OK, I can accept a lot of silliness in MMOs due to the nature of the beast, the limitations of quest mechanics, the need to provide playability even at the cost of simulationism, and so on.

 

But sometimes, some things happen that are just so silly, you have to point them out, if only to laugh a bit.

 

On Balmorra, one quest involves going into a factory filled with insane killer droids, and finding an Imperial officer who is making a courageous last stand to fulfill his mission. He's badly wounded, barely holding on, stiff upper lip, cheerio, pip pip, etc, won't go home until he's done his job or died trying, yadda yadda...

 

Just around the corner there's a respawn point with a medical droid. He doesn't have to abandon his mission and return to base; he has to walk maybe 50 feet. (And based on the conversation text, he is capable of doing that if he wants to.)

 

I'd pay real good money for "Yo, doofus, did you know there's a medical droid fifty feet that way?" conversation option. Real good money.

I just ignore most of the medical droids. They are placed for player convience, and often in far out of reach or haphazard locations. There is one on Taris in the middle of no where surrounded by pirates, imperials, Nexu, and rakghouls. In reality it would prob be torn to shreds or looted for parts or something but this is a game.

lol I find many things to laugh about but its just a game ya know. What are you gonna do?

lol I find many things to laugh about but its just a game ya know. What are you gonna do?

 

Laugh?

 

I mean, I'm not saying "ZOMG this game sux becuz its so stupid!!!!1111!1!!". It is possible to like and enjoy a game while still noticing the more obvious... incongruities. Having been involved in a few large scale design projects, it's often the case something like this happens because Team A is doing quests and Team B is doing level design and deciding how often to place respawn nodes, and while they work off the same set of design documents, they might not coordinate more than that. Given the hundreds of quests, etc, it's unlikely each and every one was checked for logical consistency with every other one; that's got to be low down on the priority list, if it's on it at all.

 

It reminded me a little of some of the early Ultima Online quests, which were randomly generated; one time an armor vendor wanted me to bring him a chainmail shirt. I bought the shirt FROM HIM, then handed it to him and got five times what I paid for it as a quest reward. One time in Daggerfall, I was paid by one NPC to deliver a message to an NPC who was less than ten feet away in the same room.