So I was playing Lord of the Rings Online the other day, going through Paths of the Dead on my way into Gondor. I remarked to my husband that I was a little disappointed all I had to do was run through it, that there were no quests, and he reminded me that I shouldn’t have expected otherwise since in-lore, Aragorn had already recruited all the ghosts and there was no one to give me quests. I replied that usually LOTRO does a good job with pop-up landscape quests – you know, show up at a corsair camp with one quest and the game issues you several more related quests, rather than making you hoof it to take a quest from an NPC – so I kind of expected that.
He started laughing and said it sounded like I’m taking quests from LOTRO’s version of Clippy: “It looks like you’re killing rats. Would you like some help with that?”
Well, I’ll never think about pop-up landscape quests the same way again! And honestly, maybe they’re a little ridiculous and immersion-breaking anyway. Star Wars Galaxies had these types of missions, but they were always wrapped in a comms call with somebody, so there was a pretense that someone had remotely given you the task, versus it just being the hand of god. Or hand of Clippy?
Do you like pop-up landscape quests in MMOs, or do you require some sort of real quest-giver to secure your immersion?
Every morning, the Massively Overpowered writers team up with mascot Mo to ask MMORPG players pointed questions about the massively multiplayer online roleplaying genre. Grab a mug of your preferred beverage and take a stab at answering the question posed in today’s Daily Grind!
