Flagging Quests vs Finding Quests

[Denmo]

Please read the post/thread in entirety before you make a response. At the very least, skim. LIKE IF YOU AGREE! THAT'S WHAT IT'S THERE FOORR

Thesis (TL,DR): If we could complete quests and get rewards from them without having them flagged, Questing (in terms of WoW) would be optional, and Exploration would be King.


I'm not sure what MMOs do their quests like this. If they have, I haven't heard of it yet. I'm talking about the way the Elder Scrolls RPGs - Skyrim, Oblivion, and Morrowind - handle their quests. Very similar to the way MMO's do them, but I can see one key difference:

Even if you don't have the quest flagged, you can still complete a quest.

Let's say you're out and about, exploring the wilderness for no particular reason, and you happen upon a Beastman camp. You're feeling awesomely awesome and decide to wipe the suckers out. Oh no! Their leader pops out of his hole and suddenly you've got a boss fight on your hands! You didn't plan on this at all. It's a really tough fight, but you pull through because you're awesome at your job. You loot the bodies, poke around the camp for anything cool, and then move on.

In WoW/MMO's/modern quest system (also 2.0/ARR's, to my knowledge), if you do this, you often get nothing of importance, only later to find out that the boss was indeed a quest mob, and there's actually 3-4 quests involved in that camp that you would've completed had you flagged them. Wow! You just wasted your time by exploring and poking your head around without having quests flagged! You feel really bummed and realize that you should just quest from now on, or you might miss out on some cool stuff. You never go out exploring again, (unless it's achievement related.)

In Skyrim/Oblivion/Morrowind's quest system, if you were to do something like this, you get the loot and clear the quests in question regardless - you just don't know it yet. Only when you head in to town and talk around do you realize, "Oh hey, that boss you want me to kill? Already did that. Reward please." You feel pretty awesome about this happy accident. You endeavor to go exploring more often. Who knows what you might end up finding?

Were FFXIV:ARR to allow for this, IMO, the whole necessity of simply doing quests in succession would fall apart. Questing would become optional. Players could go and do what they wanted, and if they needed some direction, THEN they would grab quests. But trekking out into the wild blue yonder would be an adventure and just as rewarding.

Or think about it this way. You grab one quest that says to kill 5 squirrels, not knowing that there's also a quest to kill 5 crabs, who happen to be intermingled with the squirrels. No biggie! You're killing both them anyway, so you complete both quests. User-friendly! MAGIC!

And to top it off, doing something like this wouldn't be that difficult to implement. Right?

Why don't MMO's do this? What could be the downside to such a system? (serious question, I can't think of any)

Is there an MMO that does already? How does it play?