“Questing.”
While Frodo Baggins had one major quest, destroy The Ring, I’ve found myself in a cesspool of incomplete quests, filling my quest book to the brim with worldwide travels. From coast to coast, island to island and across the open seas I’ve got missions to complete with no end in sight.
It’s an addiction, a fascination, an uncontrollable urge to click any creature with an exclamation upon his head. I cannot stop taking on the responsibilities of the world all upon my lonely shoulders. Unfortunately, travel time is not free and I find myself traveling the world in search for quest “turn-ins” and random item drops from creatures small and tall.
When does it end? I turn in a quest to get another! A few quests have me traveling to far off lands where more villages scream for my help with yellow “!” above their heads. I must help a wandering soldier, a fisherman, a poor villager and the beggar; I do it all “for the horde.”
You can have something like 20 quests in your log at a time, I’ve got it full with quests from each land. Perhaps someday I’ll complete them all or throw them away to pickup others, realizing the value of each quest will decline as my character levels.
The lesson here, stay where you are until the quests in that land have all been exhausted. Ah, the trials of a wondering adventurer striving to conquer the land.
The game industry, like other entertainment avenues, is a risky business in which publishers have to pick titles they “predict” will do well in the market while passing on other “risky” propositions. While a the good ol’ shooter title will break sales records, the market cannot rely on one genre to carry the business especially considering many of these titles are forgotten within two months from launch. Publishers are going to be forced in expanding their reach to “family games” in order to finance new blockbuster titles.
The idea of designing a “family” game isn’t new to our industry, as a matter of fact, it’s one of the oldest cornerstones of video game entertainment. Pong, Centipede, Pac-Man, Space Invaders and many other classic titles were no doubt playable by the entire family, but things have changed. We’ve evolved from hit titles like Donkey Kong to hit titles like Halo. We migrated from 2D gaming to full 3D adventures and pixel graphics to pixel shaders, but where do we go next?
There has been many debates on the graphic level of Diablo 3 and how it should be different. Finally a developer comes out and says “um, no.” Their reasoning is fairly simple, it’s one thing to photoshop up a screenshot with some filters but it’s another to get the texture and lighting to run at that detail on a standard computer.