The toxicity of questing in MMORPGs today

[Alleo]

The question is how exactly should a MMO which is about playing online with lots of players do their questing? How can they tell a good story that makes sense and at the same time give everyone a different kind of experience? Even if we had the possibility of choice this would still be restricted and you will have a very big chance to still have lots of others that did it exactly the same.

I also play Black desert a little next to this game and it has lots of quest too but the quests itself don't reward exp and like a lot of Asian MMOs you will need lots of exp to level up..So you will have to go around and kill lots of monsters to gain levels and I do prefer the FF14 way..Especially since its imo not really a slow leveling up but really fast especially with all those exp bonus you can have. So doing the quests in the game for your first character will mostly lead you to 60 with not much grinding.

[Annwyn]

*snip*

"Sandbox" MMOs offer a good alternative where the world is built first and the quests second. Questing only serves to enrich the game in a sandbox, while the game focuses on giving players the ability to play however they want (exclusively a crafter/merchant for example, or an explorer, a warrior, etc). The only issue with Sandbox MMOs is that there hasn't been a quality one in years, they're all created by indie companies who don't have enough budget and so the games are faced with many problems and fail. But it's just not possible with 100% "Themepark" MMOs as they rely too much on questing to give players choices, and they're still using the kind of stories you'd find in single-player RPGs. I think the answer lies somewhere in the middle between Sandbox and Themepark.