Quests are too... casual?

The_Tarantian

Yeah, I guess some would say that quests ARE MADE for casuals, but c'mon.
The stealthy way quests are easy due to NPC's braindead behavior (hello, Balmora questline, where guards are in error 404-mode 24\7).
The puzzle quests are way too easy due to the their six-years-old-schoolboy complexity.
Combat - mkay, combat part of quests is mostly ok, though on 160cp being properly geared up those feel too ez as well.
And not to mention lil' to no diversity in most of the quests. Big ones are more or less mkay in that aspect though.

Am I the only one feeling that quests should be a bit more challenging?

Anyhoo, cheers and have a nice day everyone.

SirAndy

Unfortunately pretty much all mainstream games have followed the trend to excessive hand-holding.

This is what solving a puzzle now looks like:

NPC: "Hey, i lost xyz, been looking for it everywhere, can you help me find it?"

Me: "Sure, why not"

Me: "Follow big obnoxious quest marker to location of xyz"

VaranisArano

Its slightly better than Skyrim, where the "puzzles" involved turning rocks to match the order of rocks on the wall, animals in a book, or looking at the dragon claw key.

VaranisArano

SirAndy wrote: »

Unfortunately pretty much all mainstream games have followed the trend to excessive hand-holding.

This is what solving a puzzle now looks like:

NPC: "Hey, i lost xyz, been looking for it everywhere, can you help me find it?"

Me: "Sure, why not"

Me: "Follow big obnoxious quest marker to location of xyz"

I'll take that over Morrowind's "Turn left at the forked tree and straight down the foyada until you see the door to kwama cave between two hills." And then I'm wandering all over hoping I saw the right forked tree and I've found 5 doors and none of them are the kwama mine and I'm pretty sure I picked the wrong foyada and using recall means starting all over while I walk at a snails pace, as cliff racers sweep overhead and I'm pretty sure an ash storm is brewing...

I liked Morrowind, don't get me wrong, but quest markers are really nice too.

Elsonso

VaranisArano wrote: »

Its slightly better than Skyrim, where the "puzzles" involved turning rocks to match the order of rocks on the wall, animals in a book, or looking at the dragon claw key.

Myst, it was not.

SirAndy

VaranisArano wrote: »

I'll take that over Morrowind's "Turn left at the forked tree and straight down the foyada until you see the door to kwama cave between two hills." And then I'm wandering all over hoping I saw the right forked tree and I've found 5 doors and none of them are the kwama mine and I'm pretty sure I picked the wrong foyada and using recall means starting all over while I walk at a snails pace, as cliff racers sweep overhead and I'm pretty sure an ash storm is brewing...
I liked Morrowind, don't get me wrong, but quest markers are really nice too.

Dunno, i like it when a game challenges my brain, not just the speed of my fingers.

I always found the exploration part of Morrowind enjoyable.

The_Tarantian

SirAndy wrote: »

i like it when a game challenges my brain, not just the speed of my fingers.

I always found the exploration part of Morrowind enjoyable.

Gotta agree here, exploration itself can be very entertaining and to be honest, ESO brought me some good fun moments related to survey. I actually played most of ESO as a single game, since I'm in real love with the whole setting.

Also, I would really like to see the features, allowing you to use the enviroment instead of straight approaching the enumi (like in the beginning of TES IV: Oblvion, when you could drop the logs into poor goblins or whoever was in that cave). Not the braindeadly-everyone-use-instead-of-fight-way of course, but more cunning and intelligence demanding way.
Ah, dreams, sweet dreams...

VaranisArano

SirAndy wrote: »

VaranisArano wrote: »

I'll take that over Morrowind's "Turn left at the forked tree and straight down the foyada until you see the door to kwama cave between two hills." And then I'm wandering all over hoping I saw the right forked tree and I've found 5 doors and none of them are the kwama mine and I'm pretty sure I picked the wrong foyada and using recall means starting all over while I walk at a snails pace, as cliff racers sweep overhead and I'm pretty sure an ash storm is brewing...
I liked Morrowind, don't get me wrong, but quest markers are really nice too.

Dunno, i like it when a game challenges my brain, not just the speed of my fingers.

I always found the exploration part of Morrowind enjoyable.

I liked it...to a certain point. Wandering over the same stretch of hills trying to find a kwama mine again and again because the graphics made it hard to tell if I was following the directions or not was not something I liked. Morrowind did pretty well with giving directions for its main quests, but some of the errands "drop off alcohol for the miners" and the like were more trouble than they were worth if the directions were vague.

Anotherone773

Maybe a daily multistep quest that could possibly involve multiple zones. Quest markers are disabled. It consist of clues that are vague, sometimes combat, sometime bribery, sometimes puzzles. Maybe the quest could be from an artifact merchant/collector. And your job is to figure out where the "lost" artifact is and bring it back. An example of a quest might be:

1) You start with information about an Argonian beggar on the streets of wayrest who mentioned, after to many ales, about an expedition he was on and researchers mentioning a book they found containing information about a rare artifact.

2) You find the beggar after searching wayrest. But he has not ate anything but scraps for days. He says he will tell you what he knows if you can find him his favorite food( a crafted green food). The beggar tells you about ayleid ruins that he went to as a laborer for some researchers. He doesnt remember where they are but remembers dominion soldiers along the road and that the ruins were right on a stream as he use to spend his evenings fishing just outside of the ruins. He gives you the title of the book and says it should still be there.

3) After some trial and error and using your knowledge of tamriel you think you found the right ruins. Now you fight through hostile NPC as you scour the bookshelves for the book. You find the book and read it. In it( you actually have to read it as you dont get an updated quest telling you where to go next), you find some of the history of the artifact in question. The artifact was last recorded in the book to in the tomb of ( dead NPC name) that is located in Northern Valenwood( at this point you need to have a bit of lore knowledge or do some research to figure out that Northern Valenwood is the old name for Reaper's March)

4) You find the tomb, but find it has been cleared of valuables. It seems you have reached a dead end. You decide to talk to some of the locals and see if you can pick up the trail. Finally after many ( often boring conversations) you find a bosmer who has knowledge of the robbery. It turns out that the artifact was cleaned out in a heist by the thieves guilds nearly 30 years ago.

5) Your next logical step would be to talk to the guildmaster of the thieves guild in Abahs landing. You scour old documents and books in the den to reveal who pulled the heist. Nothing is mentioned of where the artifact went too. but does mention who lead the heist.

6) You talk to the guildmaster again and learn the heist leader "retired" to fencing at the outlaw refuge in morrowind.

7) you get to the refuge and find the fence. he will tell you who he sold it to but you have do him a favor first. In a cave on the west side of the volcano is a dwemer artifact that one of his clients want for their collection. The only problem is its guard by dwemer constructs. Inside is a wall with blocks on it. Each block has dwemer word. The blocks have to be pushed in a certain order in order to open the door to go further in. he gives you a map of the location of the cave( looks like treasure map)

8) You have two choices try to figure out the order. You can either push them randomly and try to find the correct blocks and order. Or you can try to solve the puzzle. You get to the ruins fight a few dwemer spiders and make it to the room with the wall. You see 10 blocks in the wall with dwemer words. Luckily you are able to make out the words. The inscription above says " If one has an infusion of chal, a marble, and a leather-sewing needle; what 3 items should they acquire at the market? If you choose not to fight your way through dwemer constructs of increasing difficulty and instead figure out the puzzle you may find that the reference is probably in your own lore library. A search of dwemer scrolls will find that scroll IV contains the answer you need: bone-tweezers, guar egg, and boot-jack.

9) you make it past the door and acquire the trinket. Once back at the fence, he reveals he sold it to a noble Breton in Port Hunding but only gave a first name of (NPC first name)

10) you find the noble in port hunding and ask him about the artifact. He says he owned it, but bandits stole it a few years ago. He remembers the bandit leader was called ( NPC name) and they use to work out of a cave on the north western side of the island.

11) you find the bandits and dispatch them. You find the bandit in question who is now the leader. He is not in the mood to talk and you are forced to kill him. On his body is two maps. One of a map of Tamriel with an area in the northwest circled. The other is a drawing of a local area( treasure map style) with an x on it. At the top of the map it has a single word, the name of the artifact.

12) you travel to the general area and look for the spot. You find it and dig up a treasure chest. Its locked with an inscription " Only a sigil stone will stop the wrath of oblivion" You see a round inset with a keyhole. You decide to pick it. It has 6 tumblers and is very complex. You manage to pick 5 but you took to long and portal opens and several scamps burst forth. You dispatch them and try again. one tumbler to go before dremora burst from a new portal and attack. You try again and faulter. This time 2 Daedroth( elites) emerge from a portal and attack. You barely survive with your life. Finally you manage all 6 tumblers and unlock the chest. You have found the artifact!.

13) you return to the artifact merchant and claim your reward( XP, gold, and either writ vouchers or something similar with the merchant selling similar quality items that you can buy for writ vouchers)


It would be a lot of work to add enough quests like this to make it seem dynamic( though they could do some with every patch or make them more dynamic) but it would interesting to have quests that you had to figure out and that dont always have an obvious answer or that cannot be solved completely by trial and error.

Sauce_Revolution

Quests that work like the litany of blood would be nice. Or even just more similar achievements.
While I think the combat should be harder I doubt that'll happen. Puzzles though, I don't see any reason why they can't be made more difficult, with the occasional mind-bender would be nice. At least with puzzles if you can't do them you can look up a guide (and forever live with the shame).

Turelus

I think some of it is too easy especially the tasks where you literally just have to follow the markers, but then again sometimes I just want to do a quest without dungeon crawler levels of thinking.

I would appreciate if ZOS would make quest descriptions (especially journal ones) in a way where you can do all the quests with markers turned off, so those who want to do some hunting and thinking can switch the markers off and puzzle it out.

DKsUnite

turn off your UI. never see a marker again. ultra hard mode

Asardes

They are designed like that, so anyone can buy the game and just play. More buyers, more money for the developers. So I understand their point of view.

The main issue is that NPC enemy behavior is so simple and damage is so low that they literally pose no threat. You can just fight them for minutes with just basic attacks, and never once be in the danger of dying. So even jumping in a normal dungeons feels like a huge leap for people who just quested, and jumping in veteran content after that is even harder. I farmed a particular set in normal and several vet instances of a part 1 dungeon, and I queued as all 3 roles on my Templar. In good groups I was doing slightly less than 50% DPS, in bad ones I've gone as high as 85%. Some of those players were 300-500 CP. And I confess I'm a mediocre DD, having played mostly tank, and I can barely pull just under 30K on stationary targets on most situations.

So yes, the overland content is easy enough to let you enjoy the story with just doing a few clicks, but too easy to really teach you anything about combat. It's basically a point and scroll kinda game with nicer 3D graphics.

Vanya

I shall speak from my point of view.

First let us define and specify what Casual means for individual. What would you realistically expect from a Landscape quest? So you have spoken to "that" guy and you have travelled there and slaughtered a pack of Dremora cultists or Beats, collected materials,investigated the source, solved mini puzzles and so on..

The quests in general for MMO genre in essence cannot be changed. As for challenge , It's impossible to please anyone. It depends on your build,gear,amount of enemies you are facing. They can theory increase the damage of enemies and decrease yours ,but to completely overhaul the entire questlines. Shor's Bones! People are never happy indeed. Elder Scrolls Online for me does offer a lot of variety, tis not only collect Pelts or Slay {1/10} Not at all. It's the most versatile an diverse MMO.

The game is enormous, You cannot conjure something on such a degree. You cannot have everything, but challenge in depth and impossibly long /challenging quests. It doesn't work in that system of MMO.

Let us visualise NPC's with massive health pool which will take few minutes to take down or cleaning "solo" quest that would require 1 hour? Would you? If Another tale. It's very simple to unleash your frustration and negativity to Developer wanting a challenge, but for them it could be an ardours task.

In whichever fashion you put it, you cannot "balance" the MMO. Any further increase of foe's Resistances,Damage,Health Pool will only either irritate and displease "Casual" playerabase.

That is the issue and narrow minded view of certain players. If you solely focus on one single aspect on the game, you'll rapidly get tired ,bored and frustrated. Not everyone can invest massive amount of time nor has knowledge or skills to conquer in PVP or toy with even bosses with 800 Champion points or can sit 12 hours daily and grind to Oblivion and beyond.

The_Tarantian

Vanyalicious wrote: »

I shall speak from my point of view.
...The quests in general for MMO genre in essence cannot be changed. As for challenge , It's impossible to please anyone. It depends on your build,gear,amount of enemies you are facing. They can theory increase the damage of enemies and decrease yours ,but to completely overhaul the entire questlines. Shor's Bones! People are never happy indeed. Elder Scrolls Online for me does offer a lot of variety, tis not only collect Pelts or Slay {1/10} Not at all. It's the most versatile an diverse MMO...

Fun enough, you read the part about challenge, but totally ignored the rest of topic.
All your talks are about combat difficulty, while in the very first post it's been said:

"The_Tarantian wrote: »

Combat - mkay, combat part of quests is mostly ok...

Questing isn't all about it's combat difficulty, you know... So yeah, speaking of narrow-minds EksDi

Anyhoo...
No, I'm not demaing ALL QUESTS to be hardcore-challenge-of-your-life. Some of them are supposed to be ez.
Yet I want to have SOME of them being comtetetive. And this mostly applies to non-combat parts of quests - i.e. puzzles, stealth missions and generally having brain involved into completing, instead of "one quest - one kill, no luck - just skill" type.

Oh yeah, I'm quite happy with current questing by the way. I just think it could be even better.
You, obviously, think otherwise.

Morgha_Kul

Makes me wonder how today's players would have handled games in the old days... things like Eye of the Beholder, Dungeon Master or... THE ELDER SCROLLS I: ARENA.

Sevn

Without intentionally trying to insult or offend anyone, I think it comes down to where you are in your life and why you play ESO.

Plenty of other games offer challenging gameplay/quests, I play those when I'm the mood for such. I play ESO for what it is, a casual romp thru a dungeons and dragons setting.

Cptacidtrip

Turelus wrote: »

I would appreciate if ZOS would make quest descriptions (especially journal ones) in a way where you can do all the quests with markers turned off, so those who want to do some hunting and thinking can switch the markers off and puzzle it out.

Yes I would like that as well. I find myself just speed clicking through dialogue a lot in eso. For one, I'm just trying to catch up to everyone since about 3yrs and 8 months late because I was brainwashed by destiny for so long, and two I know that it there will just be a quest marker I can make a b-line for.....unless I'm on the wrong side of a gigantic damn cliff that spans the whole zone.

I was addicted to Oblivion for a long time and I liked how there were more quests requiring you to carefully listen to the npc or having to pop open the quest log to read the instructions. I guess I just feel the need to rush through everything now considering my gaming time is extremely limited do to needing to adult a lot more than I did during that time.

Xerikten

Morgha_Kul wrote: »

Makes me wonder how today's players would have handled games in the old days... things like Eye of the Beholder, Dungeon Master or... THE ELDER SCROLLS I: ARENA.

they would download the cheat codes.

Morgha_Kul

Cptacidtrip wrote: »

Turelus wrote: »

I would appreciate if ZOS would make quest descriptions (especially journal ones) in a way where you can do all the quests with markers turned off, so those who want to do some hunting and thinking can switch the markers off and puzzle it out.

Yes I would like that as well. I find myself just speed clicking through dialogue a lot in eso. For one, I'm just trying to catch up to everyone since about 3yrs and 8 months late because I was brainwashed by destiny for so long, and two I know that it there will just be a quest marker I can make a b-line for.....unless I'm on the wrong side of a gigantic damn cliff that spans the whole zone.

I was addicted to Oblivion for a long time and I liked how there were more quests requiring you to carefully listen to the npc or having to pop open the quest log to read the instructions. I guess I just feel the need to rush through everything now considering my gaming time is extremely limited do to needing to adult a lot more than I did during that time.

I agree, especially when the whole point of a quest is to FIND something... putting a big arrow on it or putting it on the map is kind of defeating the purpose of the mission.

I actually did this over at Star Trek Online, where they usually do the same thing. Their Foundry system allows players to make missions, so I did one where at one point, the players have to find a character who is hiding from Romulans. Of course, I didn't put him on the map, and the player can't just scan for him, so they had to find other ways of finding him (in this case, since the Romulans were looking for him too, if the players just listened in on Romulan conversations, they would get the clues they needed to locate him...).

I like puzzles that make you THINK a bit. Not everything should be overcome by hitting it.

Everstorm

I get annoyed each time I have to do the light beam "puzzle" in Stonefall. It's an insult to one's intelligence. Only interesting puzzle I can think of is the dwemer contraption in the mine in Wrothgar, though the difficulty is for a large part due to the perspective.