I vacillate. There's good repetition and bad repetition, after all. I would have been pretty confident in putting MMO daily quests into the "bad" basket. Until Rift.
I first came across daily quests during my brief stay in WoW. I pretty much hated them on sight. I didn't do them, I didn't want to do them and I wished they didn't exist. I like repeatable quests well enough, those quests you can do over and over as and when you feel like it, usually to raise some pocket change or get some unlikely secret society of three-foot high talking hedgehogs to trust you enough that they'll open the back of their gaudily-painted caravan and sell you some ethnic handcrafts of their people. But the point of those repeatable quests is you can do them whenever you like, so you never feel you have to do them NOW!
Daily quests demand. They threaten and whine. If you don't do me today you missed out! If you skip me this evening your a bad person! How lazy you are! Don't you have any application? As soon as I ran into these things in WoW I was convinced I would never have any truck with them. Ever.
For the last week and a half, every evening, I've been logging in eight characters on three servers in Rift and running round throwing firebombs,
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| Hey! This is a built-up area you maniac! |
feeding pot-plants,
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| And that's a civic amenity! |
zapping citizens
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| Ok now you went too far. That's assault!And you did it to me yesterday. And the day before that! If only there was a guard around... |
and generally behaving like a highly suggestible four-year old with OCD. What's more, I'm enjoying it. I even look forward to it.
So, why do Rift's dailies work for me when WoW's didn't? Three reasons. Brevity, variety and lucky bags.
- Most dailies in Rift take just a minute or two. You rarely have to travel far or search hard or do anything difficult. They're "why not?" quests.
- They aren't the same every time. Sometimes the task varies, sometimes the result, sometimes both.
- You can get a bag! With stuff in! And it's stuff that you might want! It's like a free Kinder Egg every day.
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| Marty got the sweet stuff. Oh yes he do! |
These things are well designed. They are fun to do. They are good repetition. And now it's almost mid-day and my dailies will have reset. So I'm off to do them again. And again. And again.
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I'd agree actually. I'm not a daily quest person really, but I think Rift simply does them better than WoW/LoTRO etc (like so many little aspects of standard MMO gaming). Their more polished, have some good humourous content, are mixed up nicely and offer some good rewards.
ReplyDeleteThe fact they're generally short AND located either in the main hub or wherever you're likely to be questing is also important.
I'd *much* rather do Rift dailies than the Firelands grindfest in WoW that's for sure.
I hate dailies. I hate them! I was notorious for not doing them in WoW. But I agree -- RIFT dailies don't seem so bad. Maybe it's because they're short, or perhaps it's just that there are so many that I don't feel obligated to do each one each day.
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