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17619: Re: [MUD-Dev] Interesting EQ rant (very long quote)
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From: <the_logos@www.achaea.com>
Newsgroups: nu.kanga.list.mud-dev
Date: Wed, 21 Feb 2001 02:35:05 +0000 (GMT)
References: [1]
Organization: Kanga.Nu
On Tue, 20 Feb 2001, Jeff Freeman wrote:
> Good Quest: Npc Joe hates orcs. Kill the Orc Chieftan and and
> bring his head back to Joe. This makes him happy. He'll never
> stop asking people to kill the orc chieftan. There will always be
> an orc chieftan (since as soon as one is killed, the orcs are just
> going to declare some other chieftan). Point is, it won't be the
> *exact* same Orc Chieftan that you just killed 10 minutes ago.
> Bad Quest: Npc Joe hates Bob the Orc. Kill Bob the Orc and bring
> his infamous Hammer of Bob back to Joe. It's a single-player game
> quest: In a solo game, once you kill Bob the Orc, then Bob the Orc
> is dead, and Npc Joe will stop asking for you to go kill him and
> return his unique Hammer, since you already did that. For a
> multiplayer game, the "solution" is to make Bob the Orc respawn,
> sometimes without a Hammer, and to have NPC Joe keep asking for
> that specific Hammer over and over, even though you just gave it
> to him 10 minutes ago.
I see no fundamental difference between these two. The differences are
fairly pedantic and have little to no bearing on the player
experience, in my opinion.
> True, but quests can be a lot better designed than the "A to B to C
> and here's your cheese"-model which periodically just "resets" back
> to "A", implausibly, and for no good reason.
Your 'reasons' are barely-disguised fictions to allow the cheese to
effectively reset back to A. I can't see most players caring whether
the quest was the "bad" or "good" versions, as they are basically
identical.
> Well, I'd come up with an alternate 'multiplayer world' quest, then.
> But I definitely wouldn't stick single-player games' quests in a
> multiplayer world with no better excuse than, "I can't think of a
> better way to do it." Really, I don't think there's anything
> especially difficult about it.
You certainly haven't convinced the player in me that your ideas are
any different from what is happening now. You're just concealing the
quest with a paper-thin story device. The quest is the same.
--matt
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