I just noticed this while reading an interview with Matt Firor about Imperator.
Just a few days ago Jeff proposed an idea about a centralized way to deliver quests and loot in order to make them more accessible and without recurring to 3rd party spoiler sites (WoW is a step forward but sites like thottbot.com demonstrate that the path isn’t complete):
When you want a magic sword, you go to a website and find out where there’s a sword for you to get. We could eliminate that sort of thing by putting it in game: A seer or soothsayer sort of NPC that you tell what you want, and they gaze into a crystal ball and tell you who you gotta kill.
I kind of like the idea of eliminating “Just do quests ’til you finally get something you want” and “Just look it up on a website” and even “Just do it over and over ’til you win.”
He also explained in a comment from where the idea is coming (which is the most interesting aspect to consider, imho):
It’s basically from the same school of thought: that design sprang from the idea of looking at how some people play the game (in spite of the way the game was “intended” to be played), and coming up with a game was intended to be played that way.
This is particularly important because too often the games are designed on a model that often the players do not respect or follow and without appropriately considering the context. The result is a “gap” between the original purpose and perception of the devs and the game that often is not even acknowledged.
It seems that Imperator will, at least, take advantage of these observations:
Matt Firor – We are making Imperator’s content mission-based, where players are actively engaged in some sort of short-term goal throughout gameplay. Missions can be obtained virtually at any time by simply bringing up a comm-link interface and getting a list of all missions – level appropriate, of course – in their geographic area. This is just one example of one of our key points: easy access to the game’s content.
A pity that the rest of the design appears rather weak.