When you have an IP and a Game Brand which has its own demographics of a specific target audience and filling a specific Niche in the genre… you should take care of it and evolve it WITHIN what makes it the unique experience it was.

Why do recent MMORPGs, which are based on a much bigger budget than older MMORPGs, end up with less content? If you have played EverQuest, WoW then Aion/Rift you can create a pattern here. MMORPGs tend to offer less content than the previous one which offered less content than the one before. Let me make a comparison between EverQuest when it first started (no expansions) and Aion or even Rift.

I’ve noticed a lot of bloggers and forum threads were talking about Quests last week for some reason. Most of these authors were complaining about how this trend is getting repeated too many times and that we need a change to the system while a few think it’s dandy.

I’m going to share one of each opposite opinion and going to throw my comments on this issue. If you read my blog you know exactly what my opinion is regarding this Quest Driven crap. I don’t even try to be political about it because I believe it is the #1 malfunction of all games and needs to be fixed.

Folks, I have never enjoyed playing WoW the same way I did with EverQuest. The reason is simply because EverQuest and WoW are two different games which I believe belong to different genres. WoW is a game where you are told what to do 90% of the time and the dungeons are instanced. There’s almost no feel of community except the occasional lag in Iron Forge back then. EverQuest never told you what to do, you were free from the very first moment you log in. With HUGE dungeons that are not instanced with a great community feeling because everyone was there if they wanted to (not instanced). There were no Auction Houses, which means if you want to buy something you had to talk to someone.

When I was playing Rift: Planes of Telara beta I did an escort quest that made me think about how this Quest Driven system wastes our time. The escort lasted around 3 to 5 minutes, I’m not exaggerating. I was following some NPC in a stupid path and I really felt like doing this for the zillionth time in many games before. I start to wonder “Why am I doing this?” Why am I following some stupid looking NPC in this shallow world? The lore of the world of Telara is boring just to be frank. Which is another problem with new IPs not being original.