The World As We (Don't) Know It: Quests

Our continuing saga of Karl not doing anything while chaos reigns on W-H... continues? Call me too lazy to grab a thesaurus and look up a synonym. But as I was saying, we've still got someone (or maybe multiple people?) wrecking havoc unfettered around here. Fortunately it looks like it wasn't too serious, with just some things in the forums messed up. Like, random stickied topics and somebody's pack RP ending up in the main forum (unviewable by the majority of the players, though).

Those of you who decided that it was too petty for something I would have done were correct. I mean, I would have at least locked the topics too. And, like, cleaned up the suggestion board or something. Not to mention I was asleep at the time...

Also, apparently Burn (or Zanna, as you might know her by) has been banned. Actually, this happened last week, but that's what I get for writing entries in advance. Anyway, that's another fairly well-known member gone. Anyone want to start a betting pool on who's next?

Oh, and apparently in 1.2 RP topic starters can delete posts from annoying noobs. Too bad we didn't get this sooner, before all the RP boards died and went to hell. Not to mention we're finally getting to edit our first posts, after ages and ages of asking for it. Why the fuck was this not allowed in the first place?

Anyway...

As stated in the last entry, this part of our series on impossible namelessness land will feature quests, as well as any lore and plotline. Basically, any information about the world that we have through characters that exist in said world... if we actually had any info, that is. Oh well.

Alright, so we'll start by establishing the fourth wall. All quest characters seem to have no knowledge they exist inside a game, so there is obviously a fourth wall in play here. This is excluding Karlos, who does break the fourth wall, but only to basically welcome the player. This is expected, as is some sort of tutorial on how to play, like in most video games.

Too bad we don't actually get any of that 'tutorial' stuff. Or, like, if the FAQ actually included questions on how to use the map and attack things. Oh, wait, I forgot - it was all ripped from my guide, which already had a tutorial, so it didn't need to answer those things!

Getting back on track, we know that all of the questgivers are characters in their world. We can draw a few conclusions just from their appearances. First, either there is a cave full of permanent markers or vats of paint, or some other unexplained circumstance has allowed wolves to come in a full range of absurd colors. I bet a wizard did it. >.>

Of course, I'm not going to complain about the coloring too much. As all the characters are actually owned by the players, it just reflects what the players wanted to color their wolves. That, and my character's design is somewhat less than strictly realistic anyway.

The second conclusion we can make is that wolves are sentient, intelligent creatures. As a corollary, all other animals seem to be non-sentient and simply food, since none of them are ever portrayed as anything but food, and none of them can talk. Not to mention that several questgivers talk like they are 'managing' the population of the other species, like we'd do with, say, cattle or horses. More on that later.

We can also note that wolves appear to ignore any instinctual behavior they have on earth, as they don't appear to be territorial or hostile to strangers (except Mei, and she's *comment censored to prevent Mei from killing the author*). They also appear to have vastly differing goals. This would be realistic, as humans hardly cooperate on anything, if any of those goals could be connected to each other.

Instead, we're stuck with a ton of 'kill 10 rats' quests that are completely and utterly unrelated to each other. There's no connection, even if you did a quest for that character previously. For example, at one point Byz is injured and needs food. You give her food... and that's it. Nothing related to her other appearances on the map, and nothing to deal with the fact that she still has a wound to recover from that would probably take weeks. Even with the huge amount of food you give her (how the fuck did you carry 10 fawns?), she'd still need more help or something.

Of course, there's a reason for this: all the quests were written by players. Now, this might seem like a nice idea... but it doesn't really work. Sure, we could have all the current quests and be mostly fine... if we also had a plotline of some sort, which would have to be written by staff. But no. No storyline allowed. Just defeat random enemies so you can gain XP.

Oh, speaking of XP, apparently the questgivers know it exists, despite there being a fourth wall. Because, you know, they're all like 'here take this' when you're done and hand you DP and XP, and maybe points.

This causes a lot of questions. For one, how the hell do you give XP to someone? A magical Thayan learning scroll? Sure, it's understandable that quests should reward XP... but the questgiver actually giving it to you? Yeah. Oh, and how do they know XP exists if they don't know they're in a game?

Oh, wait, that's logic. Sorry.

And then there's DP. What exactly is DP, anyway? It stands for Dominance Points, so... it's how dominant you are in the world? Um, how do you give dominance to someone? And if you get dominance from helping quest givers, like they're giving you some of their dominance... why don't you just kill them in the first place? I mean, then you'd get all their dominance or whatever, right?

Anyway... We've still got no sort of plot or even continuity in the quests. They're all unrelated. If you do all but one, it makes no difference. No chain quests, either. Nor does it affect the world in any way if you do or don't do any of the quests. So... they're pointless and irrelevant?

We don't get any information from them, either. No background, nothing about the world, no explanations of why they're blue and pink and red, nothing. In fact, they seem to contradict each other half the time - Lumina worries about how apparently the population of elk and caribou is getting out of hand, basically like a game warden. Meanwhile Mei acts like a protective pack alpha against the extremely-threatening snow leopards (and the wild goats, which Fellack claims are extremely dangerous predators. Run while you still can!). Those two mindsets don't even belong in the same world.

So, let's look at our checklist:

-Standard kill 10 rats quests? Check
-Completely unrelated to each other? Check
-Inexplicable reward system? Check
-No in-game reason to complete them? Check
-Contradictory info on what wolves in general in namelessness land are like? Check
-Background information about the world? Um... nope
-Any sort of overriding objective? Nope
-Fun, believable, and interesting? Nope

Hm... I don't know. It's almost like someone went out of their way to make it impossible to have a worse quest system! Although I'm sure I could think of something...

So, let's combine what we have from the past entry. In impossible namelessness land, there are a bunch of confusing and unrelated quests to kill random things for no good reason. So... the point of W-H is to kill random things for no good reason?

Think about it. What is the goal of the player in W-H? Get more XP so you're stronger. Why? Uh... just because?

That's all the reason we get. We are supposed to continually kill random animals to gain XP in a never-ending, impossible-to-win cycle. In an RPG, there should be a storyline here. W-H claims to be an RPG. Allow me to make this very, very clear:

W-H IS NOT AN RPG.


Clear enough for you? Seriously, go look it up. This isn't a roleplaying game. There's no roleplay involved. There's no reason for your character to do anything. Heck, you can't even claim your character exists - because nothing happens to you. You've got no purpose. Just hit buttons continually until you... oh, wait, no, it's just hit buttons continually. Because it's impossible to win because it has no end.

Even Pong had a point - win the game. Get the ball past the other side. You get the idea. We don't even have that. You can't win, you can't lose, you can't ever have anything happen!

Yes, I just said that Pong was a better game than W-H. Deal with it.

Please remind me why I'm playing this again?

Next up: Enemies (And maybe something on Vlad)