WoodenPotatoes makes an argument that Guild Wars 2 needs traditional quests to fill up a gap that dynamic events can’t cover, because the racial cities (and the world) somehow feel hollow.
Personally, I think he’s conflated two issues together and grasped at the old standby of traditional quests to attempt to solve it.
Point 1, which I heartily agree with, is that the racial cities are full of unexplored potential and as of right now, feel extremely empty and hollow.
When I too ran around to explore the Black Citadel, I kept coming across all manner of interesting locales and intriguing NPCs that I would have loved to hear say more than a few automatically scripted lines on interacting with them.
Coming across an NPC that said a few words of “fluff” that added to the lore was nice, if you’re the sort to actually read such things, but that’s about as good as it got, besides stumbling across the various merchants that sold different kinds of food and so on.
Point 2, is that he thinks this empty feeling can be solved by strewing a whole bunch of traditional quests across the landscape, alongside dynamic events.
I disagree most heartily.
Perhaps this is just semantics, or perhaps my most recent experience with “traditional quests” in SWTOR has left an extremely jaded taste in my mouth, but when I hear the word “traditional quests,” I imagine players running off alone by themselves on Fed-Ex errands moving things from one NPC to another, there and back again, just to get it ticked off a list and done with, preferably for xp or some other reward.
Being led around by the nose in Kass City on a traditional quest that was apparently meant to be an extended city tour did not actually serve to show me much of the city besides endless running along empty corridors, and all I could think of was that I wanted it DONE. Done and over with.
Now, of course we can argue that the map design of GW2 is a whole lot better than SWTOR in that there’s almost always something intriguing to see after just a couple of paces, and it wouldn’t ever devolve into endless jogging across barren landscape…
But to me, the entire design of a traditional quest is counter-productive to what GW2 is trying to achieve.
A traditional quest focuses you on the end reward, on the destination, not the journey. It’ll end up a race to swiftness as much as possible from NPC A to NPC B for the shiny. Repeat ad nauseam x how ever many alts you have, because of course, all of them want the shinies. That shiny is linked to the quest, see, so you can’t do another quest, you gotta do -this- quest.
A traditional quest is often done alone, by yourself. It wasn’t until later that all the fancy shared questing and shared item collection technology got shoehorned in, because folks suddenly realized that it was really stupid to have to kill 12 rats x 3 players when in a group so that everyone could get their proper share of rat intestines, while the guy who did it alone raced off blowing raspberries at the slowpokes who dared to be social.
No, no, you say, we will assume that we have learned from the past and all this technology will be implemented… but are you saying then that every player who wishes to do the quest together must first run to NPC A to pick up the quest? If you don’t have the quest in your quest log, then you can’t get the quest complete, even if someone in the area did it while you were standing nearby. That’s traditionally how it goes, no?
No, you scream at me, MMOs have solved that already. It’s called sharing quests. Any player who’s picked up the quest can share it with others in their group (or maybe even, in the area) with a press of the button. They don’t have to run to NPC A to start the quest. That’s old-fashioned.
Wait a sec, why do we even have to press the button to share the quest?
And suddenly we are in Warhammer Online and RIFT territory with public quests.
Add the question of why we have to physically form a group by ourselves (Warhammer) or click a button to join the group by yourself (Rift) and suddenly we are back to square one with Guild Wars 2’s dynamic events.
The beauty of the dynamic event system is that they are both solo and multiplayer friendly. If you’re alone, you can do it by yourself (assuming it’s not marked as a group, and even then a lvl 80 probably could) and anyone in the area can come by to help out – and they can only do so if they see those admittedly-immersion breaking orange marks on the minimap.
In truth, what you may possibly be irked with is the following:
a) Dynamic events feel very random and beyond one’s control to start.
A lot of the dynamic events are on some kind of timer, or linked in a not-so-obvious chain where a prior DE may have to be completed before the whole thing cycles again. To most players, the events just seem to pop up at random.
But they don’t have to be.
There are dynamic events that can be started by talking to an NPC, and they are often helpfully marked with a symbol over their heads and a conversation option with another symbol.
b) Dynamic event rewards feel all the same. Woohoo, xp, karma, 1 silver and however many copper pieces…
Maybe GW2 missed a beat here by not sending a thank you mail with a shiny item attached, so that it feels more traditional quest-like.
Alas, they were trying to think outside the box and offer players the option to choose their desired reward from pretty much anybody.
Talk to your karma vendors, people, there’s where your quest rewards are. Toys, equipment, and so on.
c) Dynamic events repeat too often and thus feel predictable and cyclic, and shortly thereafter, boring
Well, this I’ll give you partially, but the devs are human and can only make so many events at one time.
And we tend to only see the most obvious dynamic events run on repeat cycle because that’s the ones most people find.
Just today I did an extended Zho’Qafa Catacombs dynamic event chain that I’ve personally -never- seen before because so few people bother to find and run it. Straits of Devastation is somehow so oddly avoided an area. But it was extremely fun, with a number of champions along the chain. We had formed a group to go Final Rest hunting, and it seemed almost dungeon-like, where we were cooperating as a synergized team – boons, conditions and all, just in the open world where others could join up too.
It’s not really the fault of the dynamic event system per se, because it is also quite capable of sophisticated surprises. I wouldn’t dismiss the system just because the big event chains follow a predictable pattern.
Fer instance, a couple days ago, I was just waffling along on my lowbie Asura Guardian in Brisban Wildlands and I came across a chest next to a Veteran cave troll, flanked by two minion cave trolls. Recognize the setup?
Kill veteran, pick up blue piece of loot from chest, right? Or if you’re sneaky, bypass veteran and grab loot from chest. But I’m a bloodythirsty sort, so I kite the cave trolls and kill them, feeling awesome and bounce over to the chest to grab my reward…
…and suddenly this slimy Skritt thief hops out of the chest, cackling madly and runs off with the loot. (Cue dynamic event popping up – stop Skritt thief from reaching destination)
Caught completely by surprise, I snap off my scepter’s immobilize, but it’s short lived and the skritt is off.
STOP, YOU THIEVING RAT, I want to yell, but that’s a waste of breath when my Asura is already huffing along on super short legs.
I didn’t have any swiftness skills swapped in at the time, and I fling myself after it with greatsword leap, trying to get in range for binding blade, but it’s a little too late, he’s got a head start and my guardian is slowed down by having aggroed all the mobs in between him and me.
The skritt does drop one piece of blue loot in the chase, but I fail that event, and now my Asura despises those little thieving buggers (he won’t even call ’em bookahs – those are for tall stupid people) even more now.
What was different about this dynamic event? Player-triggered, for one. Out of a goddamn chest, not by talking to an NPC like you’d expect.
As for the timer, well, I keep wanting to do it again and challenge the Skritt to a rematch. I’ve gone back twice now and haven’t found that chest again. Maybe there’s an in-between event I’m missing somewhere. Maybe it’s a long timer.
And Lost Shores proved that the dynamic event system is even capable of one-off events. (Though just because it’s capable of it, doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a good idea to do it.)
Well, maybe, someday I’ll get that scrawny Skritt…
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You know what I think GW2 needs? To fill up those empty-feeling areas?
What those places need is -content- and -stories-.
We want to have stuff to do in the cities, aka content.
As for stories, well, even across the open world, some of the dynamic events may feel more generic than others – nameless bandits, centaurs, Inquest, Risen, whoever, just rushing to the slaughter.
But I remember Rhendak the Crazed pretty well, mostly because I keep joking he’d have to be crazy to sit all day underwater waiting for people to come by. I remember the ghosts in Barradin’s vault VERY well, because Ivor Trueshot kept pwning my lowbie and Horace still tears up my downleveled 80 and I recall them as people from Guild Wars 1. I even remember the Bane warband going on their regular ghost patrol, if only because they and my character share part of their surnames.
(I even remember that most useless group of almost-pacifist ogres that need their hand held with everything – even if I don’t remember their names.)
I think what we’d really like is to get to know some of the characters in the open world a little more. Learn their names. Hear their stories. Get involved in meaningful ways. Bring a little more personal story into the world story.
Ditto with all that potential in the racial cities. (I remember enjoying the public quests in Warhammer’s cities.)
But you don’t need traditional quests to do it. That’s a cop out. That’s the “I don’t have time to show you these stories, so I’ll just tell them to you in a big wall of text format” solution.
Based on the dynamic events already in game, add on what we’ve seen in end-of-beta events and the monthly updates, the dynamic event system is capable of filling those in just fine.
Given some time.
Why I Game 
I guess it is just me but I really don’t have a problem with the cities in Guild Wars 2 as it is… I just treat it as a tourist attraction, something to visit, see the sights, maybe grab some souvenir and then go back to the usual adventuring stuff.
But I agree with your points about why Guild Wars 2 doesn’t need a quest system and why Dynamic Events, albeit not perfect, are a better solution to the old problems of how to keep people moving and doing stuff in the world.
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That Skritt event was added at or around the Halloween update, I think. It pops all over the place although not all that often – I’ve only seen it twice so far.
I’ve also only fairly recently realized that, in addition to the event-starters with the orange balls over their heads that you illustrate, quite a few events begin when you speak to NPCs who don’t have a symbol at all. I recommend talking to random Tyrian residents, particularly any that wave or yell at you.
Adding traditional quests is a crazy idea and hardly worth knocking down because it will never happen. Have you seen any player-demand for it in-game? I certainly haven’t. People seem to be fine with the various reward systems.
As for the cities, I like them as they are. They don’t feel at all hollow to me. What we do need (and it was supposed to be in the game according to the pre-launch hype) is a setting to suppress repeated NPC voice-overs so you don’t hear the same lines a thousand times while you’re banking.
More events would, of course, be welcome. That’s supposed to be one of ANet’s priorities for the first half of this year, precisely to reduce repetition and make events in general appear more “organic”. Whether many of those events get placed in cities I would rather doubt, but it’s a good idea in theory.
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Funny, I actually watched that woodenpotatoes review on youtube 15mins ago and kept thinking “erm, no it doesn’t?”. 😀
you make a great point how fixed/modernized traditional questing pretty much gives us what GW2 gives us today; I know nobody out there genuinely yearning for fetch&deliver and backtracking routines of yore. it’s the one thing that truly makes LOTRO a chore in places when I could live with most of its other flaws.
I too think ANet haven’t nearly used up all their potential with the dynamic quests, especially when it comes to stories and chains. for hearts too, the ones I remember most were those with multiple steps and ongoing, deeper stories that affected whole areas. tangible impact as a whole is still very underrepresented in all MMOs.
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Dynamic events suck in GW2. They should be called static events. After you’ve played the game for a few months you’ve done everything there is to do. It’s like watching old reruns of boring TV shows.
They need to add something dynamic to the way these events happen. Tell us to attack/control different parts of the zone or something. Not the same circles every time.
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I personally think that part of the bland feeling of cities is simply because they need to tweak NPC chatter and actions. Anyone who’s used the Norn auction house knows what I’m talking about – the first time I heard that slurred “You never loved meeee” I was intrigued by the potential loads of backstory there, but after it cycled through about 10 times in as many minutes I didn’t care and my brain had filtered out that NPC chatter.
Adding a wider range of options both for text and actions and adjusting their action times would suddenly create a far more interesting city to explore, instead of just a place filled with noise that we learn to ignore. I’ve noticed this issue in a lot of games, and I think simple tweaks (and additions) to what NPCs do can drastically change the environment for the better.
Think of WoW’s Cro or the Elite Tauren Chiefs in Shattrath. Every now and then, they’d do their own thing, be that launching a tirade against a fruit seller or playing a rock concert, but it was rare enough that witnessing it felt like you had been given a window into a special slice of that city’s life, and those NPCs quickly became crowd favorites and added great atmosphere to cities.
GW2 needs to sit down and adjust their random NPC behavior, both by changing up their automated action timers and giving them a wider range of actions/chat. Until then, us players quickly learn to ignore it and want meatier content instead, like quests or events, to help flesh out the city for us.
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