Thread: Autoquests
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Old 01-21-2010, 07:30 AM   #3
KaVir
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Join Date: Apr 2002
Name: Richard
Home MUD: God Wars II
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Re: Autoquests

I added a simple autoquest system to the original God Wars mud back in 95 - you would get a quest card with 3 randomly selected objects on it, then had to go around collecting those objects and adding them to the card. Once you'd finished you'd insert your card into the quest machine and it would give you a quest token.

You could eat quest tokens to gain their value in quest points, and could also create quest tokens at will (with their value being subtracted from your quest points) to use as a form of currency. Quest points could be spent on enhancing or creating magic items.

The feature was added to give players a wider variety of things to do, but the problem was you needed both exp and quest points in order to be competitive, and you needed a lot of both - so instead of adding variety, it ended up as just another form of grind.

In God Wars II, I added a different form of autoquest - maps. There are three stages to maps, the first is to decypher it (via a minigame), the second is to follow the map to the appropriate location in the world (examining the map gives only an approxiate distance and direction, so this requires a bit of trial and error) and the final stage is to defeat the guardian.

However the maps give the same type of exp as you get from killing mobs, so unlike the quest cards in GW1 they're not a requirement. This has proven much more effective, as players who get bored of killing mobs can simply switch to maps, or pick one of the other means of earning exp.
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