EverQuest Next - The Power of Interactive Quests

The date of EverQuest Next’s public reveal by Sony Online Entertainment is quickly rushing towards us. During SOE Live, on August 2nd, at noon
Pacific, the world of MMORPGs will be changed forever. If you’re not going to be able to make it to SOE Live this year, then listen very carefully to what
I say next. You really want to be here when the announcement is made. I can’t say why and I can’t say what may be here (ALLEGEDLY!) but you want
to keep your browser pointed to Ten Ton Hammer. As the date gets closer, I’ll be sure to keep everyone informed. (ZOMG, do I know secrets that would kill
any normal mortal to contain!)

With that out of the way, I can move on to today’s topic. I’m hoping to see an EverQuest staple make a return to the MMORPG genre – interactive quests.
Now, when I say interactive, I’m not referring to getting X item to click on once you’ve gotten mob Y beaten down to 30% or below; I’m referring to
actually speaking with NPCs to get quests at all… assuming you were able to figure out what to say to them.

I realize having to engage in a scripted dialog with an NPC may seem insanely archaic by today’s standards, but there was a lot of purpose in having
players carry on a conversation with an NPC. You had to speak to NPCs in order to figure out whether they even had a quest to offer. And if they did, you
would need to continue the conversation to discover how you were supposed to go completing the task. It was like a puzzle that the player had to piece
together, or a mystery to be solved. On the surface, the system may appear to be nothing more than another time-sink for which EverQuest was at times
famous. Believe it or not, though, it served more than one very real purpose.

Typical quest dialog in EQ.

For starters, having to work through quests and interact with NPCs slowed players down. It avoided the human compulsion to quickly find out what needs to
be done, close the quest text dialog without reading, and go rushing off to kill 10 rats without knowing why. In EQ, you would start a conversation by
“hailing” an NPC. If the NPC’s response contained a word or phrase in brackets, you could use that word or phrase in a sentence and get a response
(assuming you phrased your question correctly). Some quests were easier than others to figure out, but the system always served its purpose.

By engaging the NPC in a simplified conversation, players were immediately more immersed. Think about it: which school classes were more interesting for
you, those that featured a teacher lecturing for 45 minutes at the front of the class, or one in which the instructor brought up a topic and had the class
draw more information out of him by engaging in questioning and conversation? Especially in the late ‘90s, there were far easier ways for players to have
been given quests. This engagement level was not created simply by accident.

Another purpose it served was to get the players to actually think about the quests they were doing. Sure, there were quite a few kill, messenger, and
fetch quests, but it was the beginning of an era and those hadn’t gotten old yet. Even so, it took some effort and puzzle-solving to determine exactly what
you were supposed to be doing and how to go about it. To be fair, this was also part of the reason the quest system as we knew it eventually had to be
changed.

For all the time players spent trying to figure out how to solve a completely unknown number of quests, the development team spent even more time creating
them. I’ve heard it said that even to this day there are some quests in EQ that have not been discovered or solved completely. That means work that was
done 14 years ago has gone untouched. On one hand, the concept that a game could have new content that was never discovered after over a decade of play is
incredibly awesome and intriguing. Imagine being the player that finally discovers and solves quest X137563, and being the first in the world to do so
after all this time.

To be fair, the interactive quest conversation system of EverQuest was not without issues. There were times when no matter what you typed, you would get no
response. It could get boring walking up to every single NPC you met (there were hundreds, even at launch) and hailing them to see if they had a quest for
you to do. Remember, there was absolutely no visual indicator of who had a quest and who didn’t.

Hitting the auto-attack button while talking to this quest giver would result in your demise.

The most famous “problem” of all, at least in my humble opinion, had to be the “a” key-mapping. By default, the “a” key was used to start auto-attacking.
This means that the very moment you hit that key, your character would start swinging whatever weapon they had currently equipped. This happened no matter
what you had equipped, where you were, or what you had targeted. Or perhaps, I should say who you had targeted, because if there’s one thing every
single EverQuest player of old has done, it’s forgetting to hit the enter key before typing and accidentally taking a fatal swing at a powerful NPC.

On the surface, this may not seem like such a big deal, but the most common way to correctly respond to an NPC that had given you a bracketed word after
you hailed them (for which you had to target them first), was to use the word, “what”. Now imagine you’re a level 1 Warrior. One of the very first things
every character did was go see their class guild master to be introduced and sent on your way to fame and glory. If you hit enter first after hailing your
respective guild master, you would be able to answer whatever statement he made with “what [bracketed word]” and be on your way.

If you did not hit enter first, your character would move forward just a foot or so (because you hit “w” and the default key-mapping was set to use WSQE),
then you would immediately reach out and attack your guild master. Right there in the middle of the hall, in front of the gods and everyone. Since you were
level one, it of course only took one backhanded bitch slap to immediately kill you. Now it’s time to go retrieve your corpse. You can imagine the
embarrassment and humiliation this caused. You can also imagine the rage it once caused me after having been gone from the game, starting a new character
with my best friend, and then having to listen to him laughing hard enough to nearly bust his spleen as I immediately die when inadvertently slapping
my guild master. I may have screeched, “Are you f***ing kidding me? ‘A’ is still attack?!?!”

Despite some potential issues, I think there’s a serious need for this type of interactivity to return to questing. Combining the best aspects of this
system (and that does not include the “a” key issues) with some of today’s modern conveniences such as an indication that an NPC actually has a
quest, I think today’s gamer would appreciate the added level of engrossment they could find in their gaming sessions. It would be just as engrossing if a
game ever allowed players to sell loot to merchants and, rather than it disappear, it would actually be available for a week or so for other players to
then purchase. Oh wait, EverQuest did that! You also had the satisfaction of prying the weapon a mob was beating you with from its cold dead corpse if you
were victorious in battle… but those are topics for next week’s article!

While you wait for next week’s piece, catch up on any previous EverQuest Next articles you may
have missed! If you’ve got questions, old-school aspects you’d like me to cover, or anything in between, shoot me an email or hit me up on Twitter!


To read the latest guides, news, and features you can visit our EverQuest Game Page.

Last Updated: Mar 29, 2016

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