PC Gamer - The Rise & Fall Of The Personal Quest

Richard Cobbett posted an interesting editorial on PC Gamer about Personal Quests. 

What makes personal quests tricky to look back on is that they're simultaneously one of the best and worst things that ever happened to the genre. Without them, MMOs would be lesser experiences, and it's hard to imagine them being as successful. In their success though, they offered a template so easily copied and safely implemented that they largely killed the point of their genre. It's as if, say, Quake had taught the world to crave flashy 3D graphics, but in doing so decided to remove the guns in favour of a debate system where you talk the monsters out of their evil, and that rather than deathmatch had come to define what modern shooters are. Call of Reason: Advanced Diplomacy would be high in the charts. It would be madness.