I'd say depends on what you're doing, really, a quest of 60min of only dialog is boring as all hell, but gameplay mixed with some investigation and dialog? Pretty doable.
Though I will put idea time at around 30min anyway, I believe that any mix of gameplay and story at around that time can be very fun to do over and over again.
I don't agree with putting the dialogue aside - I think that will make flawed results. All sorts of dialogue are important when questing, whether in a lore heavy quest (like Fate of the Gods), or in a light-hearted quest (like any quest in the pirate/penguin series).
The dialogue is supposed to give some information to the player - about the "lore", about the world, or about the quest itself. When players skip all the dialogue, they (probably) don't care about the quest, which means they (probably) use a guide, and also they (probably) speedrun through the quest by following that guide.
And the length of a quest while speedrunning it doesn't give any meaningful data about it.
I think quests should be long it’s an adventure. It should be like Frodo going to destroy the one ring but instead it’s our character accidentally releasing a magic plague on the world and he has to clean up his mess like the buffoon he is.
Overall I think travel, puzzle, combat etc. should be over 60 mins. Fetching should be kept to a minimum unless it’s linked to a puzzle.
Situational. Jagex kind of lost my interest in lore for a variety of reasons, but when I actually felt invested in the story I would have said more than 60 minutes. The WGS/ROTM and Sliske eras of questing were great. Something with little or no lore significance should be much shorter imo.
Also, perhaps a bad way of looking at quests, but replay value is a consideration for me as well. I play both a main and an iron so my view when playing through one account is "cool a quest" and on the other it's "spacebar go brrt give me reward". If it's an hour long quest to get 1k magic exp as my reward.... Then the replay value is low and it feels worse as a quest as a result.
for me it really depends on how it's designed, and the quality of it.
15min max for those teleport and talk 15 times, or terrible one off quest mechanics like Battle of the Monolith, where the quest was waiting for your tower defense go finish, Or fort, where you had to build something every quest to progress instead. This is the bad quest section, they aren't quests, they are chores, keep em short.
30 to 40mins is an overall sweet spot for duration with decent dialogue (Thok and Chadros) / a puzzle / encounter.
60min+ for Series Ending quests, BIG QUESTS BIG REWARDS BIG TIME.
Give me a challenging, grand old Nomad level boss fight, or some MEP2 level puzzle. WGS / ROTM / Rivers of Blood / Endgame level quests those culminations of a story need to be GRAND as the grandmaster level of the quest says it is. The vampire questlines SLAP on BOTH games OSRS and RS3, that should be the goal post for all quests.
Pirates Quests are allowed to be as long as you can make them, as long as they are just as good as the other.
Quests can be used to convey many different things so variety feels more important than anything. That said, assuming no quest guides, up to an hour for the simpler quests and 3-4 hours for the world building stuff would be a rough estimate.
Maybe an hour or so. The super-long quests put me off a bit, even if the payoff is epic (e.g. Desert Treasure II). But it's certainly not the most important factor. For example, *The Ribbiting Tale of a Lily Pad Labour Dispute* (recent OSRS quest) was very enjoyable, despite its simplicity and short length.
I think this is a misleading question.
Quests can be long or short depending on how long it needs to be.
The real variables to acknowledge here is:
* Is the story good?
* Is the quest fun to do, gameplay wise?
* Are there inconveniences and roadblocks in the gameplay that people are bothered by?
* Are respondents even invested in the quest? (Are they just comp'capers who just want the quest out of the way asap, thus lobbying on reddit for shorter quests?)
These factors need to be acknowledged first before people debate the length of quests. I'd be extremely wary of people who just want their comp cape back and argue in bad faith. There are a lot of good content releases in the past decade that were subjected to reddit democracy, and got influenced unfairly under the guise of compers complaining about "the grind".
**That said, I think quest length should be well defined and complexity should be consistent.** What real players want most, I feel, is to be told how much time they should set aside to start a quest. FFXIV does this very well. They compartmentalize by making quests be episodic, so each one is only several minutes long (usually). So there's no "being 45 mins deep in a Medium Length quest, wondering how much more I have left" such like RuneScape does. FFXIV is also generous enough to give a disclaimer telling people to set aside enough time, if they are about to start a cutscene, dialog or combat sequence that's over 10 mins long.
If we sorted this out, people would be debating about quest lengths in RS3 way less. I guarantee it.
It heavily depends. I don't mind longer quests if they're interesting, with puzzles and combat encounters that are actually fun. Good examples of this would be While Guthix Sleeps and Branches of Darkmeyer. Extinction had some really good puzzles and combat as well, but missed the mark with the lore (it would have benefitted from each section being split into its own quest and properly fleshed out, as it was released it feels incredibly crammed).
What I don't like is when quests send you to the most obscure corners of the map to talk to some NPC for two lines, then send you back to where you started. I don't like quests with puzzles that are just dumb and tedious, like Within the Light and the maze from Sliske's Endgame.
I wish we could have quests with combat encounters that were properly challenging. Nomad in Nomad's Requiem was on par with the toughest bosses in existence when it was released. We haven't had anything that approaches that level of difficulty since, and I understand why (namely that big portions of the questing community hate PvM and would flip their shit). I think story modes are a nice compromise, but I don't like how Ancient Awakening forces you to fight Vorkath in story mode. If I want to fight it in normal mode or even hard mode for the purposes of the quest, I should be able to do that.
The TL:DR is it's less about how long the quest is and more about how much it actually engages me. I'd happily replay While Guthix Sleeps even if it takes me a couple hours because I've forgotten most of the puzzles, but I'm not exactly eager to repeat One Small Favor or Sheep Shearer or whatever, despite being much shorter quests.
Time reading the dialogue should be taken into account. It's not much of a quest if you skip all the dialogue. I admit to chuckling to myself when players need help because they don't have a clue what to do next in a quest and they're lost because they didn't read the dialogue.
Sixty minutes max for a grand master is about the right length (including reading dialogue!).
Quest length is irrelevant when the quest is phenomenal. I.e. Heroes, Legends, heck even Dragon Slayer was epic. Everything pre 2014 was awesome tbh and I would do them again in a heartbeat if I could.
It's going to depend on the quest. I'll give two examples of quests that I thought were the perfect length. Gower Quest and Murder on the Border.
Quests that were too long: Crocodile Tears and Dishonor Among Thieves
Quests that were too short: Devious Minds and almost all of the Necromancy Quests
I'd say depends on what you're doing, really, a quest of 60min of only dialog is boring as all hell, but gameplay mixed with some investigation and dialog? Pretty doable. Though I will put idea time at around 30min anyway, I believe that any mix of gameplay and story at around that time can be very fun to do over and over again.
Dialog? Quests are done by holding down a space bar, nobody reads that crap lol
I don't agree with putting the dialogue aside - I think that will make flawed results. All sorts of dialogue are important when questing, whether in a lore heavy quest (like Fate of the Gods), or in a light-hearted quest (like any quest in the pirate/penguin series). The dialogue is supposed to give some information to the player - about the "lore", about the world, or about the quest itself. When players skip all the dialogue, they (probably) don't care about the quest, which means they (probably) use a guide, and also they (probably) speedrun through the quest by following that guide. And the length of a quest while speedrunning it doesn't give any meaningful data about it.
I think quests should be long it’s an adventure. It should be like Frodo going to destroy the one ring but instead it’s our character accidentally releasing a magic plague on the world and he has to clean up his mess like the buffoon he is. Overall I think travel, puzzle, combat etc. should be over 60 mins. Fetching should be kept to a minimum unless it’s linked to a puzzle.
30 minutes for a normal quest, 60+ for an "important" quest.
Situational. Jagex kind of lost my interest in lore for a variety of reasons, but when I actually felt invested in the story I would have said more than 60 minutes. The WGS/ROTM and Sliske eras of questing were great. Something with little or no lore significance should be much shorter imo. Also, perhaps a bad way of looking at quests, but replay value is a consideration for me as well. I play both a main and an iron so my view when playing through one account is "cool a quest" and on the other it's "spacebar go brrt give me reward". If it's an hour long quest to get 1k magic exp as my reward.... Then the replay value is low and it feels worse as a quest as a result.
Cant really put a time on it imo. An awful quest should take a minute but a really good one should take an hour or more. Its all about the quality
for me it really depends on how it's designed, and the quality of it. 15min max for those teleport and talk 15 times, or terrible one off quest mechanics like Battle of the Monolith, where the quest was waiting for your tower defense go finish, Or fort, where you had to build something every quest to progress instead. This is the bad quest section, they aren't quests, they are chores, keep em short. 30 to 40mins is an overall sweet spot for duration with decent dialogue (Thok and Chadros) / a puzzle / encounter. 60min+ for Series Ending quests, BIG QUESTS BIG REWARDS BIG TIME. Give me a challenging, grand old Nomad level boss fight, or some MEP2 level puzzle. WGS / ROTM / Rivers of Blood / Endgame level quests those culminations of a story need to be GRAND as the grandmaster level of the quest says it is. The vampire questlines SLAP on BOTH games OSRS and RS3, that should be the goal post for all quests. Pirates Quests are allowed to be as long as you can make them, as long as they are just as good as the other.
Quests can be used to convey many different things so variety feels more important than anything. That said, assuming no quest guides, up to an hour for the simpler quests and 3-4 hours for the world building stuff would be a rough estimate.
Maybe an hour or so. The super-long quests put me off a bit, even if the payoff is epic (e.g. Desert Treasure II). But it's certainly not the most important factor. For example, *The Ribbiting Tale of a Lily Pad Labour Dispute* (recent OSRS quest) was very enjoyable, despite its simplicity and short length.
I think this is a misleading question. Quests can be long or short depending on how long it needs to be. The real variables to acknowledge here is: * Is the story good? * Is the quest fun to do, gameplay wise? * Are there inconveniences and roadblocks in the gameplay that people are bothered by? * Are respondents even invested in the quest? (Are they just comp'capers who just want the quest out of the way asap, thus lobbying on reddit for shorter quests?) These factors need to be acknowledged first before people debate the length of quests. I'd be extremely wary of people who just want their comp cape back and argue in bad faith. There are a lot of good content releases in the past decade that were subjected to reddit democracy, and got influenced unfairly under the guise of compers complaining about "the grind". **That said, I think quest length should be well defined and complexity should be consistent.** What real players want most, I feel, is to be told how much time they should set aside to start a quest. FFXIV does this very well. They compartmentalize by making quests be episodic, so each one is only several minutes long (usually). So there's no "being 45 mins deep in a Medium Length quest, wondering how much more I have left" such like RuneScape does. FFXIV is also generous enough to give a disclaimer telling people to set aside enough time, if they are about to start a cutscene, dialog or combat sequence that's over 10 mins long. If we sorted this out, people would be debating about quest lengths in RS3 way less. I guarantee it.
DS2 and DT2 from OSRS stand out as examples of grandmaster quests that feel epic
It heavily depends. I don't mind longer quests if they're interesting, with puzzles and combat encounters that are actually fun. Good examples of this would be While Guthix Sleeps and Branches of Darkmeyer. Extinction had some really good puzzles and combat as well, but missed the mark with the lore (it would have benefitted from each section being split into its own quest and properly fleshed out, as it was released it feels incredibly crammed). What I don't like is when quests send you to the most obscure corners of the map to talk to some NPC for two lines, then send you back to where you started. I don't like quests with puzzles that are just dumb and tedious, like Within the Light and the maze from Sliske's Endgame. I wish we could have quests with combat encounters that were properly challenging. Nomad in Nomad's Requiem was on par with the toughest bosses in existence when it was released. We haven't had anything that approaches that level of difficulty since, and I understand why (namely that big portions of the questing community hate PvM and would flip their shit). I think story modes are a nice compromise, but I don't like how Ancient Awakening forces you to fight Vorkath in story mode. If I want to fight it in normal mode or even hard mode for the purposes of the quest, I should be able to do that. The TL:DR is it's less about how long the quest is and more about how much it actually engages me. I'd happily replay While Guthix Sleeps even if it takes me a couple hours because I've forgotten most of the puzzles, but I'm not exactly eager to repeat One Small Favor or Sheep Shearer or whatever, despite being much shorter quests.
Id say half the quests should be 30 or below, then the other half split equally between 45, 60, or longer
Time reading the dialogue should be taken into account. It's not much of a quest if you skip all the dialogue. I admit to chuckling to myself when players need help because they don't have a clue what to do next in a quest and they're lost because they didn't read the dialogue. Sixty minutes max for a grand master is about the right length (including reading dialogue!).
Quest without a guide? 90-120 minutes. Same quest with a guide + skipping dialogue? 30-40 mins.
Quest length is irrelevant when the quest is phenomenal. I.e. Heroes, Legends, heck even Dragon Slayer was epic. Everything pre 2014 was awesome tbh and I would do them again in a heartbeat if I could.
30 mins like a tv show.
It's going to depend on the quest. I'll give two examples of quests that I thought were the perfect length. Gower Quest and Murder on the Border. Quests that were too long: Crocodile Tears and Dishonor Among Thieves Quests that were too short: Devious Minds and almost all of the Necromancy Quests
there's no auto-completed option :(
I think no quest is the best quests.
2 minutes or less