I’m just 10 minutes into this new patch and already want to bang my head on the table.
Can you please get rid of these asinine 1 minute quests where you have to move 100y, kill 10 mobs, and turn in the quest. I’m so sick and tired of these, and the worst part is you HAVE to do these to forward the story.
Can you PLEASE do something else, for the love of gaming!
The thing with these quick quests is that you’re not in the action long enough for it to even have a chance to become fun. It’s over in 30 seconds. Hell, picking up the quest and walking back and forth almost takes longer.
In fact, stop doing quests altogether. Just let us talk to npc’s to get the story and have us reach a goal to unlock the next part. How we get to that goal could be anything, either kill a few thousand enemies, craft a metric ton of armor, do 10K steps ingame every day,…I don’t care, literally ANYTHING is better than more of this.
I love the quests where you have to interact with some object, AND IT ALWAYS SPAWNS A FREAKING MOB… and there’s a ton of such quests… then there’s the many “progress bar” type quests…
Blizz doing every possible thing to inflate the time you spend ingame… they actually went out of their way to remove quick WQs like we had in Legion and BFA to kill one target mob for example.
The problem is not the concept of “take quest, go to quest area, perform task, return to quest giver”. The problem is that the “perform task” part has been catastrophically nerfed to be so abhorrently easy and quick to the point that it doesn’t feel as if we did something.
When a quest asks you to go 200m away to kill 8 bad guys and most of the time is still spent on travel than on combat, you know something’s wrong with how you design your game.
One hour in, 20 meaningless quest on, and we’re back to borrowed power with a new cloak.
This is like watching an old sick dog dragging itself through yet another excrutiating day. At some point, someone needs to take pity and shoot the mutt.
If you actually think about it, it’s always “kill X amount of whoever” or “gather X amount of something”. Sometimes packed different but 99% same in the core.
And that’s in every single MMORPG. There are only few exceptions that I’ve seen where you have to solve some sort of puzzle and stuff like that but that’s a HUGE exception. And it’s also not made for the masses and definitely not for WoW community. The outrage would be much bigger if the quest design would required the average player to think.
All these comments against your post do not make any sense. I understand your statement and I agree fully, they need to do something about it, it finishes too fast and is too easy.
People saying that every mmorpg is designed like this are wrong. In New World for example (the game I spent most of my time last month), is designed with same approach, but has different vibe to it because mobs hit you hard. If you pull 3 end level mobs in New World and you have decent gear, you can easily die, so you need to manage your spells and dodge/block moments and because of this, you end up having interesting action during these kill x / gather x quests.
In GW2 for example you have similar quests, although very different in the way developers approach it. You have story going on usually for 15-20 minutes of action of killing or doing something in between dialog quests. You have a purpose as why you are there. Sometimes you have to go on 20 min long road of killing mobs so you can get into last boss fight, you are there with purpose and you feel this action. In WoW every ‘‘action’’ is designed so it finishes in between 1-5minutes, it does not feel to have any purpose. I agree with some comments above that WoW should fully go dialog questlines or something similar, with many cinematics, no matter if those are high end cinematics. Story should be there for fun and lore people, it should not matter to progression and it shouldn’t be tied to reputation as well.
It’s something I’ve always disliked about the questing in WoW as well.
It’s very stop and go.
Lots of reading. Then a bit of travel. Followed by a bit of action. Then a bit of travel again. And then lots of reading.
It’s honestly not a very engaging game experience.
It never really has been.
I remember when I started playing WoW in ages past during the Vanilla Beta, one of my first thoughts was how much worse the story experience seemed compared to the game I came from – Diablo II. Because in Diablo II you didn’t get a whole lot of quests, but each one presented you with a lofty goal that took you on a long adventure. And there was no reading! Everything the NPCs had to say, they actually said out loud! I really struggled with that transition to WoW where everything had to be read, and most quests were short to-do tasks that didn’t really involve a lot of adventure, and mostly you were just ping-ponging back and forth between the NPCs whilst doing random intermittent tasks like delivering packages or killing a couple of wolves.
And now, more than 20 years later, it’s still like that!
It’s why I don’t play through the game a second or third time on alts. The questing experience is okay-ish enough to be decent for a single playthrough because there’s some mystery and excitement to the story itself, but the actual questing itself is not very enjoyable unless you ignore the story and just blast through the objectives as a means of power-leveling.
It would be nice if Blizzard would evolve their storytelling a bit…a lot, but they haven’t for 20 years, so I wouldn’t get my hopes up.
The issue is not that you have to kill or gather, the issue is the way it’s done.
Cutting up questlines into little tidbit, one minute quests, that now, because they need 100s of those to fill up the content, end up being nothing more than ridiculous chores to spoonfeed you a new currency (valorstones in this case). The whole questdesign is now to create these small chores instead of giving us something with meat on its bones.
Most quests in Classic, even those to go kill 10 or gather 10 of something took some time. When you were at the Crossroads and had to go kill harpies in the north, that was a treck, in which you did other things on the way. The area itself had many harpies and a treacherous elite one you had to keep an eye out for or get ganked by it. You needed to position yourself, pull towards you, and watch for repops becuase fighting more than 2 or 3 at same level usually meant dying. That quest would easily take you 15 minutes, and then it had a follow up that sent you back, and another one. In the end, after 45 minutes of gaming (and not mindlessly spamming buttons to bulldoze whatever mob in front of you) you got a nice meaningful reward (for orc warriors it was a very good axe). It was fun, challenging and rewarding.
That’s the trinity for quests. Fun, challenging and rewarding. None of that applies to any of these one-minute quests. You cannot reward that which takes no effort. You cannot introduce challenge in something that only takes 1 minute to complete, and without challenge you can barely introduce fun.
I absolutely don’t understand what you are trying to say.
What is it that upsets you? Rewards? Quests being too short? Give one example of that meat you crave for.
Imo that was the worst design to ever exist in gaming history. I think I did not play a single game in my life that managed to make questing so dull.
Go kill 10 mobs. Hit one mob for 1 minute. Eat for 1 minute. Hit next mob for 1 minute.
Now… THAT was horrible for sure.
That was also the rise of gold selling and boosting services. Over 100k accounts banned in that time and over 30 million gold removed from the game. The good old days
Ok, now I kinda understand where you a coming from. But I highly disagree that it was fun or challenging. It was never hard but more like annoying. You pretend to be he Hero of Azeroth but you sit there and… ye… hit one mob for an hour. And the rewards were 9/10 always bad. I remember only a few quest chains that actually were worth doing and it kinda pushed you knowing that you get some proper item that will stick with you for at least 5 levels. Those were VERY rare tho.
And many quests were so annoying and made no sense where to go… like you pick up 5 quests, 4 of them are somewhat in the same area and the other one is like in Timbuktu… and then you are not even getting anything good from it. No money, barely any xp (or even less than from the other quests) and no item.
That was horrible.
And it did not become better, which is why questing addons became popular. You then could finally do proper lines of quests and did not end up wasting like 1 hour for 100 xp.
If I had to choose between that and what we have now, I 100% take what we have now. No questions asked.
The very first quest you’re given by an NPC comes in the form of a voiced monologue that takes ~1 minute. The NPC tells you to go into the first zone and find and cleanse the den of evil. So you do that. And when you find the den of evil and enter it the quest updates and tells you to explore the den of evil. And as you come upon the residing demons in the den, the quest tells you to kill all the demons in the den of evil.
When you are done and you go back to the camp and talk to the NPC, she offers you a ~1 minute voiced monologue thanking you for cleansing the den of evil and rewards you for your efforts. Those efforts took 10-30 minutes (depending on your experience with the game).
So that’s ~2 minutes of voiced NPC quest dialogue in total, and anywhere between 10-30 minutes of uninterrupted gameplay.
In WoW I have just been doing two quests by an NPC, Narathe, who had even chosen to follow me as I completed them. One quest told me to collect 4 energy sources nearby, and another quest told me to tame an animal that’s nearby.
Reading those quests as I was given them took ~1 minute each, so that’s ~2 minutes upfront. The gameplay of the quests took no more than ~5 minutes in total. And after that I had another ~1 minute of reading as I completed each quest.
So that’s ~4 minutes of reading and ~5 minutes of gameplay. Pretty much a 50/50 split between the time I’m standing still and reading text and the time I’m out and playing my character.
And it’s a very short game experience. That’s a maximum of ~10 minutes for two quests! That’s hardly an adventure. It’s a hand-holding experience from start to finish.
11 million people disagree with you when Vanilla was at its top.
I think you’re just being contrarian for the sake of arguing. You want to win the argument, so you’re fishing for angles to retort your way into being right. No one in their right mind would chose chores over quests in a game.
That’s cheating. You can’t use D2
I honestly can’t tell how they did it but D2 story telling felt immersive and you automatically followed it and knew what’s up without even really reading anything. It’s just sorcery.
(but somehow the ARPG genre does it always way better, don’t ask me how, had the same feeling in Lost Ark)
Na that’s non sense. There simply was no competition and WoW was pretty much the most popular game.
Did you ever see those 11 million players again across all the private servers? No.
Did we see them on Classic re-release? No.
This fact proves that those 11 million did not exist because they liked the design. The simply had nothing else at that time and that’s reality.
What argument? We don’t even argue lmao.
I was just curious what you were talking about and now I know it. I disagree with your opinion. That’s it. There is nothing to win or to lose.
You know… variety is a good thing. Every game doesn’t have to be a mind game. Our brains also need, and do well, with less demanding tasks. It’s called resting your brain, and it helps it learn new things and manage more in the long run.
I am sure even you do some braindead activities, if you stop and think about it. Stop being ashamed of it.
