What Are Some of Your Favorite RPG Quests?

Ryosen asks: "The current issue of PC Gamer Magazine has a rundown on the MMORPGs due out this year. Reading over the list of hopefuls and checking out some of the websites and comments, I continually ran across complaints from players about the tedium in a lot of the quests from various games. These are typically of the non-imaginative 'take this message to that person' variety, or 'go kill 4 of these creatures' sorts. Obviously there have been some great quests and plots in games of the past and, with so many new RPGs in development, I thought this would be a great time to reminisce over some of our favorites. Who knows? Maybe some of those designers might find some inspiration for their upcoming creations."

KOTR and KOTR 2

[rben]

I loved both of the Knights of the Old Republic games. The whole game was one big quest that culminated in an epic battle. Those are the only Star Wars games that really made me feel like I was living in the Star Wars universe.

Related Note: I like the quests in Dungeons and Dragons Online a lot better than most MMORPGs. If you pay attention, some of them have some great story lines, especially the Catacombs.

Planescape: Torment

[circletimessquare]

http://www.gamespot.com/pc/rpg/planescapetorment/ [gamespot.com]

the whole game is unique and unlike anything else i have ever played. the "choose between 4 relies" thing gets tired after awhile, but for sheer inventiveness, 5% of this game is more creative than 5 other videogames put together

Re:Would have to be The Bard's Tale (I II and III)

[VelvetHelmet]

I was hoping someone would mention The Bard's Tale games.

Bard's Tale 3 was my first RPG. What a great game! I don't remember if I used a clue book or not, but I do remember how freakin' difficult the final battle was. What a feeling when I finally won!

Re:Recent?

[Meagermanx]

I'm glad somebody mentioned Fallout. The atmosphere really makes you feel like you're in a dirty, lowbrow environment. Plus there's all the dialog options and different ways to complete quests.
I've just started going through Fallout 2 again (I quit the first time, due to lack of character planning), and it's an amazing game.

BG2 vs NWN

[MattW]

BG2 was unquestionably the better RPG if you just bought them and wanted to play through them. However, BG2 inspired, as the poster said, the urge to "play through it over and over again". But NWN was never meant just as a single player game, and honestly, I believe that the reason NWN's single player campaign was disappointing was just that SO many man hours were put into developing the engine and tools and assets and scripting that there wasn't enough time to create a BG2-like experience.

That said, if you were willing to look beyond the official campaign, NWN becomes more competitive. There have been a lot of fan-created, really great modules. At the top of my favorites is Adam Miller's Dreamcatcher series. Some people swear by Stefan Gagne's work (which is prolific). Almost everyone agrees that Rick Burton's Twilight/Midnight modules are fantastic. I'm really fond of the Aielund saga.

Go here: http://nwvault.ign.com/fms/TopRated.php?content=mo dules [ign.com]

If you have NWN installed. And play some of the top rated modules that sound appealing. There's some great stuff, stuff that you may well enjoy a lot more than the original NWN.

Bioware, for their part, got their act together a bit for their expansion, Hordes of the Underdark. It had a much more enjoyable single player campaign. Even the developers said that by this time they'd really gotten better with their own tools, the engine was refined, and lots of important art assets (robes, for example) were in the engine.

Meanwhile, the expandability of this game may never be matched. There is literally tens if not hundreds of gigabytes worth of custom content - tilesets, weapons, icons, creature models (with animations), to say nothing of actual modules. People have hacked in ridable horses. It's amazing.

Right now you can pick up the NWN Diamond edition in stores and it comes with the original game plus both expansion packs PLUS some of Bio's "premium modules" they sell now.

Meanwhile, online, you can play with others in a way you never could play BG2. Since the game has a DM client, there are a ton of people running bona fide campaigns. Neverwinterconnections.com is a matching service to hook up people to play together. There's also a list of "persistent worlds" a mile long, some of which actual merit being played; they're like mini-MMOs (or graphical MUDs, perhaps) where 20-60 players will play all hours of the day and you can return and keep playing the same character.

One ambitious project even attempted to create a huge set of servers which connected the Forgotten Realms all togther (ALFA, although it's sad that enthusiasm and competence don't always go hand in hand, although the Roleplay level there is pretty amazing).

So all in all, Baldur's Gate 2 for someone who just wanted to buy a game off the shelf and play it was certainly a better game, in my opinion, especially for its time. But NWN quite literallly broke new ground. For those who were willing to go out and look for fresh content and people to play with, it continued to pay dividends. NWN, if you got into it, is probably pound for pound the best value any game has ever delivered. I probably played all the way through BG2 at least a half dozen times, maybe more - there are some good addons for it, including David Gaider's hacks that make some of the "big" fights a lot more difficult, add NPCs and quests, etc. But even still, that amount of time and fun is dwarfed by the play of NWN because of the fact that I can always go grab something fresh. I think you really have to be a fan of that TYPE of game to fall in love with NWN, but if you are, I think it's unmatched on the whole.

Morrowind

[jack79]

Not a particular quest in Morrowind but more a genre: the ones that sent you into the Dwemer ruins. The quest objectives themselves were pretty superfluous but I loved the mystery and dank beauty of those deserted underground cities. All that steam-punk machinery sitting there with no explanation, the robotic spider guards etc. Amazingly atmospheric and it drew you into the of the world without ever providing nicely packaged answers about the Dwemer disappearance, or even shouting "Hey, guys, the Dwemer have TOTALLY DISAPPEARED!" It was just this puzzling aspect of the world that you could either safely ignore or get really intrigued by.

Re:Are we there Yeti?

[Zibara]

Yeah, Are We There, Yeti? was one of my favorite WoW quests. Another favorite of mine was the lazy peons quest where you hit sleeping orc peons with a cludgel to wake them up and force them back to work.

KoToR...

[Senjutsu]

had a quest where you had to solve a murder case by talking to different witnesses and suspect and thinking things through. I thought it was a nice way to capture the sense of Jedi as Mediators instead of just fighters, and it was pretty fun too.

Ultima IV The Quest of the Avatar

[Anonymous Coward]

Best RPG ever! This wasn't your typical 'go and slay the evil sorcerer or dragon' adventure. The previous Ultima games had already done that. In Quest of the Avatar, your goal was to become the Avatar by being as virtuous as possible. The game had this 'karma' system that kept score for you. If you decided to steal from shops or people your honesty points would go down and so on.
I would play this game for hours at a time and be totally thrilled each time my character or one my party members would level up in any virtue.

Long Live Lord British!