Pushing Too Hard : SWL

Yesterday I happened to read something Telwyn posted about the new Anima Allocation system that was added to Secret World Legends as part of a recent "Quality of Life" update. Then I saw Syp talking about it too.

I had read about all this when it happened but at the time I didn't have a window of opportunity through which to look the changes over. Well, what better time than halfway through a lazy Sunday afternoon?

I logged in and went to check the new system, only to find that you need to be Level 20 to use it. I'd already forgotten that SWL, unlike TSW, has levels. I couldn't even have guessed with any conviction what mine might be.

It turned out that my one and only character was Level 18. That seemed close enough to fix so I pulled on my leveling pants (I don't actually have leveling pants although that's a merchandising idea right there...) and set to it.

I warmed up by doing The Black House. It was far shorter and easier than I remembered and yet I still managed to die somehow.

I'd logged out in the roadside store in Savage Coast. I thought I remembered a couple of simple kill quests there so I went to grab them...and they wouldn't give them to me! I conned a couple of mobs. They were only a handful of levels higher but the quests involving them were recommended for level 22 and hard-locked somewhere above 18.

Well. That's not fun. For all my droning on about "comfort gaming" and liking to do things the easy way, it's been my counter-intuitive practice of extremely long standing to push ahead of my level while leveling up.

Having developed most of my MMO habits in the five years before WoW appeared to reset the hobby I never acquired any innate feeling for "quest hubs" or "completing an area". To me, the only parameters to let me know if I should be where I am, doing what I'm doing, are whether anyone has anything they're willing to let me do and whether I can do it without dying. Much.

As a compulsive leveler, I am also always very aware of what constitutes good xp. That varies from game to game, be it questing, grinding, open world or dungeons, solo or group, PvE or PvP. It doesn't take me long to get a feel for it and in most cases you get better xp doing quests and killing mobs somewhat above your level.

I don't recall Innsmouth Academy even having a lacrosse court, let alone a quest for it. And my other Templar's an alumni!

On my run through The Secret World a few years ago the main limiting factor was gear. With no levels it was theoretically possible to push a long way ahead without scratching around for every last quest and as an explorer I am always eying the horizon.

I remember leaving Egypt, which had become a tad too tough to be fun, to go to Transylvania, which was harder still, because I found I could -just- kill the very first mobs (ghouls, I believe) inside the zone line. Those ghouls dropped gear that was a significant upgrade and with a few of those I was able to go back to Egypt and progress a little further.

That's how I have played MMOs since the end of the last century. That's my favorite gameplay - or my favorite solo gameplay, anyway.

Secret World Legends doesn't really let you do that. For one thing there aren't any gear drops to speak of but more significantly, not only is there now some very strict level locking on the content but the mobs seem to have been adjusted accordingly.

At this point in the questline every mob is level 22 while I'm 19.

At level 18, anything below me presents no challenge at all. I can just barrel into clusters of Level 16s and mow them down. At even con it's still straightforward but let the mobs go to 20 or 21 and everything changes fast.

It seems as though, in the quest to make the game more accessible and, particularly, comprehensible for an audience that didn't appreciate TSW, Funcom have decided to funnel players into a very specific channel. The quests may not be linear but the options for your character are considerably more constricted than they used to be.

One quest that didn't appear to be locked was the main storyline. In the New England section of the game that's Dawning of an Endless Night. I was on step 11 so I cracked on with that.

It seemed a lot harder than I remember. Not the celebrated/infamous puzzles, which I either remembered or looked up on the wiki, but the fights. Everything was three or four levels above me and mostly came in pairs or groups. Worst of all were the mages that summon minions, which sometimes found me fighting half a dozen mobs before I'd realized where they were coming from.

I died a lot, which didn't seem to matter in any way other than annoying me. It took me a lot longer than I expected. I had to stop to upgrade my gear, spend my SP and AP and fiddle around with my build, all just to try and get ahead. 

Eventually I brute-forced my way to the end of the Savage Coast sequence, dinging 20 at the same time. My quest indicator pointed me to the third New England zone, Blue Mountain, which is unnerving, considering the game otherwise doesn't yet consider me ready for the second half of Savage Coast.

Was it worth it?

The run took over two hours, so an hour a level, which is laughably, even unimaginably, short by Golden Age standards. I remember I used to allow ten to fifteen hours for a level in the twenties when I was playing EverQuest in the early 2000s.

Even so, it seemed slow, hard work and not a huge amount of fun. The cut scenes weren't as impressive as I remember them, either, the writing not as sharp. Even the voice-work, which I have praised many times, seemed to be considerably more stilted and awkward than I expected.

Maybe that's familiarity, maybe exaggerated expectations or the disappointing false glow of nostalgia. Whatever the reason, I'd had enough. I didn't even stop to experiment with the Anima Allocator. Instead I logged out and went to play EQ2, where my Bruiser is also fighting above his weight class.

The difference there is that he's winning, easily, which I find to be a lot more fun. The only downside is that questing above your level gets you drops you can't equip, a sure sign that whoever designed the quest didn't expect you to get there that soon.

That's a problem I'd always rather have, though. After all, if I managed to finish the quest or kill the mob, wearing what I'm wearing, well, I obviously don't really need those upgrades yet, do I?

Taking Sides

Syp started the ball rolling last week when he suggested MMORPGs would be better without side quests. As well as spawning its own lengthy comment thread, the modest proposal sparked replies at GamingSF and Endgame Viable along with a comprehensive and convincing rebuttal from Azuriel at In An Age.

I've been mulling all week. I find my own views are...complex. Contradictory. Conflicted.

My instinctive response was to leap to the defense of the "Side Quest" as a fundamental, structural component of the entire genre: one of those essential elements without which it would be awkward to argue a game was an MMO at all. That lasted about as long as it took me to remember all the MMOs that have managed passably well without one or more of those so-called "essentials". Levels, dungeons, races, classes - you name it and you can bet some developer threw it under a bus back in pre-alpha.

It would, then, without question, be possible to design an MMORPG with no side quests and still have it be, indisputably, an MMO. But would that be a good idea?

No. Not to my mind. For one thing, Azuriel's argument, that "Sidequests are the mechanism by which imaginary worlds are built" is persuasive.

Trapper Borgus? Trapper Bogus, more like!

So-called side quests are often the parts you remember best, longest and most fondly. I'd be pushed to recall a single line of dialog from the "Ages End" storyline that formed the narrative spine of EQ2 for a decade but certain phrases from far less portentous plots come back to me over and over, like restless ghosts.

Mrs Bhagpuss and I often croak "Oh, my aching back!" in imitation of the malingering dwarf who doles out a series of tedious "quests" at the entrance to Thundering Steppes. I recently added someone to my GW2 friends list purely on the strength of a conversation we had that began when I sent him a tell about his character, who he'd named after Baby Joseph Sayer. Only a week ago Mrs Bhagpuss, making a new character, named her after a quest-giver from a quest she hasn't done in a decade. I could go on. And on.

Side quests are like off-topic conversations in a movie. They bring both the characters and the world they inhabit to life. It's more than two decades since I last saw Pulp Fiction, for example, but the first thing that comes to mind when I think of it is the "Royale with cheese" speech.

That scene does absolutely nothing to further the main plot but it's of paramount importance as to why the movie had such an extensive and long-lasting impact on cinema. Seemingly irrelevant details like this make the difference between bumping your nose on the back of a wardrobe or pushing on past fir branches covered in snow.

Suuure you did. Got a doctor's note?

Apart from being the warp (or is the weft?) in the weave of the world, side quests are also integral to gameplay. Or they are if you want to have a particular kind of game. You can hardly call your game "EverQuest" and then not put any quests in it, can you?

And yet...

The original EQ did indeed have plenty of quests but you didn't have to do any of them, not if you didn't want to. You could level up, equip yourself and generally find plenty to justify your $14.99 a week without ever stooping so low as to do a favor for an elf or help a halfling out of a bind.

What's more, the game kept its quests to itself. There were no feathers over anyone's head, no question marks or exclamation points or slowly rotating neon donuts hanging in the air. If you wanted to find out if an NPC had something on her mind you had to ask - and not by right-clicking and listening to a voice actor or watching a cut scene, either.

No, you had to read a wall of text and then type in a reply. If you were good at spotting keywords or just sufficiently verbose you'd get an answer and on it went. And you had to pay attention. The game didn't record anything in a journal for you. There was no journal, other than the notepad and pencil you kept next to your 15" CRT monitor.

Well, you were either there and you know all this or you weren't and you really don't need to. We won't be going back there again, will we? Oh, wait...

Of course, those weren't "side quests". We didn't have side quests back then. We just had quests.

In fact, we couldn't have side quests. Can't have sides without a main and main quests hadn't been invented yet. I played EQ, Dark Age of Camelot, Anarchy Online, The Realm, Endless Ages - a whole bunch of early noughties MMOs. If any of those had a through-line or a central narrative or a Main Quest Sequence then I never tripped over it.

"Quest". It's "Quest"! For heaven's sake get the jargon right!

Come to think of it, that doesn't mean there wasn't one. Just that, if there was, I neither knew nor needed to know about it. The games themselves certainly made no attempt to push Story at me. What they served up was Lore and plenty of it. Also, world-changing events, but even those you mostly had to discover for yourself. If there was a story it was one we lived, not followed.

That pre-lapsarian world lasted a few years. Then World of Warcraft came along and changed everything. Or so the legend goes. And, yes, it's undeniably true that WoW's model of gameplay, particularly the level-by-quest format that's relevant to this discussion, was adopted so widely over the following decade that it came to constitute a new orthodoxy for the genre.

But it was WoW's unprecedented commercial success that irrevocably and inaccurately attributed the quest-based format to the first ever MMO, leaving every other developer toddling along behind, hanging on to Blizzard's shirt-tails . In fact, by the time WoW launched, the floodgates had already breached. EQ2, which launched two weeks before Azeroth opened its doors to the paying public, plumped for an almost identical system. Quest-driven gameplay was set to become the meta for the genre whether or not WoW got there first.

Over the years that followed questing became so ubiquitous, so unavoidable, that whatever luster it briefly enjoyed, tarnished. And yet, even as excitement over unfettered access to an infinitude of unrelated quests began to fade, along came Lord of the Rings Online, upping the ante with its inevitable foregrounding of a central quest-line so portentous no-one could hope to ignore it.

The final nail in the coffin of player freedom hammered home when BioWare joined the party; with their Fourth Pillar the assimilation was complete. MMOs had morphed into single-player RPGs that single players didn't have to play on their own. Go, socializers!

Almost without anyone noticing there was anything odd about it, we woke up in a future where every MMO, even supposed sandboxes, had to have a plot. A story. A narrative. A beginning, a middle and an end. It was like a collective bad dream from which the genre is only now beginning to awaken.

Wait while I get you another pint, old-timer. Then you can tell me more about your fascinating life. Said no-one, ever.

How did it happen? And why, exactly? Why did just being in a world, killing monsters, leveling your character and getting better gear cease to be enough? How did MMORPGs sleep-walk into becoming a narrative medium?

Don't look at me. I drank the same Kool-Aid  everyone else did. And, like I said, I'm conflicted.

It's not as though I don't welcome some direction. I was never swept up by the sandbox craze that followed the perceived failure of the Theme Park narrative. I like to go my own way, sure, but the exhilaration of taking the path less taken requires there be a path more taken, too.

I've heaped enough praise on The Secret World's story, after all. I'm invested in the GW2 "School for Dragon Slayers" plotline even though I know it's incoherent nonsense. I've even found much to like in the ultra-linear central narratives of the likes of Twin Saga and Blade and Soul. I enjoy a good - or even not-so-good - story as much as the next addict.

Stepping back, though, trying to be objective for once in my life, I have to wonder whether, rather than putting side quests on ice, it isn't the Main Quest itself that should be deep-sixed. If side quests add breadth and depth to the world, don't main quests try to put that world in a box and close the lid? When it comes to exploring a new world, the contrast between side quests and main quests can feel like the difference between hitch-hiking across the USA and taking a "twelve cities in ten days" coach tour.

You'd better close that fourth wall - I think your meta's showing.

None of which is meant to suggest that side quests are perfect as they are. The love and attention the writers give to some side quests make reading the label on the back of the ketchup bottle feel like studying classical literature by comparison and, much though I love settling down to a good evening's rat-killing, I'd hardly describe pest control as "questing. I'd far rather see a bulletin board in the market square or a notice pinned to a wall, signed by the relevant council official, declaring open season on vermin, than have to listen to some NPC's spurious backstory, trumped up in an intern's lunch-hour to justify the slaughter.

As players we need stuff to do - but everything we do doesn't have to come with a tale attached.
That's why someone invented "tasks. Or "missions", if you still want to be able to pretend to yourself that what you're doing matters.

Quests, though; if you're going to dignify them with the name, quests require gravitas. Or humor. Or pathos. Something.

I'm all for improving the quality of side quests. Reducing the quantity, though? Or eliminating them entirely? Nope. I'm dead set against it. In fact, I want more and I want better.

As for grand, all-encompassing, over-arching Main Questlines, well, if there's a petition going around to get Main Quests out of MMOs and back into single-player RPGs, where they belong, show me where to sign! I've got my pen right here.