Hub and Spoke Disease
I played WoW again the other day — it’s been nearly three years to the week that I stopped playing the first time around. I was only under the influence for about fourteen months, not counting the summertime when I didn’t have my computer. I’ve been told by many friends that the game is vastly improved with Burning Crusade, so I thought I’d give it a try. I made a Blood Elf warlock and started in…
It’s exactly the same. I didn’t last past level five. As soon as I saw that line “Gather 7 Mana Slivers and bring them here to me,” I was done.
Brenda often lambasts the game for its shallow goal/quest system — what she calls the hub and spoke mission: go here, get five of these, bring them back. Go somewhere else, get something else, bring it back. Without the ability to retain real persistence in the game world, and with the need to accommodate an unpredictable quantity of players competing against the same enemies for the same rewards, its the only basic quest structure that works for an MMO. Every MMO has them. There are no exceptions. And they all suffer for it.
Solving the problem of quest and story in an MMO is one of those big issues, the ones game developers constantly work on but have yet to solve, the ones professors use to teach their students that game design is not a walk in the park. But for all that issues like these are perpetual thorns in the minds of developers, I don’t often see them discussed. Do people assume that the problem cannot be solved? Are they content to wait until someone else has an epiphany? Or do they have good ideas but just don’t publish about it?
MMOs suffer from hub and spoke disorder, but it’s not a fatal illness. They say people only change when they’re in pain, and the entity that is MMOs is flourishing despite awkward design barnacles like this that it just can’t seem to shake. Perhaps no intervention is necessary. But as WoW’s power and influence plateaus, and new MMOs fail with startling regularity for trying to copy the WoW model and failing… the ground is being laid for an MMO revolution. What will define the basic quest of the MMO of the future?
It takes an exponentially greater amount of effort to build quests with more than wheel and spoke, speaking only from a theme writer’s point of view. I’ve written a few quests for a mud, including the scripting behind the NPCs and locations involved. I didn’t name it, but I did try to avoid the hub and spoke problem.
I didn’t succeed. In part due to the limits of the underlying game engine, but mostly because it’s HARD. The quest for X, starts with a need for X but the first clue leads to A. A leads to B, B leads to C, C may be a minor hub for D E and F, finally leading to G… etc.
In describing this, I am reminded of the Zelda series of games. My favorites are where you can blatantly ignore the direction of the story and choose your own path, as in the very first of the series you don’t HAVE to get the sword, and in fact I’ve successfully completed enough of the game without a sword to be able to get the Magic Sword without getting either of the others. But I digress.
Writing a game-spanning epic quest for an MMO is much more difficult because you can’t place tool limitations, as someone else might already have the tool. You can’t limit travel, and you can’t limit information because anyone who has already accomplished the quest can take you to the end of it. You can only base limits on what is already limited: resources such as experience and gold, and maybe time.
I don’t think it is impossible to surmount for MMO, but they as a group have more hurdles to overcome to present interesting quests. Hub and spoke is easy. A connected hub and spoke system, where each spoke is a hub, while less than perfect and maybe even less appealing to play, are likely to come up as a ‘cure’.
Interesting topic of thought. Thanks.
Provocative response
Thank you.
The way I see it, another factor that makes this approach so hard to avoid is the competition among players. MMO players need more competitive elements other than experience level. One shall have more experience than the other, but one has an epic Sword which is dropped by a given boss, of a given quest, and only few players have it.
If a new design is to be created to replace the quest/reward system it must provide the users with the same competitive features that are out there. And even more, I must say.
In pondering this further, I thought about what makes a quest a quest. Quests need two elements to really count as quests: difficulty and memorability. Hub and spoke quests might be difficult, but they aren’t memorable. If it isn’t difficult, it doesn’t become important enough to remember. If it is simply repeatitive, and tedium is the difficulty, it is not memorable. Lacking memorability, these “quests” degrade to “tasks”, with all the boredom and lethargy which that term evokes.
Thus, the MMO term “grinding” for skill gaining.
Quests in the books typically have four elements: distance, time, danger, and a compelling force. Accomplishing the quest is an epic story. Being a part of an epic tale is one reason people play RPGs. Nobody wants to recount the tale of trapesing through the sewers for a month killing rats to learn smithing.
Quests should not only have a reward at the end, but the journey itself should be somewhat of a reward, too. I saved some villagers from a magically enhanced troll, took his magic thinger, which led me to the orc traders that sold it, from there I had to track a group of bandits… NOT repeatitive. Also distance is a good thing: I had to travel all the way to the mountains by the western ocean, it took me three real-life weeks but LOOK what I GOT!
I vote we eliminate hub and spoke tasks from future game designs, as a matter of principle. And definitely stop calling them “quests”.
Thanks!