A Small Time Travel
Who still remembers the first blue exclamation marks with the Netherwing in World of Warcraft?
- It was a completely new principle: Quests could be repeated every day and thus offered a fresh method of reputation gain with a beloved faction.
As long as a quest is logically sound, there is no problem: a camp that needs to be supplied with resources every day can very well send me as a player on the hunt for those very resources again and again, that makes sense.
The daily maintenance of various technical devices can also still be considered logical (though I would like to pull the gnome engineer’s ears to elven length). But as we all know, it didn’t stop there.
It Feels Like Work
Daily missions have something incredibly repetitive – that is basically their purpose. They can be programmed with relatively little effort and simply by being repeatable, a player will engage with them much longer than with a classic “One-Time Quest”. That would be fine in itself, if daily tasks were not rewarded with things that make it almost essential to complete them day after day, if you want to stay up to date.
“In the past”, it was about a unique mount that you received for the consistent work – yes, work. The 47th collection of dragon eggs had nothing to do with fun. The end result was satisfying, nevertheless; you did a lot of work and received something you didn’t necessarily need, but just wanted as a prestige item.
Beyond the Target
Meanwhile, the “Daily Quests” have been elevated to a whole new level of absurdity. I no longer have the choice between two to three areas, as it was back in the Netherwing and the Sha’tari Skyguards, but can choose from over ten different hubs. And as if that weren’t bad enough, the reward for successfully completing such areas is unlocking more.[quote_right]As long as the players have something to do[/quote_right]
Many other MMOs have jumped on the daily bandwagon since then and have thrown away everything that originally belonged to their game, following the motto “As long as the players have something to do”.
As a prime example of the negative implementation, Star Wars: The Old Republic unfortunately stands out. The sci-fi MMO shined with fully voiced quests and a great story – this was simply discarded in the daily quests. Instead, every day you go to a terminal, click seven times to have all quests, and then slaughter yourself across the whole area. Sooner or later, when you have killed the “evil occupant” of a corporate site for the fifth time, you realize that a logical story is no longer relevant.
Of course, one might say now, “So what? In dungeons and raids, you also kill bosses multiple times,” and that’s true. But quests have always been the opportunity to present players with the story of the world, and have become an absolute joke due to such banalities. Even though the planet “Makeb” has tried to make the tasks shine in a better light through partially synchronized daily missions, that doesn’t change the fact that you simply have to redo the whole planet – week after week, if you wanted to keep up with the “top level”.
Single-Player Content with Group Pressure
For me, daily quests were always primarily content that could be tackled alone while waiting for the next raid or killing time until the next battleground. They were perfectly suited for that – they were never very demanding and usually consisted only of simple gathering or killing tasks that could easily be interrupted to engage in the “real” gameplay.
I unfortunately do not know (or fortunately!) which game designer thought it was a good idea to introduce daily group missions because they cause frustration. Now, you had to intentionally invest time into these contents and could no longer use them as a side distraction – because you were reluctant to leave a group for the next PvP skirmish. Again, SW:TOR takes the crown: to turn in the crucial main mission, all other missions must first be completed, which of course includes the group quest – you were thus forced to complete every task.
Glimmers of Hope and the Future
But not everything was bad about the past generation of daily tasks. One thing that has stayed in good memory for me is the “Domination Offensive” in World of Warcraft. Although the faction did not offer great rewards in the form of items worth playing for, it still captivated me: Every few thousand reputation points, you received a new, unique quest that advanced the main story – one of the best questlines I have experienced in an MMORPG thus far.
[quote_box_right]There won’t be no daily quests, but we do want to get across the notion that it’s not going to be the primary focus for end-game content in Warlords – Bashiok, WoW Community Manager.[/quote_box_right>
- The developers also seem to have realized that such a task type is outdated and no longer liked by players – the new WoW expansion “Warlords of Draenor” is thus expected to have only a minimal number of these tasks.
It remains to be hoped that WildStar, TESO, and also SW:TOR will handle it the same way.
Because if I experience exactly the same thing every day and the fun decreases each time – why should I still play the game?
