GRATS! The De-Evolution of the Quest

Ah, the fabled quest. That one activity that’s prevalent through many games, both single player RPGs and MMOs. How far the “quest” has come from its early days.

Not to sound like an old man, but in my day we had to trudge across miles in Azeroth with no mount, and the snow weather system wasn’t even invented in the game yet! We had to read the quest log to get our clues! None of these fancy dancy wikis or quest helper mods were around to help us and none of those prissy sparkles to highlight a quest item! And when we finally returned back to the quest giver after running for days, all we got was 32 silver! And we did that hundreds of times because that’s the way it was and we liked it! We loved it!

The chat channels were always pounded by people asking for directions to certain quest areas or screaming for help to kill some elite mobs. There was no LFG interface then either, just the general and trade chat channels.

For any class-specific quests, players usually groaned at having to run around the zones in what inevitably meant hours of playtime devoted to those arduous quests. Need I remind you Shamans about the Call of Water quest chain?

Quest sparklies were not out yet then either. I remember spending hours in the Hinterlands as a herbalist, trying to spot the elusive Sungrass in amongst all the green grass texture. Looking back on that now, I think about all that time wasted. However back then, I willingly accepted that as just part of the game.

Nowadays we’re presented with an overwhelming amount of quest assistance. The quest window interface has gone through several changes as well to make the quest process easier and easier with each patch. The most recent patch 3.3 has adopted the quest map markers taken from many MMOs like Warhammer Online’s Tome of Knowledge and mods like the ever popular QuestHelper.

In addition to in-game assistance, there are now a multitude of game wikis and game databases out there that contain all the secrets and directions for any quest in the game. Have trouble finding a particular mob? In the past, it would mean screaming across the channels in hopes that someone else had found it. Nowadays, if you don’t alt-tab to one of these sites, you’ll get screamed at for being a noob who wastes everyone’s time. Ah, how far we’ve come along.

Why make the game easier?

With each development decision, game developers strive to make the quest process easier and less time consuming. Blizzard is infamous for this by “dumbing down” World of Warcraft by including with each patch quicker ways for people to level up. Whether it be including more and more quest assistance, allowing mounts at earlier levels, or even going as far as reducing the XP requirements per level.

Remember all those elite non-instance mobs you had to kill back in the day? Remember the Ruins of Alterac or Andorhal in the Western Plaguelands? Today, most of those mobs have been normalized and you’d be hard-pressed to see anything elite outside of a dungeon. Even dungeon bosses have had their HP reduced dramatically with each new expansion.

All of this is in response to players wanting their gaming experience to be quicker and easier. Where in the past it would have taken someone months to get a character to 60, now people seem to roll new alts to 60 within a matter of days and to 80 within a couple of weeks.

What does all this say about our society and expectations in games these days? Have our attention spans dropped that dramatically that game developers are willing to strip the challenge from their games? Or is it more an issue that the developers, in effort to keep players involved in their games, pave roads to each quest objective with bright neon signs and floating arrows? Personally I think it’s a little of both.

Part of me wonders if games of the future will eliminate quests entirely. If players are so eager to rush through these quests, why not just dump the whole mechanic and do something new? Part of me does worry that this might be the case, but I think we’ll see another evolution to the quest mechanic eventually. One example of this creative thinking is the steps Bioware is taking with SWTOR. By having fully voiced interactions with NPCs, we may just see players wanting to slow down and experience each quest like we did in the old days. Just like the motivation WoW players have for the Wrathgate questline.

In a way, we’re falling back to the roots of RPGs. Bringing back a focus on storyline and lore, rather than XP bonuses and mob kills. Maybe it won’t be so bad to spend hours doing one quest? Maybe it will become the new way and maybe we’ll love it!

- Rackham