What I hope to see in patch notes pt.3

Hey, You’re back! Thanks for that.

(If you’re interested, here are links to Topic 1 and Topic 2.)

Topic 3 : Questing for Me. Not for everyone. 

*Let me apologize in advance if anything here is poorly written or hard to follow. I've been coming down with something past 48 hours and it's making me cloudy. I'll likely make some revisions to this as I feel better.

                OK, so we've talked about a few QOL tweaks (only a few, that list could be massive on its own) and dabbled into a bit of reward for veteran players. Those all sound fine and dandy, but what would trying to do something with what we already have? Let’s talk a bit about questing.

                My readers may recall (both of you) that I've touched a similar topic in and old post back during Cataclysm. While a lot of what I was saying there is still quite applicable, I want to go in a bit of a different direction this time. That previous post was focused a lot more on the mechanics of quests and the play involved. While this post is more about the mechanics of questing zones, and the experiences taken away. 

                One of my personal gripes with questing in general is the static nature of it. If you've quested through the world once, your next trip is going to feel pretty damn similar. In truth, it’s nearly identical. Quests have traditionally been built as a way to tell the story of the zone and guide a player through the experience. This works well, and it makes for each zone to be a nice little self-contained game of its own. But going back and playing that game again gives you almost nothing new. It looks like they are trying some new and exciting things with the upcoming Warlords of Draenor expansion, which is awesome. Hopefully the WoD changes don’t invalidate this post entirely. We’ll see.

                For quests, I’m talking about class and racial quests and/or modifiers. We can plainly see that the quest system knows what class and race I am, tons of quests refer to me as an orc, and the new quest reward system just gives me the most appropriate item for my class. But the quest itself remains static and dull. Let the quest have modifiers based on my class and race that factor into gameplay. After all, as a player I want this to be the story of me and my hero. Not the story of the zone.

                To be clear, I’m not asking for huge sweeping crazy quests like the warlock green fire, or anything that big. I’m asking for small quests that are inserted into other quest lines that are specific to either class or race. I love the idea of two people going through the game and having different experiences. Let’s say everyone does Quest A that asks to kill 10 boars. But quest B is flagged as a “racial quest” if the player in question is an elf, the next quest will be to put the bodies of the boars to rest peacefully in the garden. If the player is an orc the next quest would be to butcher the boars and feed them to the wolves. In essence it’s a “dispose of the bodies” quest, but how you do it could be slightly tweaked. Quest C now has us going to a new camp, and Quest D is a “class quest”. A class quest is based on, of course, our class. If you’re a hunter it’s to snipe these birds from the trees, if you’re a warrior it’s to chop down the trees, if you’re a druid it’s to heal the damage to the trees.

                This could be tough to navigate at times, as it would have to still navigate the zone and tell the story of the zone. But it’s the forks in the road are what make the road interesting.  Have an area full of were-rats? Awesome! Let’s have warlocks steal their souls, priests heal the infected npcs, shamans try to purify the were-rats, while warriors go fruit ninja and just slaughter them all. This could even be expanded into combinations of the modifiers. Let’s say priests heal, and warlocks eat souls. We are heading into a questing area that is full of npcs from an evil blast-mining operation. If I’m an orc, then my goal is to heal orcs to save them (as a shaman) OR to eat the souls of humans (if a warlock). Yet if I’m a troll, then I need to cleanse trolls (shaman) or consume dwarven souls(warlock). This would allow for essentially the same quest to present a huge number of variants. While one or two quests this way wouldn't make a huge impact, think if you leveled a troll warlock and an orc shaman back to back, while you go to all the same areas, and interact with the same world, you would get two significantly different experiences.

                Better yet would be to make these quests pop up somewhat randomly through play. Quest A has a Monk only variant while Quest D has a Troll variant. By sprinkling these in at a seemingly unpredictable interval, you could make it harder for players to define the pattern and attempt to mitigate the prediction of “ok, this next quest is a class quest because it was last time”. The end goal here is simply to make questing through a zone feel like it’s unique to me, and that it’s different from the last time. Let me make the world my own.

                I’d also like to see some varying rewards in the areas of art and animation. I’d love to have a bank of two or three casting animations for my character, and being able to assign them myself. Maybe my paladin reads his libram while casting a heal spell, but Ted’s paladin meditates for while casting. Maybe my troll uses an over-the-head style cleave while Ed’s troll cleaves with a low sweeping motion. On the art side you could award new hair styles through quests, or facial features. “I earned this scar fighting off the rebellion under the world tree” while a healer gets to say “I read from this book that I obtained while healing the fallen draenei under the world tree.”  

It could be very tricky to navigate this with the concept of group play in mind, as many people do play and quest together (we are talking mmos after all). But I tried to provide examples that could allow for multiple people of different roles to act simultaneously. If you have a mage and a warrior both questing together and they have different objects, but all of which are in the same general area, they can most assuredly quest together and stay a team in the process.

Sadly, this also results in an extremely expensive investment for a studio, I know it seems like little details here and there to most of us, but as someone who’s built even very small and simple games, I can assure you this would be a ton of work for any studio. I suppose the million dollar question is whether or not this would be worth exploring from a studio.  Would this breathe enough life into a world to make people want to re-experience it again, but differently? I can’t really say. But, what I can definitely say right now, is that I dread the idea of leveling alts because everything I’m tasked with doing feels like I've already done it over and over again. Maybe, just maybe, letting that experience be just  unique enough would make me want to see what the world looks like from the eyes of a warlock or a gnome.