Extremelining

Something unexpected happened when I got to Parness, the second zone in Requiem – I started encountering questgivers.

Back in 2008 when I first played Requiem the quest system was, like a lot else in the game, fairly obviously lifted from World of Warcraft; an ongoing questline that led me from hub to hub, in each of which a few NPCs would be hanging around waiting for me to do stuff for them. Most of that stuff involved killing monsters – either to collect body parts or just as straight kill quotas – but a few involved other activities such as collecting/clicking on items that were scattered around the landscape, and there were also some escort quests. Standard stuff.

At some point – I think it would have been around the time the game changed from Requiem: Bloodymare to Requiem: Memento Mori – this questing structure underwent a major change. The main questline wasn't noticeably altered, but all the side quests were removed from the NPCs. The kill quests were turned into what's called Scroll Quests – basically the same quests but you obtain them all from a single NPC called an agent, – while the collection and escort quests were dropped altogether.

(The objects are still in the world, as are the escort quest NPCs, like the mayor's wife who stands in the middle of a bandit camp waiting to be rescued, only the quest to do so no longer exists...)

As extreme as this streamlining was – and it's the most excessive I've seen that didn't involve removing entire zones – the removal of some quests and the consolidation of the rest into one questgiver isn't really that detrimental to the experience of this game. You lose a little bit of world building from the loss of some quests and the others no longer being related to specific hubs, but the NPC dialogue is uninspired at best and this is no great loss. It's not Scarlet Blade levels of awful – not much is – but it's as bland and unmemorable as most of the quest text in say RIFT.

Now that I'm in Parness, which makes more use of conventional questgivers, I'm even more convinced that I wasn't missing much in the previous zone. There's an awful lot of running back and forth.

This is doing nothing to diminish my impression of Parness as a zone that's designed to be a time sink. Even the quick travel biplanes are in out of the way locations, with huge stretches of nothing in between. Literally nothing in some cases, as there are multiple areas where there's nothing but landscape, with little or no features to break up the monotony, giving the zone a distinctly unfinished feel.