Thread: Quest Design
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Old 09-21-2010, 02:12 PM   #10
Parhelion
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Join Date: Oct 2007
Name: Sarah
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Re: Quest Design

This actually sounds like a pretty fun approach.

I've worked on designing a few quests before and I've found that, as both a player and a writer, I don't generally like repeatable quests. My reasons for it is that it breaks immersion as much as it kills any replay value for a game, and the only good I've ever seen come of it is to create easy "money generator" quests.

Designing single-use quests comes with their own challenges. You can forbid players from discussing the secrets for finding the Couch of Mana, but somewhere along the way someone a-hole is gonna post a Quest Guide somewhere on the internet, or pass it around through messengers. I would also find it very difficult to say "no" to players that wanted to organically guide each other through these quests (i.e, through roleplay -- which would likely come up far more often on a roleplaying type game as opposed to a strategy or H&S one), but that opens up a whole can of worms for easily bypassing the rules.

An approach that I tried (but never implemented, due to time constraints) was to design a system that would present context-sensitive quests to players. In this way, the order of quests, and potentially the end objectives, would never be totally predictable. The rewards would also be unpredictable (with each quest drawing from a pool of acceptable rewards). The "quest giver" should be able to remember what each CHARACTER has already done in the past, to allow for the quest chain to take on a meaningful path.
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