Susan Arendt said:
The Secret Appeal of The Secret World
Funcom designed the quests of The Secret World to be less about killing rats and more about unraveling a global mystery.
Read Full Article
This line is the most telling: "Some players will undoubtedly feel uncomfortably restricted by the game's limit on active quests, but Bylos believes the narrow focus actually works in the player's favor, turning the NPCs from quest dispensers into actual people."
Creator-as-teacher, man that's a tough truth of gaming. You basically have to create ways to
slow your players down sometimes. Like students reading a story, they often feel the goal is "Get done fast! The end is where you want to be!" As a result, they only skim the surface of the content, and then complain that the story was "boring" or "too short" or what-have-you.
It sounds
awful to say it, but gamers are like those students. If you don't give them reasons to slow down -- "quiz" them on whether or not they read/listened to the quest introduction, give them "homework" during which they practice the skills necessary for the next step -- they'll breeze through the content, thinking that surely the best part is at the end. Then they get there and say, "That's all?"
Other games choose, instead, to throw in filler. Let the players move as fast as they want, you can always introduce a new widget to collect ten of, or a new breed of rat to cut down by the dozen... It's a shallow experience that has a whole lot of
movement, but not a lot of
motion. But it keeps the developer from having to visit a hard truth among the players -- sometimes, a game has to tell you, "No. Take your time and do it
right."
