Thread: Quest Design
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Old 09-28-2010, 11:44 AM   #22
plamzi
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Re: Quest Design

@silvarilon:

It is absolutely a matter of audience. Mine comes primarily through the AppStore, and graduates from "modern" mobile MMO's like "Pocket Legends" and "IMO: World of Magic" that let you quest-grind ad nausem. The average mobile MMO quest takes 1-2 min. to complete (lest someone gets bored) and comes in two flavors: "kill this" and "find this". Sometimes even random tapping on the screen will eventually kill the right mob and complete the quest. Think monkeys on typewriters. This is just to provide context.

Because of the above, I believe that for my particular world, advanced quest concepts may not be worthwhile. But in this brave new simplistic world, I do want to retain and cultivate the spirit of MUD creativity, so I'm focusing my energy on opening parts of the quest engine to players themselves. That is, I'd like to allow the top levels in my game to kick off quests for lower levels as part of their mentorship (e. g. explore this area and you'll earn my spare diamond robe). They'd also be able to start races where the first one wins, or to put a a price on their head (we have limited PK). All this has to be very straightforward to do, and my current approach is a web form connecting to an SQL db that the server is reading from in real time. If users provide their own reward, then the quest starts immediately. If not, it is queued up for immo revision and approval.

The emphasis for me is in having my quest engine support a wide variety of relatively simple tasks and in making it easy for users to contribute content. Because individual quests can be linked together (see KaVir's link), I believe that creative players may help build quite complicated multi-step scenarios. They'd be engaging enough even without multi-goal or random detour support.

While it is certainly possible to do anything with code, the more advanced a quest engine becomes, the less open it is to the average user. This, I think for most MUDs translates into content dearth (since none of us have staffs of hundreds). In CircleMUD, I can devise and code in one incredibly advanced plot using the baked in special procedures (C code assigned to entities). Or, in the same amount of time, I can build a robust simple-quest engine that can spurt user-generated content endlessly. My choice is already made.
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