If you’re going to have uberlong quests that require me to track down mystery whatzits all over the world without any hints, make the whatzits big and simple enough that even your minimum system is going to render it. Having to get someone to tell me “click two feet to the right of the post over there, where the tiles on the shelf intersect” is Not Fun, and a good way to lose an income stream.

… and identifying which of those two situations you are actually dealing with is often, I suspect, the crux of the design problem.

Though I have to admit I’ve got absolutely nothing against the whole ‘map tells you where to go’ method of quest finding but exploration is just so much more fun. Whats the point of building a huge, beautiful immersing world if you’re just going to have us do a quick run by the map before moving onto the next?

Just please don’t make me ask my friends where I should be going next.

Unless something involves exploration as part of the challenge, ambiguity about the location is bad game design.

A lot of it, particularly for quests, doesn’t need to come down to outright hand-holding. It’s more about good content design than anything, really. While adventuring in a level-appropriate area, maybe there is an evil looking cliff to the north with a narrow path leading up and tougher mobs on the path than below.

As I mentioned before, quests should generally deal with only the areas within a particular radius of the quest hub–more specifically, it should be closer to the quest hub you got the quest than to the next one. The next hub should be in an area where there are higher level mobs, and so on.

It’s more about naturally leading players to their (hopefully) many options, not forcing them to go to them or giving them a “go to next place I need to go” button.

And yeah, the general directions and POI references in quest text are always good (”the bandit camp to the north, in the shadow of the great tree”).

Yet players incessantly ask where to go next. Do we want to lead players by the nose like WoW and LOTRO have, funneling their game experiences through the same narrow tunnel? Do we have enough faith in players to allow them the freedom to explore on their own? (Apparently not?) Most of the quest-based games will at least give a quest to briefly enter a new zone so the player should be able to say “aha! A new area to adventure in, and it’s higher level content than I currently use, I’ll keep this in mind.”

Much of this comes down to visual cues, such as how to know where to start crafting. Vanguard did a cool thing recently, rather than relying on the single icon signifying an available quest, they now have three quest icons, one for each sphere of the game. So we know immediately if that NPC has an adventuring quest, a crafting quest, or a diplomacy quest. Taking that simple idea just might solve some of the confusion if a new player sees all these NPC’s with a yellow ! then one single NPC has something different and it turns out to be the “introduction to crafting professions” quest.

Writing can also help with much confusion. I don’t know how much hand-holding we really *need* in these games. A certain amount is nice, but it was quite the culture shock when I started Vanguard with it’s dramatic lack of hand-holding even in areas I’d never realized that I was being hand-held. Ya don’t know what ya got til it’s gone, indeed. But, WoW and Vanguard both have fairly terrible writing in their quest dialogue. Every designer could take note of the great strides LOTRO took with their quests. Nearly every MMO I’ve ever played, I just skip to the end and click ‘accept’ because, let’s be honest, who cares what the NPC is saying, just get to the point: how many murloc heads do you need so I can get this garbage over with? LOTRO’s quests are entertaining to read, they breathe some life into NPC’s and they have just enough cues with directions, mentioning prominent landmarks, etc. that players can find what they’re looking for without undue effort but also not tugging too hard on a leash and leading them directly to it.