SE stop doing the "norm"

[Velhart]

These are your words.



It doesn't mean that, but when an MMO purely built on the premise of a grand story could barely keep the quality up after awhile, you have to wonder if it's because of the volume of quests needed or if it's the developer, usually you can conclude that the volume of quests is why the quality drops off. It happens in all MMOs with a quest grind progression, there's not one MMO that didn't end up having it's quest quality drop off as you progressed.

Hell, Yoshida even said that internal testing there's still not enough, so it could go either way in terms of quality (you either want quantity or quality, it's very hard to do both as proven by recent MMOs), but people seem to be thinking we'll get hundreds of top quality quests to progress through when not even story focused MMOs achieved that.

The only thing I expect high quality quest-wise is the main story. I don't believe we will get a lot of deep storyline side quests. I believe we will get enough that we start to figure out how normal people in the world react to things around them. That is what I feel is important in the side quests. Not every NPC you encounter has to have some major crisis. Even something simple as "Someone opened the gate and let all the sheep out! Can you help bring them back?" can tell you a lot, believe it or not. They would be farmers, they don't have much going on beyond that.

Its called your calm down moments. In media, you have to do a fair balance on epic points and calm down points. If you put too much excitement into the game the whole way through, you get overwhelmed and tired out. Simple small quests between the main storyline is there to help you take a breather, not only that, help you get to know the world in it's simplest form. So when you do that main storyline and you are saving the world, you know the world it is you are fighting for. You are fighting for your country, fighting for that person who made you gather up sheep. Its small building blocks to help you care about the world.

That was the problem with the current FFXIV. Repeated guildleves and only the main storyline quest. Did you really care about the world itself? Not really. It also felt like it was inserted in when they did that. NPC's overall felt dead and you just didn't care what was going on around you. Which caused immersion to suck for the game. With guildleves, you never met the person face to face who was having the issue. It was a lazy way of giving quests without the hassle of adding NPC's in. When you go to an aeth. camp, do you care about the NPC's there? No. Because all gates are set up exactly the same, making the world feel more like a lobby instead of an interactive world.

So remember, small quests are not there exactly to excite you. It is there to help give you a breather between the exciting moments, and get you EXP. That was the one bad thing about Star Wars, they tried too hard to make each quest deep. You sometimes lost focus of why you were there, and sometimes got overwhelmed with the high number of quests in the area with each their own story. That is why simple chat boxes instead of having all voice actors with all epic story's are the better way to go in my opinion, it can be overwhelming. Sure you can put some epic side quests in there, perhaps ones like related to Omega Weapon or something like that. But have to make it limited.

I hope that made sense. :\