Tag: questing

The Gaming Couple & Star Wars

Posted on by Gazimoff

Earlier this week we finally preordered Star Wars: The Old Republic. The decision wasn’t based on the recent beta weekend – we’d decided months ago that this was the next game we were going to play. Instead it was purely dependant on what we’re doing during the holiday season and if we’d have a chance to take advantage of early access.

By ‘we’ I mean myself and the lady who I started playing Warcraft with some six or seven years ago and who married me last year. I completely agree with Ravven: the best thing a gamer can do is fall in love with another gamer.

Going into SWTOR represents hitting the reset button for both of us. Back at the launch of World of Warcraft we played together, leveled up characters together and raided together. Since then three expansions have passed and our interests in the game have diverged. I’m only logging in to raid these days, while my wife has moved on to other games.

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Time to Change Quest Mechanics

Posted on by Gazimoff


I’ve recently started playing Rift again after taking a break for about four months. It’s impressive to see how far the game has progressed – talents and abilities have been revamped, the artwork has been improved and a ton of new features have been added. The guys at Trion have been hard at work.

Then there’s the bits that are harder to improve. One of my gripes about Rift is that in the mid levels (about 20 to 40) fatigue starts to set in. The game simply becomes less fun to play, with questing becoming dull and boring. I’m finding it a struggle to motivate myself to log into the game and play. Why? Because every single quest hub is made of boomerang quests.

Almost anyone who’s played through an MMO knows what boomerang quests are, but I’ll explain with an example. You approach a small group of friendly NPCs on the coastline. One of them tells you that there’s a cave up ahead filled with smugglers, and would like your help to remove them. You agree to go off and kill ten Smuggler Pirates and ten Smuggler Pistoliers.

After wading through the cave you return to the NPC, who then asks you to head back out again. Only this time she wants you to kill Smuggler Corsairs and Smuggler Captains. You fight your way back into the cave, killing more Pirates and Pistoliers just to get to your Corsairs. Annoying, right?

On your return, the NPC sees you coated in the blood and bodily fluids of the best part of fifty pirates. Not satisfied she asks you for one last thing. Kill Smuggler Chief Spalding, who resides right at the back of the cave. At this point you swear at the screen and weigh up just telling her to get lost.

But no, being the dutiful soul you are you march back into the cave and trying to sneak your way through to the back, getting spotted, giving in and going on a genocidal rampage against anything Smuggler shaped. Finally you get to where Smuggler Chief Spalding should be, only to find his corpse lying on the floor and a stack of other players waiting for him to return to life.

At this point I either hit the hearthstone and go somewhere else or quit the game and play something more fun. Like Giant Lolcat Olympics In Space.

I have two problems. The first is that it’s really, really lousy quest design. It’s boring, it’s repetitive, it’s frustrating and Rift is jammed full of them. The second problem I have is that it’s a problem that’s already been solved in other games.

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Review: PingCraft LagKiller (Part 1)

Posted on by Gazimoff

Warcraft can be a challenging game at the best of times. Whether it’s fighting raid bosses, battling it out in arenas or just trying to cram daily quests into our hectic schedule we all want to be playing at our best.

There’s various things as gamers that we can do to improve our game time. One is making sure we’re using a computer with enough grunt to handle our favourite MMOs. The next is to select keyboards, mice and other peripherals that support our individual styles of play.

The final piece is our internet connection to the game servers. This is the one thing we sometimes struggle with. You can spend ages trying to pick a good ISP or even move house to get better speeds. Sometimes though there’s pretty much nothing you can do.

This is where latency reduction and tunnelling services like PingCraft’s LagKiller come in – aiming to reduce your in-game latency for a small monthly fee. But does it actually work or is it just some snake-oil scam? Time to put it to the test.

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Warcraft, Rift and Fun

Posted on by Gazimoff

I’m not sure if I announced this anywhere, but back in March I took a month long holiday from Warcraft to play Rift. I felt a little jaded from the game and needed to take a break, much like I occasionally take time off from my real-life job. I think its a healthy thing to do, plus it gives me the chance to look at other games on the market.

Like many people at the moment, I find myself looking at Rift and questioning my subscription. Some people I know have quit the game completely, while others like me are keeping a subscription going to both games.

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Playing Cards at the Carnival

Posted on by Gazimoff

Confession time: I like to take my time when levelling characters. I’ve tried levelling at breakneck speed and it just isn’t for me. Nowadays I prefer to take things at my own pace – I have a bunch of alts that still aren’t at level cap in Warcraft, while in Rift I’m only about two thirds to cap nearly two months after release. After all, what’s the rush?

Spinks recently highlighted an idea that the Everquest 2 developers are kicking around, where experienced returning players could trade cash for a max level character. I agree with her that the concept feels like a bad one, but that it’s getting difficult to justify why.

There’s a great analogy someone once made that compared MMOs to the Lord of the Rings film trilogy. Basically put, if the films followed the same path as many MMOs then the opening twenty minutes would be about getting the ring to Mount Doom. The rest of the first film and the remaining two would all be about getting the ring into the volcano. Feels slightly skewed, right?

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The Future of MMO Control

Posted on by Gazimoff

A modified action bar set from World of Warcraft

As MMO players we have a fond familiarity with the traditional keyboard and mouse interface. We use the mouse to click on something then use the keyboard to perform an action to it. Sure, we might look at getting a fancy mouse to perform more actions or a snazzy keyboard to automate some sequences, but the principle remains the same.

The question is: do we still need them? Would it be possible to streamline the interface and bin the old keyboard-mouse combination or are MMOs just too complex to simplify? Is voice chat viable or do we still need text based chat these days? Would we get any benefits for making this change?

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The Lament of Lost Adventures

Posted on by Gazimoff

Buried in both Greek and Roman mythology is the tale of a lone hero facing impossible odds in order to complete twelve incredible tasks. The tale of the Labours of Hercules is of truly epic proportions, describing how a single man is battered by fate and fortune, toiling to redeem himself only to be struck down. It’s a raw and deep story that’s much more than any TV series or animated movie could hope to achieve.

Such fantasy tales have been around for thousands of years. Our culture and history is filled with great people achieving great things on behalf of other people. It’s why it makes such a rich seam for game developers to dig into – there’s a vast amount of scenarios and encounters just waiting to be retooled.

While the questing back in the Vanilla days of Warcraft had some truly memorable trials, I’m beginning to feel that a subtle shift has occurred. Tales seem to be less about the journey they take you on, instead focusing on a series of moments. Tasks seem to be less Herculean and more run-of-the-mill, as if it’s something that’s expected instead of something monumental. In order to explain further, cast your mind back five years to the earliest days of the game.

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The Quest Converyer Belt

Posted on by Gazimoff

Spoiler Alert: Discussion of the phasing technology used in Cataclysm, it’s history, application and the problems surrounding it. Some allusion to in-game events/quests, although no specific details.

Back in Vanilla, Warcraft was mainly a scattering of quest hubs, each with their localised set of quests. Sure there may have been prerequisites such as a minimum level, but by and large you could quest where you liked. In Cataclysm the experience is streamlined into quest tunnels that guide you through a zone from one end to the other. To help with this, phasing is the toy of choice in the quest designer’s toolbox.

Phasing as a technology started out with a single quest in Burning Crusade. “Intercepting the Mana Cells” was added in patch 2.4.0 as part of the daily quests for the Shattered Sun Offensive. These quests were part of the overall Sunwell Plateau content update, adding the final dungeons and raid instances before the release of Wrath. In the quest, the player used a device to move “out of phase” and be able to interact with the items they needed to complete the quest.

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