where people can hop into and out of as they so choose.

Thats where were heading and the general noise of the mmoblogosphere seems to indicate that thats the right direction.

-Gooney

I sure hope whomever does it does NOT use it for “kill” quests (see below) and other trivial quests, but uses it for the major storyline type quests.

@Cameron

I think a part of the problem there is the “Kill 10 rats” type quests are way too common. Sure they may have a story, but who really cares, most folks consider them a “throw away” type time filler and do them mostly for the XP boost.

This is one area I think Turbine does an excellent job in. They let you know what the “important” story line quests are and tend to take more notice of them.

Warhammer also looks like changing things around a little with “kill” quests, you’ll kill “stuff” and when you run into an NPC that wanted the “stuff” dead he’ll reward you without you having to get a quest for it to start things off. I expect that will mean people will notice “real” quests a lot more and be willing to read what it’s about.

Bleh. That’s my whole problem with the status quo. What on Earth is the point of a quest where you don’t care enough about the quest itself to bother interacting with the NPC? The Fellowship of the Ring wouldn’t have been nearly as interesting if they had said, “Yeah, yeah, forged in the fires of mount whatever– I don’t care. Give me that ring, tell me where to throw it, and show me what you’ll give me so I can decide if it’s worth my time.”

That to me says that our quests are far too common.

When I first played EQ, I freaking loved it! :D

I hope I never implied otherwise. At the time, in pretty much every way, I liked EQ better than the alternatives. Never really got into AC, so it’s always been my ‘grandpa’ MMOG.

That said, I think that offerings like CoH, WoW, EQ2, etc, have come a long way from those days. Even EQLive’s offerings are head and shoulders above what it launched with. I think Dungeons of Norrath’s content is terrific, on that count. Apologies if I implied otherwise.

As to your point, yeah, Natural language AI would be awesome for about ten minutes. I’m looking forward to having a ‘real’ conversation with an NPC, but I kinda hope never to do that in a MMOG.

Someday me and Alyx Vance are going to sit down for a conversation, though. My wife has ok’d Alyx as one of those extraordinary cases where it’s cool to see other people. She has the same thing with Colin Firth, and I find it much more likely Alyx and I will go on a date someday. :)

I could go on to mention… screw it, I will. At some point I’m sure some games will start using natural language AI and all that crazy stuff. Players will be able to hold pseudo-conversations with NPCs and that’s how they’ll get quests. I’m going to go ahead and say that it will be completely sweet when that happens, but I’ll be on the bandwagon with most other people when they say, “that is totally cool for about an hour, then I just want my effing ‘Accept’ button back, thanks.”

Thats very true, but in a way it isn’t as well. The difference I can see is that raiding is “epic” scale….lets call it “epic grouping”.

So in the context of the experience one has at the time, yea, being on a Raid is very different than soloing level 1 wolves in Northshire Abbey.

However, where I draw the parallel through the motivation. What are you doing on a Raid? You’re there to get something for yourself with a bunch of other people. By extension you’re helping other people get stuff for themselves that’ll eventually help YOU get your own stuff. In this regard, Raiding is the same as level 1: you are advancing for the sake of advancing, sometimes for your own end, sometimes to help others to help you.

Or, advancement for the sake of advancement. This is not a dig at all on the games. They’re successful enough to continue using this model. But it does alienate the millions of people that COULD be playing these games but which instead are not. I’m a big proponent of soloable endgame, as long as expectations are managed.

People just need to realize that you don’t need the best endest-game Raid stuff if you’re only going to solo at the level cap. And they shouldn’t expect it.

The company that “fixes” that will have a hit that’s bigger than WoW on their hands IMHO…

The only reason why people don’t think WoW has been beat is because they’re looking only at one game mechanic and trying to compare everything based on monthly subscriptions. There’s plenty of online experiences far larger than WoW. They’re just not DIKU collecting a monthly fee :)

I would like to clear up some other points. I never said that EverQuest pick the [word] in dialog was a better system, just that I felt more apart or connected to the world. While I am far from an expert at writing and this article as you can see has been the last written in a while now, as I work on new theme to better display in what category this article is written. I will also place a nice pretty disclaimer about what these categories mean to the articles in them.

You make some key points in your own article, but I think you missed the whole point of the article, namely that was a thinking article, more of a journal entry for future refernce of my thoughts and to expand upon later with I write articles in the ‘design’ topic. I will be the first to admit, I have not shipped at least one game, I have not graduated from a game design school, and I have not done this or that. But I’ve been playing games since the TSR-80, Atari, Commodore 64 days, up through the NES, Apple IIe, 286, 368, 486DX days.

I do think that I have a pretty good grasp on what makes a game fun and enjoyable to me, and as I can see you feel the opposite as I do in many regards. I don’t feel we need to make all the games the same. Just as your previous mention on the Raid Articles, there can be a lot of misunderstandings and I know the condition of my site will not help matter there at this point, hence why the work on a better theme and layout, hopefully it will help many out who visit the site.

In closing, I also never said that Lord of the Rings Online quest system was bad, I just pointed out that it is the same as the others people have seen and played with, that not to expect anything new there. Yes I didn’t mention the ‘story’ feel to them, but that was not the point of the article for me, it was how I felt about the Quest Journal and its side effects on the game. Again this was in a thinking category, it is not being written as law (only Raph Koster writes those). Hopefully after the new them is introduced, I can being to work on some of the design ideals I have and hope to see your opinion on them.