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Quest Design

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Dec 17, 2013
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Playing some RPGs right now and getting pretty fed up with the whole Fed-Ex quest barrage, which made me think about RPG quest design again. Here at the Codex, C&C is one of the buzzwords and objects of worship, but the strange thing is, some of the RPGs I have played lately do have significant C&C in their quests and yet the quests are still dull and tedious. What tends to happen often is some NPC gives you some low level task (go fetch this thing, or go kill that guy, or go talk to whoever, etc) and then you get there and are presented with some options in the dialogue based on your skills and abilities. So it's basically like a choose-your-own adventure Fed-Ex quest. The fact that I can choose one of several options doesn't make the shallow nature of the quest any better.

Don't get me wrong, I like choice and consequence and think they are a great addition to an RPG, but to design good quests, I think you need something else. So I went back and looked at some of the quests in those games that I actually enjoyed, and the thing they all seem to have in common is enjoyable complexity.

All basic RPG gameplay is the same, it consists of combat, exploration, dialogue, and puzzles. But the bad quests incorporate those elements into a very simple total construct: go here, perform the basic RPG element, and come back (maybe even several times if they want to punish you). The good, memorable quests combine these basic elements into a complex total construct. For example, NPC tells you to bring him some thingamajig rumored to be in some dungeon. But the thing is separated into multiple pieces scattered throughout the dungeon, and to traverse it you have to engage in a mixture of combat, puzzle solving, and exploration. Or, another example, you have to set up defenses for a fortress before a massive attack. The quest giver tells you all the things you will require for this in general terms, but then it's up to you to move around and talk people living around the fortress to lend a hand in the defense, purchase or steal weaponry and defenses, set up some mechanisms in the fortress and whatever else is involved.

In both of these cases, you are still doing the basic RPG stuff, talking, fighting and exploring, but instead of doing it in tiny doses after speaking to an NPC which is tedious, you get to do a LOT of stuff after talking to an NPC, which makes you feel less of an errand-boy and more like an active and involved character. For bonus points, these "complex" quests can also involve using your brain in terms of collecting clues and solving problems based on your knowledge and thinking.

If you are going to add C&C, it should ideally be in line with this complexity. So if the quest involves traversing a dungeon, one character can use brute force and combat, another stealth, and another diplomacy and guile, rather than just picking one of dialogue options every time.
 

WhiteGuts

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I think where RPGs tend to fail, is in making the diplomatic choices meaningful.

Most of the time it actually feels like Fed-exing, or a glorified half-assed CYOA *looks at AoD*, there is no sense of accomplishment.
 

agentorange

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This is one of the many the areas in which VTMB excelled. VTMB had a real knack for staring a quest out in a seemingly simple fashion, then having it branch into something more interesting. Like the quest where you need to track down the bounty hunter: I can imagine any number of other RPGs just having the quest end by you finding the bounty hunter dead, or drunk in some bar (and you have to decide where you want to send him back to his employer who is being mean to him), but instead it spirals into this murder mystery like scenario. Of course it also had some of the typical fedex style quests, but by and large the quests managed to feel like individual PNP scenarios - which is what I think all side quests should aim for; a side quest should feel like a very short self-contained story that you become involved in, instead of a task.
 
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Andkat

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The intrinsic problem with diplomacy etc. options in RPGs tends to be a lack of any actual challenge to the player. While there is obviously a lot of fixation on "outcomes based on character skill" as a defining point of a good cRPG around here, at the end of the day what makes an RPG a game is the player agency in determining positioning, ability usage order, preparation, etc. for a given engagement. However, most noncombat solutions tend to involve a few deterministic skillchecks (often not even rolled) and the "correct" option is often displayed explicitly (and even if not, usually obvious by dint of being the longest/most articulate sentence in the list). In AoD for example the only real element of noncombat challenge is build planning (initially common sense for the first run, and eventually just an endeavor of brute force and memorization when you really want to 'beat' as much content as possible).

An associated problem tends to be that many RPG systems, whether computer or pen and paper, tend to lump essentially all social etc. faculties into one or two skills/attributes, which means that there's really only one way to develop a character with a noncombat focus/aspect and making noncombat solutions too abundant would overly trivialize noncombat playthroughs (as you could safely pour all of your xp into one or two stats without any distinction in 'builds' or approaches and thus no real possibility of error or mechanically dictated replayability). Games like AoD and to a lesser extent VtM:B solve this problem, but still rarely made the social dynamic a real active element of gameplay (I do recall the Wesp-patched version of getting the optimal Jeanette/Therese resolution to require some amount of care on the part of the player, although it has been a very long time since I've experienced that content).

DX:HR was an interesting and quite entertaining example of how to try to incorporate an actual element of gameplay into dialogue with the whole dialogue challenge face/emotion reading bits. While this sort of thing does rely quite a bit on detailed graphics and animations and so is not necessarily a good universal solution, making dialogue that requires some element of challenge and logic to plot a "correct" course through (or perhaps even an actual numerical representation of a major verbal confrontation as a 'fight' in the vein of the social combat in pnp systems like Fate or WH40kRP Black Crusade's Tome of Excess), but without degenerating into an inane disconnected minigame (Oblivion).

The incorporation of some amount of adventure game elements in terms of having to gather or organize chains of evidence or logic or putting it on the player to reason out and input prompts for dialogue (as you could do in Fallout and obviously text-based games) might also be ways of helping to eke an actual sense of gameplay out of such things (basically making significant dialogues/sequences of dialogues a 'puzzle', ideally with multiple mutually exclusive 'optimal' solutions, that demand something of the player intellectually), although I'm really not sure as to what a good universal approach would be. Naturally, it would be of considerable importance to actually try to describe in detail the reactions of the NPCs involved and factor in things like perception/investigative skill/etc. in further divining the motivations and propensities of those you are interacting with (either during or prior to the actual conversation).
 
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Joined
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... a side quest should feel like a very short self-contained story that you become involved in, instead of a task.

Yeah, quests should be complex goals instead of simple tasks. It should be the player breaking the goal down into tasks, not the game itself. Lots of RPG quests seem like goals but the game breaks them down into tiny steps for you, so you feel no sense of active participation other than as an errand-boy.

The intrinsic problem with diplomacy etc. options in RPGs tends to be a lack of any actual challenge to the player. While there is obviously a lot of fixation on "outcomes based on character skill" as a defining point of a good cRPG around here, at the end of the day what makes an RPG a game is the player agency in determining positioning, ability usage order, preparation, etc. for a given engagement. However, most noncombat solutions tend to involve a few deterministic skillchecks (often not even rolled) and the "correct" option is often displayed explicitly (and even if not, usually obvious by dint of being the longest/most articulate sentence in the list). In AoD for example the only real element of noncombat challenge is build planning (initially common sense for the first run, and eventually just an endeavor of brute force and memorization when you really want to 'beat' as much content as possible).

An associated problem tends to be that many RPG systems, whether computer or pen and paper, tend to lump essentially all social etc. faculties into one or two skills/attributes, which means that there's really only one way to develop a character with a noncombat focus/aspect and making noncombat solutions too abundant would overly trivialize noncombat playthroughs (as you could safely pour all of your xp into one or two stats without any distinction in 'builds' or approaches and thus no real possibility of error or mechanically dictated replayability). Games like AoD and to a lesser extent VtM:B solve this problem, but still rarely made the social dynamic a real active element of gameplay (I do recall the Wesp-patched version of getting the optimal Jeanette/Therese resolution to require some amount of care on the part of the player, although it has been a very long time since I've experienced that content).

DX:HR was an interesting and quite entertaining example of how to try to incorporate an actual element of gameplay into dialogue with the whole dialogue challenge face/emotion reading bits. While this sort of thing does rely quite a bit on detailed graphics and animations and so is not necessarily a good universal solution, making dialogue that requires some element of challenge and logic to plot a "correct" course through (or perhaps even an actual numerical representation of a major verbal confrontation as a 'fight' in the vein of the social combat in pnp systems like Fate or WH40kRP Black Crusade's Tome of Excess), but without degenerating into an inane disconnected minigame (Oblivion).

The incorporation of some amount of adventure game elements in terms of having to gather or organize chains of evidence or logic or putting it on the player to reason out and input prompts for dialogue (as you could do in Fallout and obviously text-based games) might also be ways of helping to eke an actual sense of gameplay out of such things (basically making significant dialogues/sequences of dialogues a 'puzzle', ideally with multiple mutually exclusive 'optimal' solutions, that demand something of the player intellectually), although I'm really not sure as to what a good universal approach would be. Naturally, it would be of considerable importance to actually try to describe in detail the reactions of the NPCs involved and factor in things like perception/investigative skill/etc. in further divining the motivations and propensities of those you are interacting with (either during or prior to the actual conversation).

I agree with you in general about the non-combat systems often being too simple and lacking player involvement, but in this particular case, even if they were more involved, it wouldn't help with the quest design itself, just like a UPS quest involving a good bit of combat is still a UPS quest. The adventure game bit would help though if it was applied to not just the end dialogue but to the process of completing that quest. So for example, if instead of "go to X and do Y", the NPC would tell you "i need to see the end result K" and you have to use your head to figure out what you have to do to bring about that result based on finding clues, etc.
 

odrzut

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The problem is in the simplistic event tracking system. Basicaly the more the game can track - the more it can use in quests. All games track inventory and position of players anyway, so fetch quests are everywhere. Quests can react to where you are and what you have in inventory.

Many games also track who you talked with, and about what. That gives some more options to check in quests (and also exponentialy increase the time required to test all the combinations of events).

Then you can also track what NPCs and player have seen. This is important for "stealing in public view" protection, but also is useful for better quests. Sadly it's not common even in modern games.

Then you could also track chronology (quest can happen differently depending if you told about this important transport going through mountains to a Traitor John, or Honest Bob first).

And then you could try to track meta-knowledge. That is - knowledge about knowledge. For example - you talk about this transport with Honest Bob - this is knowledge. But there was Traitor John siting by the wall, and he overheard this - he also knows this. But then you can read his letter to his boss abotu this - this is meta-knowledge, that is you know that Traitor John know, that the tranpsort will be going through the mountains. And then he can somehow learn that you know this. And so on.

This meta-knowledge is recursive by nature, and it can easily take up the whole memory and hard disk, if you don't limit the tracking to something maneagable. Otherways you have your database filled with "John doesn't know, that Bob knows, that John knows, that Bob knows, that ....".

Only when you track all the things that influence the quest you would want to implement - you can impoement it. And then you still cannot put too many conditions in your quests, because the possible states of the world grow exponentialy. That is - each new condition doubles the number of possible states the world is in. 1 condition - 2 states to test. 2 conditions - 4 states. 10 conditions - 1024 states. 20 conditions - over 1 000 000 states. And 2 quests with 10 conditions each isn't 2048 states. It's over 1000 0000 states again, doesn't matter if it's one quest or divided into many smaller quests.

You can cull some of them with clever reuse of results for different conditions, but still it's huge cost to test you quests if you don't make them on/off, and allow them to be in progress simultanously.
 

AetherVagrant

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Don't get me wrong, I like choice and consequence and think they are a great addition to an RPG, but to design good quests, I think you need something else. So I went back and looked at some of the quests in those games that I actually enjoyed, and the thing they all seem to have in common is enjoyable complexity.
Examples of games whose quest structure you enjoyed or thought bucked the trends?
 

V_K

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The intrinsic problem with diplomacy etc. options in RPGs tends to be a lack of any actual challenge to the player. While there is obviously a lot of fixation on "outcomes based on character skill" as a defining point of a good cRPG around here, at the end of the day what makes an RPG a game is the player agency in determining positioning, ability usage order, preparation, etc. for a given engagement. However, most noncombat solutions tend to involve a few deterministic skillchecks (often not even rolled) and the "correct" option is often displayed explicitly (and even if not, usually obvious by dint of being the longest/most articulate sentence in the list). In AoD for example the only real element of noncombat challenge is build planning (initially common sense for the first run, and eventually just an endeavor of brute force and memorization when you really want to 'beat' as much content as possible).
It's funny how not too many years ago diplomacy was mostly about raising the NPC's disposition stat - a now nobody seems to remeber it at all.

The good, memorable quests combine these basic elements into a complex total construct. For example, NPC tells you to bring him some thingamajig rumored to be in some dungeon. But the thing is separated into multiple pieces scattered throughout the dungeon, and to traverse it you have to engage in a mixture of combat, puzzle solving, and exploration.
IMO that's still too much of a 'quest', which is what makes it not much fun. Ideally there shouldn't be quests, but goals - and everything else the player should figure out by himself. Magic Candle games did a really good job with it: you have your main goal and then you travel the world meticulously gaining pieces of lore, that slowly build up to a bigger picture of what you must do to reach it. Amberstar is another good example: while it did have quests, they were interconnected in inobvious ways, like saving a certain animal would allow you to speak animal tongue, that opened you the way into the thieves guild - but you didn't know any of that when you took the rescue quest.
 
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Examples of games whose quest structure you enjoyed or thought bucked the trends?

By those games in that quote I meant the games I am playing now, in other words, the few good quests that they actually had. It's a little hard to remember the exact quest structure in all the RPGs I've played over the years, but my general feeling is that most RPGs have shallow UPS-type quests mixed with more complex ones, though the exact ratio might differ between games. I struggle to think of a game that just blew me away in this regard with all or most of its quests being really complex, but maybe that's just memory issues.

IMO that's still too much of a 'quest', which is what makes it not much fun. Ideally there shouldn't be quests, but goals - and everything else the player should figure out by himself. Magic Candle games did a really good job with it: you have your main goal and then you travel the world meticulously gaining pieces of lore, that slowly build up to a bigger picture of what you must do to reach it. Amberstar is another good example: while it did have quests, they were interconnected in inobvious ways, like saving a certain animal would allow you to speak animal tongue, that opened you the way into the thieves guild - but you didn't know any of that when you took the rescue quest.

Well, quest and goal are just words and aren't necessarily mutually exclusive. A broad and complex quest is a goal, and a goal can be thought of/named a quest. The key is just not to tell the player exactly what to do in little steps where they don't have to think or actively participate, but tell them high level instructions and let them figure the rest out.
 

Machocruz

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I think the term "quest" is abused in video games. Going into a linear cave two miles away form town to grab a family heirloom is not a quest to me, it's an errand. Killing rats in a basement is not a quest. Going halfway across the land to throw the one ring of power into a volcano is a quest. So I agree that a proper quest is grander and/or more complex than the average you find in video RPGs.

Maybe I'm wrong and those errands are technically quests, but I'm hard pressed to think of any great quests in literature that are that lowly.
 

AetherVagrant

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Im sorry, I should clarify -- I agree wholeheartedly, and responded not to debate but was interested to know specifically which titles you think have some of the best quest design, regardless of how good the rest of the game was. I know many games have a handful of great quests with unusual structure, goals, or processes, interspersed amongst the fedX/escort/assasinate ones.
 

A horse of course

Guest
Going halfway across the land to throw the one ring of power into a volcano is a quest.

What if you pick up the ring and there's a note next to it saying where to go, then you quick-travel to the volcano, fight a level-scaled dragon and throw it in?
 

Old Hans

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I think the term "quest" is abused in video games. Going into a linear cave two miles away form town to grab a family heirloom is not a quest to me, it's an errand. Killing rats in a basement is not a quest. Going halfway across the land to throw the one ring of power into a volcano is a quest. So I agree that a proper quest is grander and/or more complex than the average you find in video RPGs.

Maybe I'm wrong and those errands are technically quests, but I'm hard pressed to think of any great quests in literature that are that lowly.

at the start of their journey Frodo and the gang spend a couple weeks helping farmer maggot settle a grain shipment dispute.
 

V_K

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Well, quest and goal are just words and aren't necessarily mutually exclusive. A broad and complex quest is a goal, and a goal can be thought of/named a quest. The key is just not to tell the player exactly what to do in little steps where they don't have to think or actively participate, but tell them high level instructions and let them figure the rest out.
There are two things that in my book separate a quest from a goal:
1) A quest exists in isolation from other quests. It rarely happens that performing a certain action advances two or more quests simultaneously (unless one of them is your main quest).
2) A quest is something you get from an NPC (and usually can't complete before you do that) while a goal is something you figure out by yourself from the clues you gather.
Goal-based narratives are more common in adventure games, but there were RPGs that adopted the approach - to great results imo.
 

Avellion

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These fedex quests are not quests. They are chores. A good quest should be a goal set by the game, my favorite are the seemingly simple goals or tasks that become a lot more complex due to various circumstances.

Less of this

8C6WPko.png


More of this

3192901-4514785129-jqme7.gif


Ultimately the problem with modern quest design is that C&C is used in an attempt to disguise an otherwise completely linear quest experience to be non-linear. Likewise, another problem I have is that most of the C&C feels absolutely shoehorned in, forced in by the devs for the sake of having C&C. Instead of designing around a scenario and thinking out various ways the scenario could be played out, it seems like the quest designers instead think of a task and then what arbitary C&C they can shoehorn in at the end.

Dividing a quest in the way you described in the first example wouldnt really solve the problem of bland quest design on its own (though dungeon design could circumvent that). The second example you brought up however, seems a lot more interesting.
 
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Zed

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For C&C to feel meaningful to me, developers must be willing to wall off a chunk of content to players. E.g. the player choosing one faction over another. You dismiss a handful of quests in favor for some other quests, or you dismiss a companion in order to gain another companion.
It feels like very few developers feel comfortable doing this.
 

naossano

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That three is even bigger if you include Walter and Ethel Phebus and their own objectives.

PS: As weird as it sound, there are also players which are agains't C & C. They can't grasp the idea of missing some content at first playthrough.
 

V_K

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It's not about missing on content, it's about said choices being forced down your throat - which actually takes away from the illusion of player agency rather than the other way around. Very few games do it in a non-cringeworthy way.
 
Self-Ejected

IncendiaryDevice

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A big problem with C&C and why a lot of people got turned off from it is interpretation. People who have lived together for decades still misinterpret what the other person is saying, so how can you expect anyone to interpret random lines in a video game correctly. No end of times I've played a game and the options have been "agree with person", "politely disagree with person" or "seriously admonish person" and the end result of that choice has not been the direction you wanted to take that character or that story-line.

For example, the "seriously admonish" might get the result that the NPC/Companion see's their way is the bad way and cow-tows to your position and roleplaying as a 'stern' boss. However, the NPC/Companion might also react by telling you to eff-off and you never seeing them again. So, as a Gamer, all you want to know is the 'correct' answer for what you want the game to do. You don't actually want balls-to-the-wall unpredictable random luck outcomes, that's for roguelikes, what you want is a means to correctly and logically roleplay your role while at the same time having options which enhance that experience. There will never be a 'correct' way to interpret and predict a social encounter outcome in the way you would want a game to relay that information.

If C&C is varied and interesting but still leads to the same result of not having C&C then people complain that the C&C is meaningless anyway, you might as well have fun and kill everything. If the C&C allows for failure, even end-game failure, then it just angers the player because only death should be failure in an RPG, having a conversation or quest path choice fail you always feels really really cheap, unless that the is the theme throughout the entire game and the main idea of the game.

Good C&C would be where it simply allows you to travel through the game via different paths, experiencing differentness, but ending up at the same goal end-point, which many RPGs try to do but with varying success as to whether that was the path your role intended.

On the subject of what kind of quests are fun and which are boring in this framework, I think variety is the key. The best games for quests are normally the ones that offer you the option of doing the fed-ex's for when you're feeling lazy and just want a brief sense of accomplishment, the assassinations for when you're feeling like a boss-fight, the talky quests for when you're feeling like you've been fighting too much, the puzzles for when you're in that mood and then the complex main quest for when you're fed up of nobbing about. Repetition is the biggest crime IMO, not any single quest-type. One of the best games I've played for quest-bookness was, ironically, the Hack'n'Slash Divine Divinity.
 
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1) A quest exists in isolation from other quests. It rarely happens that performing a certain action advances two or more quests simultaneously (unless one of them is your main quest).

I think this depends on the design. I've definitely played RPGs where a certain action advances more than one quest. Like for example, you kill some NPC, and it ends one quest which tasked you with killing him/her, but also advances another because before he dies he tells you something relevant to that. More generally, there is nothing prohibiting designers from implementing intersecting quests.

2) A quest is something you get from an NPC (and usually can't complete before you do that) while a goal is something you figure out by yourself from the clues you gather.
Goal-based narratives are more common in adventure games, but there were RPGs that adopted the approach - to great results imo.

I like that kind of adventure-type gameplay in RPGs as well. However, considering the low-level task quests prevalent in RPGs, having high level goal quests would still be quite an improvement for most role playing games.
 

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