Standard video game combat is ubiquitous in shooters and RPGs. Players and devs are familiar with it, and that makes it easier to implement it and sell it, to innovate it and build on it. Being so deeply ingrained, it's hard to break out from that mold. In MMORPGs, breaking out of it usually involves gathering something and giving it to someone. Collect 5 gorps and give them to the NPC over there. So you walk up to a node for a gorp, interact with it, and repeat the process four more times before moving next to the NPC and interacting with it. Such fetch quests are everywhere.
Another common non-combat quest type is exploring a new area. Another involves mini-games such lockpicking (which can be actual lockpicking, or hacking an interface, or hacking an NPC via a dialogue game) or pickpocketing, which tend to be extra steps for fetch or combat quests rather than the primary objective. The game Beyond Good and Evil had such elements but used photography for collecting items for the main story's fetch and exploration quests.
When we look at it stripped down, these all share the same structure. Fetch quests and combat quests both involve going to an object (whether mobile or not), interacting with it (killing, wounding, healing, giving, taking, etc.), and returning to some other object. More complex quests simply add iterations to one of these steps. Simpler quests (like exploration) simplify the process.
As a fun experiment: can you think of something that either 1) breaks this mold or 2) uses that basic structure in a creative way that breaks out of the explore/fetch/combat mindset? What would it look like in ESO? Or at least puts a different twist on it?
To get you started, consider the requests for some kind of racing game or betting game. There are also some interesting tavern ideas that diverge a bit from what is common in ESO. What about illusion abilities such as fear, frenzy, charm, etc for combat situations? Or a basic flee mechanic that counts as "defeating" a mob?
That was just a warm-up for you to let your brilliance shine. What ideas do you have to share?
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