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What Are Some of Your Favorite RPG Quests?
Ryosen asks: "The current issue of PC Gamer Magazine has a rundown on the MMORPGs due out this year. Reading over the list of hopefuls and checking out some of the websites and comments, I continually ran across complaints from players about the tedium in a lot of the quests from various games. These are typically of the non-imaginative 'take this message to that person' variety, or 'go kill 4 of these creatures' sorts. Obviously there have been some great quests and plots in games of the past and, with so many new RPGs in development, I thought this would be a great time to reminisce over some of our favorites. Who knows? Maybe some of those designers might find some inspiration for their upcoming creations."
I used to GM an Ultima Online shard. The most successful quests tended to be the ones that involved players in the storyline, bringing all of UO's lore into play and allowing them to mold the shard's future lore. These quests tend to be deeper, darker, and more dangerous than your run-of-the-mill "kill these monsters" quests. You can drag some of these storylines out over multiple quests spanning long periods of time, too.
That's if you're talking about GM-run quests. If you plan on automating your quests, you're going to be kind of doomed from the start. Anything automatic will eventually become boring to players.
Anyone remember the mission where Admiral Harkov sends you and your wingmen to inspect an asteroid field (which turns out to be a mine field) to get rid of you, then you had to fight your way out of it alive to report his betrayal. I still remember how angry I felt the moment in mid-flight when I realized the trap. Touches like these really forced you to take part in the storyline and personalize the conflict told in the game. Oh, and the moment of sweet revenge at the end of the campaign when Darth Vader says "Welcome Admiral Harkov, we have a matter to discuss.". That's what you get for sending me into a death trap sucker!
"Somebody get this freaking duck away from me!"
This guy's the limit!
BG2 was unquestionably the better RPG if you just bought them and wanted to play through them. However, BG2 inspired, as the poster said, the urge to "play through it over and over again". But NWN was never meant just as a single player game, and honestly, I believe that the reason NWN's single player campaign was disappointing was just that SO many man hours were put into developing the engine and tools and assets and scripting that there wasn't enough time to create a BG2-like experience.
o dules
That said, if you were willing to look beyond the official campaign, NWN becomes more competitive. There have been a lot of fan-created, really great modules. At the top of my favorites is Adam Miller's Dreamcatcher series. Some people swear by Stefan Gagne's work (which is prolific). Almost everyone agrees that Rick Burton's Twilight/Midnight modules are fantastic. I'm really fond of the Aielund saga.
Go here: http://nwvault.ign.com/fms/TopRated.php?content=m
If you have NWN installed. And play some of the top rated modules that sound appealing. There's some great stuff, stuff that you may well enjoy a lot more than the original NWN.
Bioware, for their part, got their act together a bit for their expansion, Hordes of the Underdark. It had a much more enjoyable single player campaign. Even the developers said that by this time they'd really gotten better with their own tools, the engine was refined, and lots of important art assets (robes, for example) were in the engine.
Meanwhile, the expandability of this game may never be matched. There is literally tens if not hundreds of gigabytes worth of custom content - tilesets, weapons, icons, creature models (with animations), to say nothing of actual modules. People have hacked in ridable horses. It's amazing.
Right now you can pick up the NWN Diamond edition in stores and it comes with the original game plus both expansion packs PLUS some of Bio's "premium modules" they sell now.
Meanwhile, online, you can play with others in a way you never could play BG2. Since the game has a DM client, there are a ton of people running bona fide campaigns. Neverwinterconnections.com is a matching service to hook up people to play together. There's also a list of "persistent worlds" a mile long, some of which actual merit being played; they're like mini-MMOs (or graphical MUDs, perhaps) where 20-60 players will play all hours of the day and you can return and keep playing the same character.
One ambitious project even attempted to create a huge set of servers which connected the Forgotten Realms all togther (ALFA, although it's sad that enthusiasm and competence don't always go hand in hand, although the Roleplay level there is pretty amazing).
So all in all, Baldur's Gate 2 for someone who just wanted to buy a game off the shelf and play it was certainly a better game, in my opinion, especially for its time. But NWN quite literallly broke new ground. For those who were willing to go out and look for fresh content and people to play with, it continued to pay dividends. NWN, if you got into it, is probably pound for pound the best value any game has ever delivered. I probably played all the way through BG2 at least a half dozen times, maybe more - there are some good addons for it, including David Gaider's hacks that make some of the "big" fights a lot more difficult, add NPCs and quests, etc. But even still, that amount of time and fun is dwarfed by the play of NWN because of the fact that I can always go grab something fresh. I think you really have to be a fan of that TYPE of game to fall in love with NWN, but if you are, I think it's unmatched on the whole.
Not a particular quest in Morrowind but more a genre: the ones that sent you into the Dwemer ruins. The quest objectives themselves were pretty superfluous but I loved the mystery and dank beauty of those deserted underground cities. All that steam-punk machinery sitting there with no explanation, the robotic spider guards etc. Amazingly atmospheric and it drew you into the of the world without ever providing nicely packaged answers about the Dwemer disappearance, or even shouting "Hey, guys, the Dwemer have TOTALLY DISAPPEARED!" It was just this puzzling aspect of the world that you could either safely ignore or get really intrigued by.