This is inspired by some derp posting an obvious troll for GW2 over in General, but it raised a question I thought was interesting. How can questing both be immersive and accessible? The icons over heads, as someone pointed out in the other thread, is horribly immersion breaking, and it's basically just a holdover from old engine technology where NPCs couldn't really be fine-tuned in their reactions and controls effectively. It was the most effective way to get across that an NPC wanted to talk to you. Guild Wars 2's approach is really just more of the same - you get a heart on the map that tells you an event's going on, but a good part of the time you're wailing away on stuff without really having any clear indication of why or who you're doing it for. In the future, I'd like to see quest availability telltales provided via contextual clues. MMO engines have evolved to the point that it's feasible to handle audio radius on NPC chatter, displays of emotion that aren't the NPC blatantly leaping around, etc., but few games seem to use that to their advantage, and none of them do it consistently. It's something single player games have been doing for an embarassingly long time. As a (somewhat stereotypical) example of what I envision - the time honored oh god my son/daughter/dog has been kidnapped by orcs/goblins/a giant and will be eaten/killed/forcibly married if you don't rescue it quest. In almost every MMO I can think of right now, that NPC is portrayed as someone just standing around. Sometimes sitting. They aren't making noises, there's no visible signs of grief or distress, just a floating icon. Remove the icon. Make them cry. Make them look depressed, or angry, or make them actually come to the player. I hesistate to suggest audio clues as a frequent use thing as hearing some guy sobbing endlessly would get really annoying, but for major questlines you could do something along those lines. This goes along with the whole "not putting the location of every quest objective convenient marked on a map/compass/HUD" thing, but that's a more complex topic. Thoughts?
That's an interesting thought. I seem to remember EQ2 doing something like that back in the beginning (maybe they still do...?), where certain NPCs would be acting very emotive (i.e. waving frantically to get your attention) when they had a quest to give you. It always seemed like a neat concept and it's definitely something I'd like to see expanded upon. +1 to this idea.
EQ2 does it in some places - it's just not something that's carried out as standard. What I'd like to see is for that to become the norm. EQ1 was particularly immersive in that you had to actually interact with the NPC to get quests in most cases - however, there was no visual indication, nothing to draw your attention. You just wandered around pestering people until someone gave you a keyword in brackets, and that got annoying fairly quickly for everyone involved. What I'd like to see is sort of a blend of the two ideas. Involve dialogue and conversation in the quest acceptance process, much like you see with some quests in Vanguard where you have to follow NPC dialogue to get the quest, and combine it with a removal of the floating quest icon and the addition of emotive behavior and NPC actions to draw visual attention that they want something from the player, or that the player might be able to help them with something. I dunno, I just feel that the genre as a whole has really dropped immersion as anything important. I'd like to see that return. I think this would be a nice way to do it.
The other day I was fighting my way into a Ra'jin fortress with a level 8 or 9 just a short way from the stating area on Kojan. This is like a walled city with dead end streets and lots of turns between buildings. In chat I noticed - 'crying woman yells' "help help please help me" (or something like that). After just a few more streets of fighting I came across a woman that was crying with her hands over her face and bending over and moving back & forth like folks do when real upset. When I hailed her she turned into a Ra'jin warrior and attacked me. Not exactly a quest but kinda what you are talking about. Her spoken words where in chat so players who turn on their fave tunes or turn sound off late at night would still see it & read it. In EQ1 there's a voice that whispers to you about the Wayfares Brotherhood and sends you to your home city to find a guy for more info. Oh and way back in early EQ1 IIRC there where no brackets and you had to just try to talk to NPCs and hope they talked back after their first greating to you. The neon signs over the heads of NPCs make it very easy to zip & skip along from quest to quest running thru the game but that's exactly what I came to VG to advoid in EQ1. I am one of those folks that played EQ from the begining and miss how we would step aside for folks instead of running thru them and say sorry & thank you to My Ladys and My Lords. Oh no, I'm not asking for 20 minute boat rides again but, a ballance in between is just what VG is offering along with a whole lot more! Sorry did not mean to make this so long. ~ Thanks
