10-14-2009, 12:07 PM
What I'm getting at is you need team goals which can be accomplished (or worked towards) individually, as if they were personal goals. So you log on for an hour and do X to accomplish some personal goal of yours, but it also impacts the greater goal of Y which many people are contributing towards.
I keep going back to Planetside for this because I think in a wagame, individuals can create their own goals which can be fun, short term and still help the team.
Kind of like our "Superminefield". Three of us would get together, go to a likely intersection of roads, hide a spawn spot nearby and start mining the road, setting up turrets, etc. It was our own personal little mission that was fun for us but it also helped the team, mainly by waylaying incoming enemies trying to approach the base through that road. We wouldn't have minded if someone else wandered in and started helping. From his perspective, he's doing his own personal job of killing enemies. From our perspective, he's helping with Superminefield. From the team's perspective, we're impeding the enemy from reaching the main battle.
By comparison, typical MMORPGs would have him show up and start killing NPCs for some quest and we simply don't care at all what he's doing because it's of no use to us, nor is it of any use to the team. He's truly soloing in an MMORPG, as good as being offline, because the game has given him solo goals that don't mean anything to anyone except him.
Wargames support my idea well simply because it's not quest driven anyway. There are team objectives to keep combat focused and it's up to you to find something fun to do within that system.
Accomplishing this in a quest based system is harder to conceptualize.
I just don't think "quests" are the proper way to move forward in MMORPGs. All they do is get in the way of community building. I think "questing" has forced people to act more as individuals, to the point that a lot of players play the game as if it was single player.
I keep going back to Planetside for this because I think in a wagame, individuals can create their own goals which can be fun, short term and still help the team.
Kind of like our "Superminefield". Three of us would get together, go to a likely intersection of roads, hide a spawn spot nearby and start mining the road, setting up turrets, etc. It was our own personal little mission that was fun for us but it also helped the team, mainly by waylaying incoming enemies trying to approach the base through that road. We wouldn't have minded if someone else wandered in and started helping. From his perspective, he's doing his own personal job of killing enemies. From our perspective, he's helping with Superminefield. From the team's perspective, we're impeding the enemy from reaching the main battle.
By comparison, typical MMORPGs would have him show up and start killing NPCs for some quest and we simply don't care at all what he's doing because it's of no use to us, nor is it of any use to the team. He's truly soloing in an MMORPG, as good as being offline, because the game has given him solo goals that don't mean anything to anyone except him.
Wargames support my idea well simply because it's not quest driven anyway. There are team objectives to keep combat focused and it's up to you to find something fun to do within that system.
Accomplishing this in a quest based system is harder to conceptualize.
I just don't think "quests" are the proper way to move forward in MMORPGs. All they do is get in the way of community building. I think "questing" has forced people to act more as individuals, to the point that a lot of players play the game as if it was single player.