It seems quite unusual that you can outright fail a quest in a MMORPG. You can get yourself lost or give up on one easily enough of course. But how often do we get told we’ve failed and get sent back to the start?
A jungle trek to the tomb
Last night we played “The Faithful Departed” for the first time, and right at the end the (failure) condition was triggered and we were dumped out of the instance. That’s pretty in harsh in DDO terms, if you fail you only get to keep the loot you’ve picked up thusfar, any experience rewards stacked up are gone.
Lots of poisonous monsters here
The issue really for us wasn’t that there was a failure condition, but rather that we collectively were confused by the terms of that failure condition. The wording made it sound, on this first run-through, like we should let the revered dead get destroyed. In fact it was stating what will cause the quest to be a failure. There are few quests with these failure conditions, so we do not have a huge amount of exposure to how they work and are worded elsewhere. If we’d paid a bit more attention to the lengthy dialogue that introduced the quest then, I guess, it’d probably have been more clear.
The dungeon happens to be a very impressive one visually, we gave up on it for that session as time was running out, but I’ll want to go back and beat it. Failure conditions are interesting, especially where there are slightly higher stakes than clicking a retry conversation option. Ensuring that the players are clear on what will cause a failure isn’t always so easy it seems.
Are you ok with failure conditions for MMORPG quests?
GamingSF 
Yes. The all-or-nothing failure mechanic in certain quests in one of the (many) things that make DDO a great MMO.
The possibility of failure is necessary for “victory”. If you can’t fail, it’s just a mindless grind.
Hm, the only quests I can think of that I’ve experienced and that you can fail tend to be escort types where you need to keep some NPC alive. Depending on their length, it can feel quite annoying to have to start over. Failure as a concept is fine, but I think it’s best implemented without making you feel like you just wasted lots of time.
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