Daily quest in the game is not as attractive as before

Have you ever felt like playing a game is an obligation? People are constantly discussing how NPH makes players dependent on loot boxes and in-game transactions, forgetting about another tool that keeps them coming back to the game. If you’re a fan of Hearthstone, Destiny 2, World of Warcraft or Rainbow Six Siege, you know what it feels like to have to log into the game a little bit every day – even if you don’t want to. Feeling uneasy. It is thanks to the daily quest system (daily quests) that many games are applying.

On the surface, daily quests are a way to keep players coming back every day. The idea is pretty simple: create quests according to the current meta and have it spawn every 24 hours. In Hearthstone, daily quests can be about launching tasks like casting 20 spells in consecutive battles or winning a few games with a certain class.

From an NPH perspective, daily quests can keep players coming back – which is crucial if their games live off of in-game trading or paid DLC like Hearthstone and Siege. As for the MMOs that pay by the month, daily quests keep players coming back while waiting for major updates, giving them loads of quests to complete while completing the main ones long ago. To describe this system, it gives you a little reward for what you’ve been doing in the game. But when applied, daily quests can turn this fun into a tedious chore – especially when you have to play a lot of games that use this system.

Long-term investment

The daily quest has a long history, dating back to the time when people were still playing Pokémon on the Neopets website’s social media, but most famously when World of Warcraft released its first expansion, The Burning Crusade. At the time, daily quests were an innovative solution to bring out old MMOs that didn’t have enough content for players to participate in. What about Blizzard’s solution? Added a system of repetitive quests so players can plow daily, with the long-term goal of earning gold or gaining fame.

To be honest, daily quests don’t make players any happier. Instead of trying to capture the best of Warcraft: dungeons and raids, Blizzard forces players to go through a vicious cycle of killing ‘X’ or ‘Y’, turning us into a working army. However, this system continues to survive and is present in most of the games that Blizzard makes. It is so stable in TCG (card game) that there is no game without daily quest. Even shooters are starting to see daily quests.

So what makes them attractive?

Even though daily quests don’t affect them as much as loot boxes, they are still controlling the player. Like arcade games designed to cost you coins, daily quests aren’t as cunning, but in some ways, keep players satisfied. Daily quest creates goals for us to do every day, even if we have free time for only a few minutes, we can still get something extra if used this time properly. But if too often, we will gradually feel we are being controlled.

With competitive multiplayer games like Hearthstone, daily quests don’t just give you some extra gold. It’s used to tie us up as players. The problem with free-to-play competitive games that use daily quests is that if you’re not interested in them, you’ll feel like you’re not part of the gamer group. It’s not about how well you play, but how much time (or money) you have invested in it. Because the gold rewards will be used to buy new packs, making you more likely to own stronger cards, the daily quest makes us feel like it is a necessity, not just a whim of ours. body again. It’s not simply “thank you” for playing this game every day, it’s like something that makes you “plow” so that you can be happy later.

Unless I’m willing to ‘split’ money to buy more packs and skip the ‘plowing’ process, I need to figure out how much more gold I can plow. My gaming goal changed from entertainment to completing tasks as quickly as possible. If one of the daily quests required me to win 3 matches with a certain class and I didn’t have a strong deck for that class, I would be very frustrated because I couldn’t win in the hope that I would meet some challenges. the opponent can breathe easier, or give up on this quest, but I’ll feel like I’ve missed out on that gold. Instead of playing the right class that I invested and cared about, now I am forced to play in a style that I no longer feel happy or satisfied with.

Meanwhile, the MMO’s daily quest feels much more frustrating. They don’t follow the game’s meta, it’s a completely separate activity to take your time. Final Fantasy 14 for example, the game has a lot of daily quests that give you currency that you can use to buy cool items, or reputation points to unlock new skins. These quests are never fun, but the MMO continues to cling to this weak system. It doesn’t matter how cool the skin is, I just have to log in every day to complete those quests in order to unlock them. Immediately, I got bored with the plowing scene and soon deleted the game.

It’s important to remember that not all daily quest systems are bad, but many games are poorly designed. It’s funny how the world quests in World of Warcraft: Legion are actually the same old daily quests and they’re really good. Not only does it give players dozens of options to see what they want to do, it also gives you rewards for instant gratification, like a new item. If you complete 4 quests for a ‘faction’ per day, you will unlock more rewards.

Furthermore, world quests are the biggest hit for Legion in leveling up, allowing you to do fun quests over and over again. The highlight is that you can complete 4 missions in just 12 minutes. The system is fast, non-obtrusive, with varying levels of rewards that lessen the feeling of dependence on them – which is a different light from the route Final Fantasy 14 takes.

But daily quests still have the same problem that many MMOs and multiplayer games are having: the feeling that you have to constantly play the game to keep your character from weakening. Whether it’s plowing money or gaining more power, daily quests almost continue to push the boring ‘plowing’ part of the game for rewards. In the way NPH thinks, keep plowing and sometime you will get something good.

The author has completely abandoned the World of Warcraft game, preferring to be a “casual” gamer to be able to enjoy the game as you like, that is the feeling of freedom. But now, ‘plowing hoe’ is appearing in more and more games, it turns precious hours of play into chores that must be done before the real fun begins. I always have to think about the games I intend to play, what the purpose of the publisher is and what motivates me to continue playing.

Like expanding map information by climbing towers, or loot boxes, daily quests continue to spread to other games. Game design is seen not only as an art but as a science in it, as publishers are always experimenting with new ways to keep us playing. On the surface, daily quests may seem innocuous, but understanding how it affects your desire to play the game is also important. And maybe like me, you’re probably asking yourself the question, is the little gold you get every day really worth your time?

Source: PCgamer