For some players, quests are either those things that serve to annoy with reading (in a game!) or merely provide gussied-up reward packages. But there are those of us who genuinely love the questing experience, including its narrative and interactivity. So here’s the question of the hour: Which MMOs have the best quests?
MMO Bro thinks he knows, and he’s ranked the top eight MMORPGs in the questing department. Number one? The Secret World. “Every main mission in The Secret World offers a strong and compelling story, provided through fully voice-acted cutscenes and readable items found along the way. Nearly all of TSW’s missions tie-in to the main story in some way, and even those that don’t feature emotional or exciting stories in their own right.”
Join us for another fascinating tour of the MMO blogosphere, with stops at LOTRO, vanilla World of Warcraft servers, and the eternal question of the purpose of vendor trash.
The Errant Penman:Â Am I really a PvP-focused player? Thoughts on PvP and PvE MMO communities.
“This nostalgia for a peaceful, utopian society of dancers and doctors seems hard to reconcile with my identification as a PvP-focused player. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy ostensibly hardcore features like free-for-all rulesets and corpse-looting just as much as the next person, but how can I call those my focus when my favorite game was nothing like that?”
In An Age: Vanilla World of Warcraft challenge, levels 1-5
“The general Paladin experience was pretty much as bad as I remembered. You start with two buttons: Seal of Righteousness and Holy Light. Combat consists of casting Seal and auto-attacking. For around 12-28 seconds. Per mob. I’m not joking.”
Healing the Masses: Comparing class choices
“Do you ever get the feeling in games like you picked the wrong class? It’s something that seems to happen to me a fair bit and is often incredibly annoying,to the point of making the game feel a lot worse than it actually is.”
Tales of the Aggronaut: WoW and Overwatch
“As you watch folks like Metzen and Kaplan talk about Overwatch you see this unbridled love and excitement in the way they express everything. Â You can tell just how much they are enjoying this game and how excited about the future of Overwatch they feel. Â This is just something I have not really seen from Blizzard in years in pretty much ANY game.”
Superior Realities: The Secret World beginner tips
“Attack rating is the most important stat for leveling builds. You need only a small amount of health. One to two minor talismans with healing rating can be worth it if your build uses self-healing or leech abilities. For secondary stats, penetration and hit tend to be the most valuable early on. Defensive secondaries are never worth it unless you plan to tank dungeons.”
Mersault: Happy 9th anniversary, Lord of the Rings Online!
“I’ve had all kinds of warm and fuzzy feelings when I saw the ring symbol as quest marker above NPCs heads, or venturing into the old forest in those early days when it had no map and was a dangerous place to adventure in. I can’t tell you how many times i got lost in that forest. The Shire, of course, beat everything. On my first character, an Elf, I traveled to the Shire as soon as I got the quest to go to Bree. I didn’t know better, or maybe it wasn’t possible to use quick travel at that time, so I walked there — and it was epic.”
Random Waypoint: EVE Online in numbers, solar systems
“There are 5201 systems in EVE. That’s pretty impressive, I hadn’t expected that many. Of those 5201 systems, 1090 are highsec, 817 are lowsec, and 3294 are nullsec. That last number again surprised me: more than 60% of all systems are nullsec, although only 15% of all characters dwell there. That would explain why so many places in nullsec feel so empty.”
Psychochild: A call for more diversity of games
“Speaking specifically to PvP games, I think that it’s time we admit that hardcore PvP games like Meridian 59 are a niche interest. A very fun niche interest, don’t get me wrong. But, the combination of free-for-all PvP, full looting, and death penalties just feels like too much for most people. And, it’s quite apparent that other games cater to the people who like this better than MMOs do. MOBAs and competitive FPSes seem to do competitive player vs. player or team vs. team fights a lot better these days.”
“In every game that includes vendor trash, there is someone on the development team taking the time to create item descriptions and icons for drops that serve no other purpose than to be sold to a vendor for a meager return. That’s depressing when you think about it. It also seems like a bizarrely wasteful use of someone’s time and development resources. So why do these items even exist in the first place?”
Starshadow: Why do I like Black Desert Online?
“Aside from the amazing, immersive and gorgeous landscape which just begs you to explore, I think it is that I’m finding the secondary elements so much fun. I really don’t care about the main story, the combat, the levelling, or the endgame here. These things may turn out to be exactly why this doesn’t become a long-term or main MMO for me, but that doesn’t matter for now. I’m just enjoying the parts that I do like and ignoring the parts I don’t. I do hope that the developers of the other MMOs I am playing, take a look at the secondary systems and take serious note though.”
Every day there are tons of terrific, insightful, and unusual articles posted across the MMO gaming blogosphere — and every day, Justin reads as many as he can. Global Chat is a sampling of noteworthy essays, rants, and guides from the past few weeks of MMO discourse.
