The complete removal of preparation, challenge, and thinking from MMO quests has turned them from exciting and fulfilling journeys to boring content gauntlets players are funneled through for the sake of progression, no better than the grind they replaced.
Ethan Macfie, “How MMO Quests Get It All Wrong“
I don’t believe Ultima Online had quests at launch, making EverQuest the first massively multiplayer game to introduce them. Even so, there were precious few “quests” in EQ on opening day. The first one I discovered was the “mail” quest line: a NPC (non-player character) in Kelethin told me to deliver some mail to the dwarven city of Kaladim a short distance away. It was my first step into the broader world, and introduced me to the joy that can be found in exploring a massive game world filled with other players.
When I say “quest”, of course, I mean “tasks.” The “quests” in massively multiplayer games are often droll, tedious affairs (as Mr. Macfie points out in the quote above); there isn’t really a lot of variety to the types of quests players are asked to do. The worlds of MMOs are akin to amusement parks where all the staff are effete beggars too inept or too lazy to do their own dirty work – but somehow have an endless supply of goodies to hand out to players who can run errands for them.
And, make no mistake, it’s those goodies that players are after. The famously offensive “dickwolves” comic by Penny Arcade was originally intended to poke fun at the lifelessness of MMO worlds, where quests about an weighty topic like slavery lose all pathos among a base of greedy players performing rote actions for pixelated rewards. Those rewards, by the way, were pretty scant at EverQuest’s launch. Few quests were considered worthwhile, as the experience, gold, and items you were given in return for jumping through hoops were nowhere near as desirable as the rewards to be gained from mindlessly camping for hours on end in the spot where a rare monster was known to spawn.
Crafting, likewise, was no method for getting rich – or getting anywhere, really. While you could farm some of the items required for crafting from monsters, gaining skill in a craft typically involved purchasing items from the townsfolk and then combining them into a resultant item that those same townspeople would buy for little more than the cost of materials (not including failures). Other players often didn’t want crafted items, either – the armor you could craft was weak, the weapons lackluster, the magic jewelry only so-so. To be sure, a few items like large tailored backpacks were desirable, but not sufficiently so to make it a worthwhile endeavor for most.
All of this leaves me wondering why the original producers felt like they needed to include either questing or crafting in the game at all. Perhaps the two systems were meant to be fully fleshed-out after the game launched – and, indeed, both have been substantially built upon in the years since. The rewards for crafting were somewhat improved, and numerous quest “chains” were added to the game.
Both crafting and questing, however, feel like clunky and haphazard assortments of clutter thrown together rather than any attempt to present to the player a cogent and compelling reason for their game time. You can craft armor in EverQuest, but it’s pointless – the armor you can get from a starter quest these days will be light years better than anything you could make yourself. Quests, likewise, have rewards that range from miserly to mediocre. You’re still far better off simply farming the items and money that drop from monsters than you are trying to piece together the disparate components needed to get a tailoring kit or towns-person to spit out an item.
It’s a shame, really, because both of these systems could do wonders to support one of the two “pillars” of the game: classic high fantasy. You could be performing meaningful work for a living, breathing set of non-player characters that depend on you for their existence; instead you’re gathering pixels to hand in to a set of cardboard cut-outs acting like the employee taking tickets and handing out stuffed animals at the county fair. You could be crafting legendary items that your peers use to perform epic feats of bravery; instead, you’re clicking on a bunch of pixels so that you can gain the skill necessary to click on a bunch of other, fancier pixels later.
Most of this is due to the static nature of the game world. I’ve used the illustration of an amusement park more than once in this article because I think it’s an apt one. Amusement parks (or county fairs, or what have you) present a stock assortment of standardized fun. There’s a set of stations (or rides, or booths, etc.) that present the same or similar experience to each and every person that comes. Different people at a fair like this don’t change the experience – the rides aren’t really experienced differently based on who’s present. It’s homogenized, static, and bland.
It could be more – it was probably meant to be more. The PVP servers present at EverQuest’s launch were clearly an attempt to have players be their own content – to foment wars between factions in the game. It wasn’t done too well in EverQuest; subsequent games such as Age of Camelot did a better job of this. EVE Online clearly does well in setting up a sandbox and having player-versus-player conflict create the dynamic content of the game.
But EverQuest remains, to a large degree, a tired, dilapidated amusement park with tattered tents and creaky rides. The animatronic staff still hand out their worn tickets and prizes as they stand at counters thick with flaking layers of paint pasted on over the years. Most of the areas are dead and deserted; it’s not a living world, it’s a dead one.
Next time we’ll explore some ideas for how this might have been different. The current state of affairs is definitely a result of designer responses to the changing state of the game world and player base – but there were alternatives available.