SE, you managed to take the umph outta quests.

No one is forcing you to do these quests. All you need to do is the main story questline and that has plenty of 'umph' in my opinion.

FFXI quests hardly told you what to do, they were so random that sometimes you had to speak to evey NPC in game to trigger the next step. And anyway that was only until someone didn't update the wiki. So having the steps listed into a browser window or the game window won't change the way you complete it but it will save you the time needed to check multiple wikis until you find the solution and let you play the game.

Anyway, in FFXI, they are trying to "fix" this too, infact the last expansion's quests are more friendly telling you were to go for the next step.

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Originally Posted by Monzcarro

*needless jabs and sarcasm filtered out* Yes, the ability to read ffxiclopedia to find out wtf you're actually supposed to do and the effort required to think "well why didn't they just say that?". Where in FFXIV they give you a quest for each step, FFXI would just give you some flavor text and a have at it. You still had to talk to random npcs, kill certain mobs for plabum, and travel arbitary distances just for the sake of it. Besides the quest text, I daresay the only real difference between then and now is that there's a lot more of them.

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FFXIclopedia wasn't around for the first few years of the game's existence. Even when it was around though, players still had to figure out what to do through trial and error until the articles showed up online, and that includes the authors of the articles themselves. DAT mining wasn't as evolved as it is these days.

That small detail aside tough, nobody's actually saying that having quests spelled out for you in FFXIV is lame. They're rather saying that it's lame when the tasks being explained are easy to the point of being mindless.

Even if you did have the specifics of what you were supposed to do in FFXI handed to you by friends or websites, the quests still presented extremely difficult challenges and offered unique, meaningful rewards. That is at least to say, they were extremely difficult as long as you were trying to do them by yourself at a level when the rewards were actually relevant to you. Soloing quests at a relevant level was nigh impossible unless you were a pet class subbing WHM/RDM/SCH, or a WHM/RDM/SCH subbing NIN and geared uniquely for soloing, which combined to make a demographic group consisting of only a very small percentage of players. The majority of players actually had to devote a good chunk of work and time into preparation before they could consider leaving town to tackle a quest, and they needed to actually cultivate a social network of players willing to help each other in order to get things like quests done in that game. This required amount of effort, planning, and oftentimes coordination made quests actually feel exciting when they were undertaken.

These days however, people's constant demands for MOAR CONTENT and FASTER CONTENT have combined to cause developers to focus on quantity of quests over their quality of depth, while simultaneously a rise in the appeal of MMOs to a more (and I use this word without negative connotation) casual playerbase has caused developers to dramatically reduce the average difficulty of questing. That may float your boat. In fact, it wouldn't be surprising if it did, considering that this trend is happening for a reason -- most players vocalize that this type of development is what pleases them. There's nothing wrong with that. Conversely however, it is still going to be a saddening thing to a minority of others who appreciated the way that things used to be. That's all that's being spoken of by the OP and their supporters here. No need to hate in this thread, folks. It's just a difference in opinion.

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Originally Posted by Gramul

And that's a little sad.

This isn't for the better. Quests have turned form performing feats of duty, bravery and cleverness into dull checklists. They've removed the organic element and put in its stead a systematic set of skinner boxes.
All the romance and lore is stripped away, leaving us with obvious and boring goal posts. It's like the character of the quests themselves where cut out to make the whole experience quicker and easier.
There's no engagement. It's become a chore.

Back then, you had to actually read your quest. Find out the locations, enemies, artifacts, tools and goals by taking it from word of mouth. There where actual dangers in your way, and you could choose to cleverly sneak by or join up with a friend. Everything's just feels so mechanical and cold now.

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http://31.media.tumblr.com/2e1aa1353...ey4oo1_500.gif

The thing is, designing objectives in an obfuscated way isn't necessarily equivalent to the quest being "epic", let alone hard. Sometimes obfuscation is just obfuscation for obfuscation's sake. To me, it boils down to logic, or knowledge: can I clear the quest by thinking "logically" or by using "what I know" about the lore? If yes, then that obfuscation was interesting, gameplay-wise. If not, then it's just bad design.

Take two extreme examples.

1. Quest giver says: "Oh, I need to protect my chest, something sturdy, because my leather jacket isn't good enough." [you notice that NPC is level 25]
=> in a game like FFXIV, I can easily deduce that I need to obtain a lv25 plate chest armor for that NPC. It's easily, logically deduced. He doesn't really need to tell me the name of the item, I can look for it myself in my crafting log or at the AH.
=> It's a nice way to obfuscate an objective while still giving me a way to resolve that problem. It feels rewarding because I use my logic and my knowledge of the game to do so.

2. Quest giver says: "Oh, you need to talk to my best friend about that. No, I won't tell you his name." [let's assume that name isn't anywhere in the lore]
=> there's no way I can find the solution, save speaking to every NPC in the freaking game. That I read the answer on a wiki or in-game isn't different at that point, I end up simply being handed the answer.
=> It's frustrating, because there's no way I can win by myself (unless I spent 3 days talking to all NPCs...). Simply put, a frustrating design is a bad design, it doesn't feel rewarding, and it actually forces me out of the game to get an answer. Worst possible scenario, if you ask me.

My 2 cts on obfuscated steps.

My only problem with questing is that, no matter the task, whether it be "Talk to that guy standing next to me", or "Go kill Garuda", you get the same amount of XP for the task if it's at the same level.

Quests in every mmo ever have sucked. The only exception to this was The Secret World but questing was the core of the game, so much so that they totally cheaped out on the combat and shot themselves in the foot.

Had a game come along with TSW's questing and Tera's combat, I think every MMO would feel that.