How was the Jedi Order first assembled? A QUEST! - Keen and Graev's Video Game Blog

But how do we tell stories without quest text directions, in-game dialogue and killing ten rats?

Is that a real question or is it sarcasm to show how truly doomed we are to forever wander this path? 😛

Both? 🙂

Hey, the daily quest to power up your lightsaber is going to be AWESOME… Plus I’m totally excited for the pod racing daily, yay!

I don’t know if its just because we are jaded MMO bloggers, but is anyone getting more hyped about this with each bit of information they release? It’s like every video takes away another hope that this might be worthwhile…

Questing, as most everyone knows it today, is not like it was back in the days of the original Everquest (and earlier manifestations of MMORPG quests). In Everquest when you were given a quest you felt the weight of how involved and important for your character this adventure and journey would be. These “quests” were more like sagas being told over days, weeks, and months for your character as you worked towards completing them.

Quests today are “Welcome to the world, please go kill me 10 womprats so that I can feed my family.”. We’ve lost that sense of “hero” and donned the awesome importance of a delivery boy, messenger, and hired gun to perform odd tasks ad nauseum.

So, sure, if you look at telling a story from the perspective of a “quest” then “quests” must exist. However, they can exist like they used to in these games where they meant something and were not something that every breadmaker, postman, and begging peasant on the street would send you on. LOTRO’s Storyline quests are the absolute bare minimum of what I consider “acceptable” quests implemented in this generation of MMORPGs.

That’s from a story perspective. Let’s look at them from a gameplay perspective now.

Questing as a means of character progression as we have seen it in WoW, Vanguard, LOTRO, WAR, and nearly every MMO since has been detrimental to how these games are designed, played, and will continue to impact the way they are developed as we are seeing with SWTOR. Characters no longer make their own path or grow and progress based on how the person playing them chooses to interact with other players and the world around them – at least nowhere near how they used to.

I could be overreacting. SWTOR may be thinking “EQ style quests” when they speak of quests or they may be thinking “LOTRO story line quests” … but the part of me that can see these things coming from miles away has caught a glimpse of the “kill 10 womprats” coming at us at lightspeed.

I believe that it would be a great single player game, but with all of the questing and different quest paths, how could players possibly group? It seems to me that SWTOR will be a Massively Single Player Online Role Playing Game.

I play MMOs to group with friends. I have watched the videos and must say that I am very uninterested in this game atm.

But quests, er… STORY is the fourth pillar SW:TOR will be built upon! You’ve, y- you’ve never seen anything like it! It’s gonna be AWESOME!

I can’t say I have a lot of experience with Bioware games, but from what I’ve heard, all their previous success has been built around epic questing. If this is true, did you expect anything different?

Give yourself the Quest to find a better way a MMO should work 😀

The problem is that questing is highly effective for character development. I really don’t think people want to go back to the days of Everquest and Dark Age where leveling involved finding a group, setting up a camp at certain area, then pulling and killing mobs over and over, having to deal with all the fun aspects of that – people going afk, people needing to leave, fighting with other groups for control of the camp, etc. On one hand, this did help to build a strong community (or did it), but on the other hand, it made leveling a chore.

Ultimately, it seems that game that removes levels and go to a skill based system is the way to go, but unless either Eve gets really popular or someone builds an Eve like game that’s popular enough to cause a paradigm shift, get out your womprat bat.

“I canâ€™t say I have a lot of experience with Bioware games, but from what Iâ€™ve heard, all their previous success has been built around epic questing. If this is true, did you expect anything different?”

Example of a Bioware quest:
“I need your help to disable these robots!”
a.) “I’ll help you!”
b.) “I’ll let them kill you!”
c.) “Pie?”

But without quests in an MMO, how would players know what to do or where to go? They would just wander around the starting area until someone gave them a direction.

Forging your own path through the world? Yeah, right. You do what you are told to do. You don’t have to like it. Might even hate it. Might even despise it with every fiber of your being. But you’ll damn well log in every day and do your dailies because THAT IS YOUR JOB.

I remember when ‘fun’ used to be a component of MMO gaming, and making the player do what we tell them to do wasn’t so important.

*cough* Darkfall *cough*

@Delmania: I long for those days. The community, world, progression, purpose, immersion, and time spent in-game just meant so much more. Was it more difficult? Yes. Was it a chore? … depends. Some days it was and some it wasn’t. I don’t feel like today’s quest model is any less of a chore though, in fact I think it feels more like a job and less like an adventure when it’s simplified to menial tasks.

LOL @ your Bioware quest example. I had to go take some ibueprofen to make my mouth stop hurting after that.

@Tipa: I remember that too.

That was some pretty funny &^!%!. I think I may have to go walk around our house now.

When I played KoTOR, I never really thought of anything in terms of quests. When I played Mass Effect, I never thought of that in terms of quests (well, the side missions maybe). So it seems like there are quests and there are QUESTS.

Wish we could edit… continued from above.

In single player games, quests have a different purpose. The goal is to finish the story. In a modern MMO, quests are used to get you to the ‘end game’.

Indeed, the quest grind is tedious. In fact, I’ve been playing LoTRO recently as WAR does not work on my system, and I’ve realized that a big portion of my problem with WAR, technical and RvR related issues aside, was that I think I burned out on the whole “go to this camp, quest here, go to next camp”. However, I also remember sitting one day for 8 hours when playing Dark Age camping goblins for one stinking level.

As for Darkfall, I am not hopeful about it, mainly because it will be such a niche market, and from what I’ve seen, the designers took everything from the past 10 years of so of MMO development, threw it in the garbage, pissed on it, and then let their dog crap on it for good measure. I know they’re trying to recreate pre-Trammel UO, but seriously, not every MMO development has been bad.

I know you may not think very much of F13, but they do have a way of pointing out some of the issues with MMO in a sometimes humorous fashion. Here’s their Darkfall thread:
http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=13129.0

WAR had somewhat of an answer. Yet its implementation is somewhat hit and miss. Public Quests might lay the foundation for a bright future. A nice mixture where perhaps yes, you still have to start with someone directing your movement, but along the way you just come across â€œquestsâ€ that happen just with your presence. Some might be full participation of everyone around while others might be scripted right at you or your group. It might be a few years out before this can be accomplished technologically but I can see quests going this direction.

You said it Keen!

I don’t bother to read the quest text anymore. I don’t feel heroic. They’re just a way to optimize getting XP.

We need something else. I doubt we’ll get it anytime soon.

Mass Effect would have been a much better game if Bioware knew how to craft a story and make it engaging and exciting.

HAHA OH WAIT

Rofl this is sooo gonna bite them in the butt. YAMOTSPFCMMOG (Yet Another More of the Same Par For the Course MMO Game)

It also sounds to me like those free Korean grind MMOs are right up your alley.

@Artemesia: From one extreme the other other? Heh, no thanks. It’s illogical to believe that just because I don’t like the quest formula that I would like the Korean grind mmo formula is for me.

I think when you hear the word quest, your brain immediately jumps to “kill fourteen bears” and all those long, horrible nights of killing bear after bear come back to haunt you in a rush of nausea and fear.

Questing is a medium for storytelling. The only problem is every single MMO out there seems to have forgotten that little fact and instead opts for the OH NOES WE DONT LIKE BANDITS PLEASE GO AND KILL THOSE BANDITS FOR ME BEFORE I PIDDLE ALL OVER MY HUT IN FEAR approach rather than something different.

Bioware is all about crafting great stories with fun, interesting gameplay to back it up and in order to do this, questing is the most logical decision to make to force a player down a storyline’s path. EVERY game does it, not just MMOs. I just feel you’re jumping to the conclusion that because they called it a “quest”, you’re going to have to run to a cave 50 yards away and collect 10 blue lightsaber crystals and turn them into Jedi Master Quest’Giphar.

As some people have said, it’s not quests in general that are a problem, but it’s how the story has been sucked out of them.

I quite enjoyed the quest/mission system in Final Fantasy XI and the starting area quests in Age of Conan, where your character was placed in a cut scene with important characters. It really made you feel like you were a part of a story, like your character was the star in a movie. I mean, wouldn’t the kill 10 rats thing be cool again if instead of having to read quest text, our character was thrust into a cut scene with the farmer pleading our character for help as we see rats moving around in the background or chewing up his things?

I also hope that WAR’s PQ system and WoW’s phasing system will be a source of inspiration for future MMO developers that really want to involve someone in a story. I mean, can you imagine having to group up with your buddies to save people from a burning village, and if you returned later the village would no longer be on fire, but instead you would see the town in the process of rebuilding. OR perhaps you choose to not save the citizens, and when you return instead you see just a completely devastated village with burned bodies everywhere (not the best example, but you get my point). Wouldn’t it be cool if your character really seemed like he/she was having an effect on the world itself?

@Artemesia: We’ll see. Everyone keeps heralding Bioware as this great developer in story and gamepla, but they make singleplayer games. Storytelling and directing the player is quite easy and welcome in a game like that. How they’ll craft that into a MMORPG could sound great in theory and on paper as all these MMORPGs do… but in practice not even 1/3 of them ever deliver.

Read my comment #5 and you’ll see that I completely support quests when they’re done like they were in the first generation – with quality, story and gameplay.

@Rosie: I see it as slightly worse. When I think of quests now I think of something devoid of story AND gameplay. The phasing technology could be used in miraculous ways – perhaps we’ll see it built upon and used to truly deliver gameplay and story that will blow everything we’ve ever known away. I hope.

Ok I have to say….that combination of pictures made me LOL for real at work here.

I’m crying tears of laughter…I’m not joking…

NooooooOOOOoooOOooo LOL!!!

I guess the major thing for me is that every game these days feels like its pretty much on rails. And while its a good thing for the gamer that has no substantial time to play it also takes away a large part of exploration and immersion into the game. There is some merit to having to go out of your way to do some major quest or find a nice hidden camping spot.

In EQ1 spawn camping was a major part of the leveling process and though it may be boring in general its no more boring then being told what to do at every turn. Spawn camping at least you had the option to go where you’d wanna go. Its like “hmm we got a group, should be go camp the Avatar in Cazic Thule or the King in Lower Guk?” Roll the dice, make the dungeon crawl and see if its camped. Swap people in, swap people out, hold the camp for as long as you like. Try not to die or it’ll cost you a corpse run(which usually required the help of a neighboring group)

There was something thats just way more immersive in that model.

… the other option being to grind scenarios all day and then at the end you’re a jedi?

This is BioWare… do you really doubt their ability to do great quests? Are you unfamiliar with the RPG genre in general? What were you expecting here?

I was/am hoping Bioware does more than a Star Wars themed WoW. So far, all we’ve seen and heard from them is more of the same with the promises of their Bioware golden touch. They obviously have some people eating right out of the palm of their hand. I challenge anyone to bring forth evidence that shows or even strengthens the argument that Bioware has any idea of how to enter the MMO industry and have the midas touch where, so far, no one has been able to do it since WoW.

I’ll be the first to shout from the rooftops that our savior MMO has arrived when and if they are able to deliver. However, until then, I’ll go with what I’ve seen and heard from their own videos and info.

As for Bioware’s ability to do great quests… see my comment #26. Comparing single player RPGs to MMORPGs is a joke.

And one more thing – Bioware AUSTIN is making this mmorpg. They were formed in 2006 and began work immediately on the mmo as a fresh division. Gordon Walton and Richard Vogel head up Austin last I checked and neither of them have an impressive MMORPG background from which the fans can launch a platform of defense in their ability to design. Additionally, Bioware is not infallible since they made Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood which flopped. And one more additionally here… they’re owned by EA now. They’ve merged with Pandemic. We know what that means for a company developing games when they suddenly have new masters.

We’ll just have to wait to see what is their concept of quests. Like mentioned before, they did go on record to say that story is one of the four pillars they are basing the entire game on, so the concept of what they understand as quests could be a little more involved than what we have today on WoW or WAR.

On those games, they can call them “quests” as much as they like it, but what they really have are “errands”. “Here boy, go to the market and get me a loaf of bread… and kill ten rats on the way back.” If those are quests, then I’m the quest-master, because my boss keeps asking me to do stuff no more complex than that at work.

Back when I still played WoW, I remember some things that I would go and call “quests”, stuff like the Onyxia attunement, which made you do this series of tasks to enable you to actually go and slay the dragon. My only problem with that was about the presentation: unless you was searching for it (i.e. your guild told you to go make that chain so you can raid), it was almost impossible to discover that this was the purpose of that chain, since the text wasn’t clear enough about it.

That is where Bioware experience might come through: understand that something like “go there and kill this” can be done, if you make clear that this is a task, part of a series that together make the actual “quest”, on the original meaning of the word, and make the final purpose of this chain something worth of recognition.

In few words: make quests be epic.

“watches video”

“goes back to beta testing Darkfall”

“Wishes he was in Darkfall beta”

Bioware stated that they’re going to differentiate their game through storyline, which isn’t really my thing but I’m trying hard to reserve my judgment. I’ve played mass effect and I know they can tell a decent story, but it doesn’t blow me away.

So they release this video saying quest this quest that, and they act as if no mmorpg creator has ever come across this great idea of implementing a quest. They need to start getting into the details so we can see if bioware’s quests system is going to be all that it’s cracked up to be.

I would love to see if Bioware can get me hooked on the storytelling part of mmorpg’s. When it comes to quests my mentality is, all I want to know is what I need to know. For 99% of quests in mmo’s the objectives fall under 3 questions what do I need to kill, what do I need to collect, or who do I need to talk to. And this is all I want to know, maybe Bioware can change that but I will believe it when I see some more details.

I feel this ties directly to the IP. I mean when you’re stuck within an IP you have things that pretty much must be done. A. stick to the IP B. tell stories about the IP to the user. Easy way out, questing. Let’s hope it’s not a super quest spree as many games seem to think we like. Unfortunately it probably will be. That’s the great thing about mmorpgs that come out with a brand new IP, no restrictions and no need to tell stories about this already existing IP that the user apparently has no clue about. Mmorpg developers today really need to realize that players of their games can have fun, and in many cases more fun, when just dropped into a world and left alone to do what they want and not what the guy with the ! over his head says he should be doing.

Perhaps you should lighten up a little bit. They didn’t say that they’re going to be failquests like in, say, WoW. This is Bioware we’re talking about here.

Remember the whole thing about the fourth pillar of story? It’s a bit hard to have a story in a game without some kind of direction, i.e. a quest. Otherwise it’s all just player-driven ‘stories’ = gankfest and/or grindfest.

You sound like a spoiled brat regarding quests. Your like my cousin way back when Doom was first out and using all the cheat codes to slash through the monsters and not “work” to get to the final victory. You think Luke Skywalker was crabbing to Yoda saying, “How come I gotta quest and train Yoda? Can’t I just jump automatically to Master Jedi status and start using the force on moon sized death stars immediately??” ” This bog instance sucks!(whine)
Sure, I agree it’s boring to kill 10 rats, but that lays on the pathetic ability of these Computer code jockeys that don’t have an imagination beyond 0’s and 1’s to make quests interesting. Quests is life. the quests of High school classes and assignments, College, and then Work. Of trying to get the attention of that hot girl. (level 1..flowers)
So instead complain to the game companies and tell them to hire writers to create some cool quests and reasons for the quest, rather then call for taking quests out of a fantasy game completely. Otherwise get some cheat codes.
-FFH-

@FFM:
First, many “Computer code jockeys” are imaginative enough to do quests betters. The fault lays at the hands of the “suits” who want designers and developers to recreate WoW.

Also, as for you “intelligent” comparison, you are failing to understand what Keen is complaining about Bioware is poised to bring about another paradigm shift in the MMO marketplace, and instead, they are taking WoW’s basic quest system, slapping SW on it, and calling it a day.

@Syp:
This is the company that is responsible for KOTOR and KOTOR 2. While both games were fun to play, their whole “quest and choose a side” system was…lacking.

What gives me hope is at the 2:15 minute mark, he mentioned they want to make quests “exciting and heroic”. What’s quite despairing though is at the 4:25 minute mark, he says that the art and environment team can take “what can seem like a dry bit of text and suddenly make it exciting”. So kind of like you said Keen, “Ok everyone! Let’s whip out these dry cookie-cutter quests and let the art and environment team make them look cool!”. Ugh.

I’ve said this a million times. Gamers are looking for something different. It doesn’t matter how great the artwork or environment, the gameplay dynamics will determine the success or failure of the game. If within a half hour you have this feeling of deja-vu (grinding) then it’s not going to get very far.

Put another way, the core mechanics are the meat and the art/environment are the gravy. Therefore if the meat’s bad, no amount of gravy will help it. 🙂

The future of MMO’s will be like this:

http://www.mmorpg.com/gamelist.cfm/game/333/view/news/showArticle/10263

and then read this:

http://www.mmorpg.com/gamelist.cfm/game/333/view/news/showArticle/10278

or you can visit their site:
http://www.citadelofsorcery.com/

I still don’t understand how they are going to pull it out, but it looks very interesting. I hope they succeed.

@ DEI,

hence my sentence “So instead, complain to the game companies and tell them to hire writers to create some cool quests and reasons for the quest,”

Which you failed to “read”.
Next!

“While both games were fun to play, their whole â€œquest and choose a sideâ€ system wasâ€¦lacking.”

While both games were fun to play,”

“both games were fun to play,”

THEN WHERE IS THE PROBLEM

I think most people are simply burnt out on Quests. They are a means to an end, that being max level. I hear more and more people referring to EQ quests and leveling system in a favorable light.

Right now ALL MMO’s use quest as the primary means to level up. Once you are max level you only do them for money, if at all. In EQ you leveled up via grouping and dungeons. The few quests you did were faction related or your epic quest, and those were normally done at max level spanning weeks and months.

Games need to start getting away from quests as a leveling crutch or they are going to start losing players, or not gaining any. WoW isn’t fun because of it’s quests, it’s fun because at 80 you have dungeons and raids. Most people don’t want to switch to another MMO to quest grind more.

It’s just kind of amusing to see you cast an automatic doubt on SWTOR and what they’re trying to do, while virtually shaking with anticipation over Darkfall — a game which you haven’t seen yet either. Why doesn’t the latter deserve the same skepticism?

@Syp: SWTOR is showing, at every opportunity, that they’re doing nothing different. Darkfall is showing, at every opportunity, that they’re taking an approach to MMORPGs that has never been done before – AND I have seen Darkfall.

Help me understand where the source of your amusement is coming from so that I can help you understand better.

@FFH

No, I read that just fine, however, you are lacking the understanding. It is not a matter of gripe at the companies, it’s a matter of getting away from the whole concept that quests are the primary form of character advancement that WoW gave us. If I need to “read”, you need to “understand”.

@Artemis

Because while they fun as SINGLE PLAYER GAMES, taking those and moving them into an MMO is nothing more than producint YAWC (Yet Another WoW Clone).

@Keen
From what I have seen, Darkfall is cross between Eve Online, DAoC, and UO…

@FFH

I hardly think the complaint is the need to quest and train. The complaint is that quest SHOULD be a more then Yoda telling Luke, “Go you must to the bog and kill 10 ten critters and to me you return” but Bioware hasn’t shown that they will be shifting from that mold.

No one complained about not wanting to deal with content, but content these days simply doesn’t hold anyone’s attention anymore. Even CoV had half decent quests series where you go from instance dungeon to instance dungeon to kill a “target mob” at the end. Though they were done in the simplest way it could be done, its far more interesting then “kill 10”. Everytime you finished a small instance you actually felt like you completed something. “Kill 10” never feels like that. Not even at 1st level.

Anyway the point in general is give us something NEW, not something rehashed.

@Delmania: Right, and doing it in a way that’s never been done before. Real-time fantasy combat where you aim and click to swing your sword with full loot PvP. Add on what makes EVE, DAOC, and UO great and it’s a totally unique recipe.

It’s like making cookies. All cookies require some similar basic ingredients, but how those ingredients are used and what else is added to the mixture can make a totally unique cookie experience.

But if someone wants to make their own really good cookie, but wants to copy someone else’s popular recipe exactly… then they can’t label their cookies as unique and special because all they’ve done is duplicated someone else’s success.

If the game is fun there shouldn’t be a problem.

The problem is quests are not fun anymore. They are all about grinding exp.

i dont think we have to fear about this game’s fate, blizzard made their MMORPG without any MMORPG or even RPG experience (Diablo I/II was more like action game with couple RPG features), and while Bioware has lots of experience in single-player RPG i think they will do just fine, also Dragon age: origins looks great too, so EA is not influencing their game-making ability too much

IMO we haven’t even seen close to enough info, pics or video to warrant calling this game a pos yet. I will be reserving judgment until we actually see some gameplay and more specifics on the core elements of the game.

Personally Id like to see future MMO’s cater to both kinds of players. If you want to group up and grind then grouping won’t nerf your exp gains and if you want to solo quests than there’s plenty of those too. As long as you can level both ways to max level and they take about the same amount of time I don’t see the issue. IMO quests can be great when done right. Like Rosie mentioned, the starter area of AoC is a pretty good example. Hell, even Keen admitted to enjoying leveling in WotLK. Something I thought I would never hear!

Perhaps hardcore and casual servers are an option. Different rule sets for each server type. That way all the hardcore wierdos can enjoy their long grinds, exp and gear loss at death, no quests what so ever and whatever other things they can come up with to make leveling longer and their epeen feel bigger. And the casual slackers will have a casual server where they can go and play the “ez mode version” and they can enjoy sucking at the game and telling Chuck Norris jokes. After writing that perhaps a 3rd server type that falls between these two would be nice as well since I consider myself neither hardcore nor casual but some where in between.

Well, hardly anyone is calling it a “pos” – unless you think “more of the same” and “pos” are synonyms (which they could be to some, depending on how they view “more of the same”).

The point of all of this is to question why we’re seeing BIOWARE – the company that is renown for making everything they touch gold and fresh – going the route of questing instead of trying to do something new and fresh. Blizzard accomplished this with World of Warcraft. They had never made a MMO but had done amazing things with other genres. They came into the MMO scene and basically created the questing system as we know it.

I’m expecting Bioware to do the same. At this point though, I’m just not seeing it and that really strikes a nerve because I’m wanting these games to be more than they are currently condemning themselves to be.

why going new route if you can just take the old route and make it great? bioware are surely working hard, and without any information we can just wish they will succed at that
besides i never really liked blizzards way to make quests, in bioware games i always completed as many as i could, in WOW it was mostly quick way to get to top level

@Keen:

That’s an easy one. Bioware is a part of EA, correct? Publicly traded company at the whims of investors.

Those investors want their own WoW, and they want it yesterday.

Yep, which is why I am a big proponent of the little companies trying to do something different without the backing of an EA, Activision, SoE, etc (although the suits can and do make good games).

EA still runs Ultima Online, with new content patches coming out regularly for their relatively small number of subscribers. They’ve been supporting it for years and keeping it constantly developing. I’d suggest that if anything EA probably understand the reality of MMOs better than most. So I doubt they’d be the driver behind this latest Starwards MMO being cack. That will lie purely with Bioware, it’s up to them alone to either do something mnew and wonderfull, or just go for yet another EQ clone.

Don’t be too harsh on EA, serving the whims of their investors make good sense, since after all, they are paying your costs. However, by all accounts EA tends to leave the operations of its studios alone.

@Delmania: Uhh, EA’s track record shows that for many years they had the touch of death on any studio that they acquired. For the longest time they destroyed everything good that they touched. Lately they’ve had a more ‘hands off’ approach with some games, but we the players are truly in the dark on how deep they’ve influenced development as well as how they’re going to start influencing it now that they’re losing money and giving employees the boot.

@Keen: Err, two things: first, why do you say they are losing money? You must be aware that while the entire US (even worldwide) economy is not doing well, games are still selling record-breaking numbers. Of course not everything is perfect, so they need to cut costs. But I didn’t see anything to point that EA is losing money.

Second: if you want a first hand account on how the are influencing development these days, just read this: “I donâ€™t know firsthand what EA was like before they bought out Mythic, but if â€œacting like adultsâ€ and â€œallowing the studio to set their own expectationsâ€ and â€œpaying a decent wage by the standards of the game industryâ€ are bad things, I donâ€™t want to work for a good company again.” That’s is from a current Mythic employee, discussing the lastest layoffs.

(source: http://bit.ly/3L5RSk)

So I would give Bioware, and EA, time to show exactly how they intent to make those things work, instead of criticizing them just because they are using somewhat stigmatized words on videocasts.

You place your hand on the holocron. You hear a voice that sounds like a frog with a sore throat say:

“Grind to Master Architect you must!”

You put the barrel of your CDEF pistol in your mouth, hope that your family will forgive you and pull the trigger.

Forgive me but I’m forever scarred by the way SWG treated the Jedi. I can’t see a Star Wars game and the word Jedi without shuddering and thinking about holocrons. Medication and group therapy don’t help.

ROFL Drakorn – I got mine on the last holocron that I had to do. 🙁

I both agree and disagree with you Keen. On the one hand I feel the same way about how it used to be, I much rather just grind randomly or explore/grind than killing 40 rats for Lady Lazy, but I honestly don’t think we need to worry about this kind of thing in SWTOR. Why? Well, they have said numerous times that they want to make questing feel heroic, what’s heroic about killing 10 or 50 rats or furbolgs? 😛

Ok, so a lot of gamedevelopers say a lot of stuff, but you’ve got to admit, they have made some excellent titles before. NWN, Mass Effect, KOTOR, Baldurs Gate series etc, just like Blizzard… doesn’t it feel a little the same to you? Blizzard had never made an mmog, and they came up with something cool, and they also had a record of awesome titles. BioWare, never made an mmog, but they also have a record of awesome titles.

At this point, they KNOW they have to come up with something completely fresh or it’s going to be the same old thing all over again, I also have my doubts, but out of most of the online titles currently in development this is one that I put in the golden chair.

BioWare are true storytellers, they’re not “Kill 50 rats”-tellers if you know what I mean 😉 but I understand where you’re coming from, with all the mmogs out there failing horribly right and left, it’s NOT easy to be optimistic!