Yesterday I mentioned how WoW’s zones will scale in the Legion expansion. Utilizing such a feature, Blizzard plans to do away with Daily Quest Hubs and replace them with ‘events’ that will rotate in and out. These events seem to operate similarly — from what little information I have — to those “public quests” (wrong analogy but they are open to everyone to open their map and go to) used in other games, with the exception being many seem to be geared toward solo players.
The “World Quests” are designed to offer more of a guide or structure to endgame play sessions rather than act compulsively on players as a “you must do these quests in this order every day” type of mentality. As someone who has never liked dailies, and currently stuck doing them in Tanaan on my Monk, I am definitely looking forward to a system that presents me with opportunities rather than forcing me to feel compelled to “do my dailies.”
“World Quests will show you quests, rare elite spawns, rare spawns, pet battles, outdoor PvP activities, world bosses, special dungeon activities, profession activities, and more. Want to know what there is to do in Azeroth today? Just open your map!” – Muffinus, WoW Designer
As I alluded to in the beginning, I think this will work nicely with the zone scaling. Players will have reasons to go everyone in The Broken Isles rather than all congregating in one final zone. We’ll be able to choose what types of activities we want to do each day when we log in. Some of these quests will be daily, weekly, or even hourly events.
There will still be rep grinds. There will still be a legitimate argument to be made about semantics. In a way, these are still “dailies.” You’re still logging in each day and doing activities, otherwise you’ll miss out on potential progression. Blizzard is simply expanding the scope of the definition to include more play styles and a slightly more forgiving presentation.
Despite the semantics, this is a step in the right direction. I like choices. I like logging in and being able to think, “What would I like to do today?” Any step away from “go to this hub, take these 10 blue exclamation points, and come back tomorrow” sounds good to me.
I am not sure if this is what people really want. Public quest type activities got boring really quickly in every game I’ve played.
My suggestions for Blizzard would be to make their current garrisons into a mobile app rather than dump them entirely.
Class quests and guild quests sound like a move in a positive direction but I wonder how long they will take to get stale.
I totally agree with you about garrisons as a mobile app. I’d love that. The class quests sound good too.
These world quests are only sorta like PQs. Unless I’m completely misunderstanding them, it seems like they vary from solo normal quests all the way up to pet battles, pvp sieges, and more traditional PQs.
“Public Quests” aren’t the correct analogy. Have you played Diablo 3 since they introduced Adventure mode?
This system is almost totally stolen from D3 and the bounties in Adventure mode.
Ok so this is how. Public quests. Probably my least favorite mechanic in these games since I started playing them. You show up with 50 other random people, you get into a twitch contest of who can do damage the fastest, nobody is really at risk of dying (because there are 50 of you), and then it drops some lame ass loot everybody already has.
Yeah I’ll pass.
@RohanV: From what I’ve seen, there are some that are akin to PQs. Leveling and the world in general are like D3’s Adventure Mode (I’ve played several seasons). Some of these “world quests” are events, some are bosses, some are pet battles, PvP objectives, etc. So they’re not all like the “dynamic” (hah, dynamic) events on a reset timer.
@Sanz: No, not really PQs. I shouldn’t have worded that so poorly as to convey that’s how the gameplay goes down. It’s essentially events, quests, objectives, goings-on around The Broken Isles that you can go to and it varies by hour, day, week.