*** Super-Duper Cliff’s Notes version — RPG Developers: Stop creating “open ended, epic-scale” time-consuming worlds while ignoring the people that only have 10-30 minutes a night to play *and progress* in your game, i.e. the much sought-after, “casual,” “mainstream” player. ***
Long quests are great and all, but…. they’re not always what I (dare I say, ‘some of us?’) would like to play all the time.
In numerous threads on various message boards that I’m a member of, some things came up that I felt should be brought together to make a point. I tried several times to craft a response that was pertinent to the specific thread I was posting to originally, but it kept turning into, essentially, an open letter / rant to RPG Developers and/or anyone interested in RPGs. Feel free to agree, disagree, love it, hate it, skip it, or whatever. To make things easier, I suppose if I had to form a thesis statement for this whole point, it would be thus:
Long, open ended, epic style quests can certainly be a good thing for an RPG. As long as they are written well, and serve to draw the player into a compelling, deep, rich and satisfying game world. However, such long quests can also serve to alienate, bore, or otherwise ‘put-off’ some players, including the “casual gamer’ crowd. Aside from including long, grand-sized quests, there needs to also be an alternative side to the game(play) which can be accessed quickly and easily, and also put aside quickly and easily for when there is limited time (or motivation) to play.
That, in a nutshell, is my overall point. From here forward, I’ll explain why I feel that way, and provide an example or two as to how to accomplish that, so feel free to skip all the rest of this if you aren’t interested, and just reply to, or discuss the point made above. I also apologize ahead of time for the less-than-English-major structure of this, as it inevitably kept turning into a rant.
Read the rest at Gamer’s Info.
