Questing and Choices

This week for Blog Azeroth’s shared topic, RunzwithFire asks:

Over the past 10-12 years, games have been advancing and being accepted more and more as a legitimate art form and story telling device, in the same way a movie or a book is. This has mostly been led by RPGs, although through the years we’ve seen other games start to take on the idea of moral dilemmas and interactive storytelling.  In fact, one of the few genres where it has kind of been lacking (or taken longer to catch up) has been in the MMORPG genre.

Could an MMORPG start incorporating some of the feature we take for granted in singleplayer RPGs? Rather than the “get quest, kill x number of things, hand in quest” formula, could we start seeing multiple ways to complete a quest? Could there be moral choices to be made, with an outcome that will affect both you as a player (emotional involvement) and your character (rewards/penalties).

Heavily edited and paraphrased due to length.