Hop on the Lore Wagon! {Editorial}
Posted Tuesday, November 11th, 2008 10:35 am by Max
Alright, time for another fascinating and exciting editorial from Max! Please, try to contain yourselves. Anyways, I thought I’d try to make it clear to everyone reading, and to myself, what I’m focusing on with all of these seemingly random editorials. As some of you may know, MMOs have an astounding amount of detail, ins-and-outs with almost everything that comes with the game. What I’m doing is focusing in on certain aspects of the genre, or at least what has become standard as of right now from precedents, and then seeing what the Twin Skies staff could do, or is doing. That whole spiel aside, most of the elements I’m checking out are in comparison to World of Warcraft, as that is the leading MMO as of right now. The way Blizzard Entertainment implements these standards are unique and a good place to compare with. Now, we can get into the fun part, today examining how Quests might work.
We need to cover what a quest is, even though that might sound simple. My definition is a story or part of a story told as a means to progress a character or the overarching lore of the game world. That might sound a bit complicated, and reading over to myself it sounds a lot complicated, but it’s fairly easy to grasp. A quest giver is in trouble, you help them, creating a story but still leading up to a bigger portion of another story. Granted, some quests are just there for experience or items for your characters, but they are much more interesting then killing 15 gazillion Spotted Bears for the experience.
But how will quests be implemented in Twin Skies. Part of the reason I chose this topic was the recent release of information regarding how a lot of aspects of the game will work. Previous games have taken players on quests in much the same fashion, an exclamation mark over a quest giver, talk with them, do what they ask, and then return with whatever is requested, to a question mark. This works, and as the old saying goes, if it’s not broke, don’t fix it. My guess is this is going to end up in the final game, but that fine by me.
Content is pretty much the allure of most games, so everything must be fully fleshed out and meaningful to the games own lore. One of the biggest disappointments in most games is the fact that most quests are just repeats of each other, i.e. go kill x amount of monster x, or collect 3,000 buzzard gizzards from buzzards. Frankly, it’s boring, and hopefully Twin Skies will bring out something that is awesome. From some of their recent posts, it looks like they are on their way to doing just that.
“Puzzle based quests are hard to do, those will be probably implemented in flash and live on the TS web site. Quests are going to be a lot more interesting than simply killing and collecting, those are just the easiest ones to implement so expect to see a few in early alpha/beta.” From this quote we can tell they are probably going to do a plot-like style on their website, Neopets-style. The early plots they worked on were awesome, so let’s hope they can pull out another hand of aces.
“Some quests will be race-specific, but those will be in the minority. Humans will certainly be able to go to Elevere to complete the quests there.” This is an interesting quote, as that means any race can complete the quests lines of another races starting area. This has been done in WoW, but it means that you can be anything you want, but still level up where ever you want. Aces!
All of this is going to wrap up into what is a truly epic quest system. Now, we still need to catch a glimpse at how receiving, returning, and the general UI of your quest log (where you keep your quests). UI, by the way, means User Interface, which is basically how you see and control almost every aspect of your playing experience. It’s a nice abbreviation, so I use it a ton! Let’s look forward to quests, and also to my next editorial. There’s a hint to the next one in the title of this editorial, so let’s see who can figure it out. If you have any questions that you want me to answer or ideas for a topic, feel free to email me at maxveldink@gmail.com! I look forward to your feedback and am grateful for all of the people who message me on Twin Skies with support. Have fun playing mini-games, till we meet again!
