When you play a Massively Multiplayer Role Playing Game or MMORPG, you’ll notice that the first thing you will be tasked to do is to accomplish a quest. Quests can either involve heading over to a character and obtaining an item, or being told by the said character to fight a battle for him or her in exchange for an important item.

In other words, you’ll find that Quests play a central role in an MMORPG. Whether you’re playing a browser-based real time MMORPG like League of Angels, or a client-based RPG like Skyforge, you’ll find yourself doing quests most of the time in the game. If you’re new to MMORPGs, then you’ll probably wonder why these tasks are having such prominence in the games.

First off, Quests form part of the tutorial in a game. The first quests in a game are always instructional in nature. In Dofus, for instance, your guide will teach you how to fight your first battle immediately after the short introduction of the game. The few other Quests that followed are also tutorials – you create your first artifact and fight three battles with it in your arsenal in order for you to understand the effects of that artifact on your actual battle.

Quests are also important to moving the narrative forward. Auto-pathfinders, or MMORPGs that automatically steer characters towards selected quests, like Mythborne and League of Angels have their stories driven by the Quests that the player is compelled to undertake for a character. The more Quests that you accomplish, the deeper into the storyline you go into.

As mentioned earlier, Quests are sometimes tasks that a non-playable character or NPC tells the player’s character to undertake on his or her behalf. Besides presenting more of the story for the player to follow, these quests also give players valuable items like new or upgraded armor, weapons and attachments. Thus, they function to make a character stronger and more powerful by giving the player freebies that improve their attributes or statistics.

There are also quests that are also rewarding in nature but do not actually have a role in moving the story forward. This means that these quests, called side quests by gamers for that reason, serve as a diversion from the main story for the player should he or she wants to take on a side mission for fun or for rewards.

However, one can always go back to the main storyline and find it unaffected by the completion or non-completion of these side quests. The gear one gets from such side quests, however, can have an effect on how easy or how difficult the rest of the main storyline is for the player.

It’s probably safe to say that a role-playing game is a big story that’s built entirely on Quests. Each Quest that one plays is an important part of the story and should not be ignored. In some cases, a quest may not affect the main storyline directly but can have an effect on the challenge factor of the MMORPG.