The Quest system - my thoughts

from Elemental Forums

Inspired by the release of 3C, I wanted to put my thoughts on the quest system in writing. I'll try to keep it as condensed as possible.

I love the quest system. Quests are great and it's a really cool part of the game, almost completely unique to any 4x game. At least any I've played. I can easily see myself playing the game quest oriented, focusing on completing them and being more of an adventurer than a kingdom-builder, winning the game that way.

Some things do kind of get in the way of questing feeling like real adventuring, but at least in my head these problems are absolutely solvable and maybe not even too difficult to solve. In my head of course, don't know how valid these ideas are in reality.

B)

I'll go through how I feel about each different aspect of questing in general.

 

A) Quest huts.

I really like the progression of quest huts, from some small Inns to Witch Huts to Wizard Towers. Of course I wish there were even more of these different kinds of quest locations (Magical Groves, Feuding camps/villages..), but the current setup is already great.

 

B ) Quest variety.

Escorting, finding an item, fighting a battle. The variety is enough in the lower level quets, but towards the higher level quests I would like a bit more variety. I'll adress this in part C.

 

C) Quest level progression.

The higher level quests feel quite a bit the same as the lower level ones. It would be nice if high level quests actually were more demanding, more difficult (other than having higher level monsters) and more exciting. Some quest types that are missing that would be really cool would be:
    1) Kill a certain NPC (that you don't control). Whether the NPC is neutral or owned by another player doesn't matter. You need to kill it to complete the quest - this might mean having to declare war on some kingdom or using diplomacy to make the other kingdom to give you the NPC on a silver platter. Wouldn't it be kind of cool to negotiate essentially the price on hanging of an NPC with your opponent? Would add a dimension to diplomacy, too.
    2) Destroy a city / steal something from it. The truly high level quests should have really difficult dynamic tasks. Destroying a certain major / minor faction city would be difficult enough to make adventuring really interesting. Works the other way around - your city could be the target of an opponent's quets. In my opinion winning the game with a master quest should require you to do some very difficult tasks such as declaring war and raiding a village, or similar.

 

D) Quest plot lines.

It would be nice to have some level 1 quest continue from a level 2 quest hut, eventually leading to a top level quets that gives a big reward. If all the quests are completely independent of each other, it'll never feel as grand as if there are some longer running plot lines.

 

E) Quest prerequisites.

Currently, all you need to do is research higher quest levels to be able to do higher level quests. Here I think it would be good to incorporate something from RPGs, gateway quests. What I mean is having a level 1 quest that you have to complete before you have access to level 2 quests - this would be in addition to researching the required tech. Perhaps a quest you get from an Inn that gets you acquainted with the Witches of the world, thus allowing you to get quests from witch huts. Perhaps the quest techs should open up access to these gateway quests. Examples:

  • Adventure tech name: Witch Lore / Witch Societies
  • Flavor: During their studies in the dark arts, your researchers have discovered information about the Witch societies of <World Name>. Rumour has it these Witches occasionally hire adventurers for all sorts of exotic tasks. Perhaps you should spend some time in the Inns to get acquainted with these sorcerers?
  • Opens up gateway quest that grants access to Witch Huts.
  • Adventure tech name: Wizards' Trust
  • Flavor: Finally, after years of trying, our loremasters have gained some respect from the powerful Wizards of <World Name>. The Wizards have also heard about your deeds around the world and are contemplating about forming a relationship with our kingdom. But first you must pass their test, which is administered by the Witches. Seek out Witch Huts to win the Wizards' trust.
  • Opens up gateway quest that grants access to Wizard Towers.

F) Quest hut locations.

I've written about this before, but this is a really big thing for me so I'll put it here again. It would provide a much better immersion if quest hut locations were less random and more logical, like Witch Huts spawning in marshes, Inns along roads/at intersections and Wizard Towers in all sorts of remote locations (islands, middle of large forests etc).

 

G) Quest hut lifespan.

Another thing that would make the world seem more of a world instead of a grid of tiles would be to make the quest huts at least partially permanent, offering multiple quests each. A Wizard Tower wouldn't go anywhere once you complete the quest. Instead, after some 20 turns from completing the last quest it would have a new one. Every now and then a quest hut could vanish (in my head it would be best if it was displayed as 'worn out' for some turns to indicate that it's disappearing soon), and soon a new one would spawn somewhere else. When a quest hut vanishes it would be really cool to have a goodie hut of the same level in its place, like "Tower Ruins" from a wizard tower.

 

H) Quest reward progression.

It would be great if you got more difficult and more rewarding quests after completing more quests of that level. So if you quest a lot you get better rewards than some lucky guy who happens to get a really good quest from the very first hut he enters. The Wizards you do quests for start to trust you and give you better tasks and better rewards.

 

I) Quest givers as NPCs.

Finally, it sprung to mind that one really exciting reward would be to for example to eventually get to control some powerful wizard that you completed a lot of quests for.

 

J) Additional quest hut ideas

Here's a quick list of different quest hut ideas I could think of (I don't remember which level the current quest huts are so I apologize if I made a mistake):

  • Level 1: Inn (roads, close to cities), Refugee Camp (anywhere a bit more recluse than Inns)
  • Level 2: Witch Hut (Marsh/Forest), Monastery (Plains/Hills)
  • Level 3: Ruins (Anywhere), Thieves' Guilds (close to cities), Feuding Camps (of Humans/Trolls/Whatever, anywhere but quite rare)
  • Level 4+: Wizard Tower (Island/edges of continent/other hard to reach places), Underworld (Mountain ranges, entrance spawns monsters often), Ancient Society (Island, rare quest hut which doesn't spawn at all in most games)

The higher the hut level, the lower the total number in play.

 

 

Well, that's it for my thoughts for now. Loving the questing - I'm a sucker for events in 4x games, much more than the strategic city-building side.

:troll:     :banhammer: #:(

elemental
11,471 views 9 replies
Reply #1 from Elemental Forums Top

Picked this up from another thead. Some more good ideas. Hopefully DeadlyShoe doesn't mind.

Quoting DeadlyShoe, reply 54
Quest feedback:

I'm underwhelmed by quests. Most of adventuring is wandering around, grabbing free loot.  Sometimes you beat up weak monsters.  Virtually all the quests/notable locations are 1-2 step at best with little flavor or adventuring to it - random MMO quests are far more detailed.  The rewards from adventuring seem inconsistent as well - varying from piddling to outrageously imba.  Mostly, the adventure system forces you to use your sovereign as your main scout, as a sovereign using game-start spells can one-shot several enemies a turn while gathering very useful loot and revealing the map.  This is espcially the case given that there are a number of negative sovereign traits that only hurt you when the sovereign is in a city.

Even the flavor text for quests tends to be 1 or 2 lines at most.

As an example of an excellently implemented quest system might be King Arthur ('the role playing wargame') which i picked up on steam when it was on sale.  There are many quests in the game, most of which are simple decision trees with varying impacts on your character and faction based on what you choose.  You may or may not end up in a battle. Granted, none of King Arthurs quests occur in a randomly generated world, but there is no reason that Elementals quests need be so brief or utterly lacking in decision making. 

For example, there's a quest to get a suit of armor that is basically 'Hey look, a suit of armor. Oh no, spiders!  Yes I will fight them. Armor. Hooray.'

There are many many problems with this, and much better ways it could be implemented.

Here's an example decision tree:

Sample Quest - The Spider Tomb

Towards the end of a long day traveling the (ruined wastes/baking desert/blooming forests/whatever the terrain is), you spot an unmoving Fallen lying prone. Hastening to their side, you roll them over and discover a grim sight - his face is locked in a grimace of agony. The Fallen is most certainly dead.  There are two puncture wounds on his arm and a partially torn map clutched in his fingers. 

The map appears to be a mostly incomprehensible private code, but a drawing resembling a nearby stone outcropping is circled in red.

*Walk to outcropping

*Bury Fallen

*Continue on your way

You strip the Fallen in preperation for burial.  You notice a small tatoo on his forearm - an infamous sigil worn only by the head of the infamous House of Whoever.   His death will be news of great import among the Fallen, regardless of what unknown errand brought him to his death in this remote heath.

Digging the grave is hot work and you are soon exausted; strange, you are not usually this weakened by labor. Sweat streaming off your face, you sit and rub your hands on your face. A sharp stinging sensation startles you and with an oath you examine your fingers. The skin is discolored and sensation is largely missing.  You hurriedly wash in a nearby stream, but the damage is done - you must have touched some poison while handling the corpse. Fortunately, its potency seems to have been diluted; other than your dizzy spell and general weakness you feel normal.

After resting and cleaning, you finish the burial and assemble a small rock cairn.

(Gain temporary +1 prestige in Fallen cities and +1 relations with Fallen empires. Lose a small amount of HP/mana - won't kill you.)

*Walk to outcropping

*Continue on your way

After circling the outcropping, you discover an almost invisible stone doorframe carved into the north side.  The interior is utterly dark; you can see only feet inside.  A worn inscription in ancient (language) proclaims this to be the final resting place of (Name), famed champion of the (Infamous House) a thousand years ago. A pile of sun-bleached human skulls proclaim it to have become home to far more than one corpse.

*Enter tomb

*Lay ambush (--> battle, but one spider is killed by ambush. Lose your move points for the next turn.)

*Leave

Fashioning a torch, you venture into the tomb. There is a single hallway sloping downward, unrelieved by decoration or torch-stands. Bones occasionally crackle underfoot.  After several minutes you warily enter a small chamber. It appears to be empty, but something killed the Fallen man...  In the center lies an ornately carved stone casket in the ancient style. A gleaming set of armor is racked to the right; a number of corroded weapons are displayed to the left. Sparing only a glance for the casket, you examine the armor; it is of masterful workmanship and decorated with arcane symbols. Judging by the weapons, the armor has somehow remained in perfect condition for generations.  A chittering sound from behind causes you to whirl around; an enormous hunting spider cautiously enters the chamber from the only door.  Chittering from the far-above ceiling answers the hunter. The Fallen man's death seeks you.

*Engage in battle

*Thrust torch at hunting spider and attempt to run past.

ROUND ONE. FIGHT!

*****

There could also be interactions with sovereign traits. A cowardly sovereign may be unable to choose some brave options, while a daring/stubborn sovereign may be unable to choose some cowardly options.

P.S. - Suggestion for Adventuring Technology - something that allows small parties of adventurers slip into neutral territory without being detected or triggering a war.

P.P.S. - I find the way quest popups unnecessarily cover up the whole screen to be irritating. I'm running at 2048xsomething resolution and most of the real estate is blank and useless. The way a single line of text extends across the whole screen also makes it hard to read. A compact well designed popup would be far better.

Reply #2 from Elemental Forums Top

i personally don't like the spawning of quest locations at all, they should already be on the map and you just unlock them via research. also they should not get removed when the quest is completed instead they should offer a new quest after a while.

Star Control: Origins
Reply #3 from Elemental Forums Top

A) Quest huts.

I really like the progression of quest huts, from some small Inns to Witch Huts to Wizard Towers. Of course I wish there were even more of these different kinds of quest locations (Magical Groves, Feuding camps/villages..), but the current setup is already great.

I like the progression, but there is clutter still. For example, I can often see 2 inns that offer level 1 quests. I go to one of them, get a quest and finish it. I go to the second inn, and it tells me there are no quests at this location. Well, why is it there then? Each location should have a quest to give at all times, else it shouldn't clutter the map. Repeating quests is not a bad thing, and certainly better than keeping these now-useless tiles on the map forever.

I think the most common sense way is to have a quest attached to each tile at spawn. For example, let's say there are 10 level 1 quests. When the game spawns an Inn, it randomly picks one of the 10 quests to assign to it. If another Inn ends up picking the same quests, the game doesn't care because they're different Inns. Completing the quest from one Inn does not leave the other one empty.

B ) Quest variety.

Escorting, finding an item, fighting a battle. The variety is enough in the lower level quets, but towards the higher level quests I would like a bit more variety. I'll adress this in part C.

Not all the possibilities of variety are explored, but they should be. Most quests only have one step, which is okay for level 1s but should increase in amount of steps as the levels climb. There's no reason not to have a quest that starts because a Bone Ogre has a %chance to drop an "Ogre Tooth", which starts a quest by telling you the tooth looks interesting somehow and maybe you should take it to someone to look at. So, you take it to a witch who claims she can make a "charm" out of it, but to do so she requires a few more teeth and helpfully points you to an Ogre Den. You go there, kill the ogres, loot a few more teeth. Bring them back, and she makes you a necklace that you can equip as an accessory.

Or a simpler quest, you kill a wolf and get its hide, which starts a quest saying "If you get 4 more hides you can bring it to a leatherworker who can make you a suit of armor". So, you find more wolves in the wild, loot their hides, take it to a special "Leatherworker Shop" tile, who then asks for some gold and materials and makes you a nice suit of leather armor.

It's boring when every quest creates a tile for you to go to. These kinds of quests reward exploration and make it more engaging. You don't know if you'll find a wolf to loot a hide. But if you do, you've got the quest. Then you just need to find the leatherworker, and that tile doesn't "spawn" because you got the quest. It's created on map start, and you just have to find it (if you find it and don't have the quest, it can just give you a message saying the leatherworker takes animal hides and turns them into armor, so you now know you can look for animals you can skin). Only having quests that start on a specific tile and end on a specific tile created just for that one particular quest is not good variety.

C) Quest level progression.

The higher level quests feel quite a bit the same as the lower level ones. It would be nice if high level quests actually were more demanding, more difficult (other than having higher level monsters) and more exciting. Some quest types that are missing that would be really cool would be:

1) Kill a certain NPC (that you don't control). Whether the NPC is neutral or owned by another player doesn't matter. You need to kill it to complete the quest - this might mean having to declare war on some kingdom or using diplomacy to make the other kingdom to give you the NPC on a silver platter. Wouldn't it be kind of cool to negotiate essentially the price on hanging of an NPC with your opponent? Would add a dimension to diplomacy, too.

2) Destroy a city / steal something from it. The truly high level quests should have really difficult dynamic tasks. Destroying a certain major / minor faction city would be difficult enough to make adventuring really interesting. Works the other way around - for no apparent reason a group of heroes might attack your city, just because some quest happened to set your city as a target. In my opinion winning the game with a master quest should require you to do some quests like this first.

I mentioned it above, but the higher level quests just need more stuff for you to do during the quest, multiple steps needed to accomplish. Maybe a level 1 quest for "Bandits raiding a workshop" just has you go there and kill them. But maybe the level 3 version of the quest has you go there, find the bandits long gone but you pick up their trail and follow them to camp. You go to the camp and the bandits attack you, but you find out that a band of Darklings raided the Bandits and made off with everything. So now you go find them, and finally recover the materials for the quest giver.

D) Quest plot lines.

It would be nice to have some level 1 quest continue from a level 2 quest hut, eventually leading to a top level quets that gives a big reward. If all the quests are completely independent of each other, it'll never feel as grand as if there are some longer running plot lines.

Most definitely. A big quest arc that spans across all quest levels can be made very awesome, and very rich.

E) Quest prerequisites.

Currently, all you need to do is research higher quest levels to be able to do higher level quests. Here I think it would be good to incorporate something from RPGs, gateway quests. What I mean is having a level 1 quest that you have to complete before you have access to level 2 quests - this would be in addition to researching the required tech. Perhaps a quest you get from an Inn that gets you acquainted with the Witches of the world, thus allowing you to get quests from witch huts.

I like this idea. I would even like if this kind of quest actually unlocked the research tech. Using your example, you wouldn't be able to research level 2 questing at all until you did the quest from the inn to meet a witch (and do a short intro quest for the witch). I don't think this is likely, though. Your idea might be, if they make it so that a quest can have another quest as a prereq, then you simply add this "level 2 intro quest" to the prereq list of every level 2 quest.

G) Quest hut lifespan.

Another thing that would make the world seem more of a world instead of a grid of tiles would be to make the quest huts at least partially permanent, offering multiple quests each. A Wizard Tower wouldn't go anywhere once you complete the quest. Instead, after some 20 turns from completing the last quest it would have a new one. Every now and then a quest hut could vanish (in my head it would be best if it was displayed as 'worn out' for some turns to indicate that it's disappearing soon), and soon a new one would spawn somewhere else. When a quest hut vanishes it would be really cool to have a goodie hut of the same level in its place, like "Tower Ruins" from a wizard tower.

I've thought about this and personally I sort of like it, but the problem with the idea is the randomness of the map. Unless the map generation can guarantee relatively fair access to the quests for each player, it might not always be fun. Maybe your start doesn't have any marshes anywhere close. Especially if you combine it with your suggestion about quests serving as a pre-req to a new quest level, it would kind of suck if you can't get the prereq quest because the quest hut isn't anywhere near you and you have to wait for a lucky re-spawn.

Reply #4 from Elemental Forums Top

Well, I have a problem with location of high level quests established when generating the map: how to handle the building improvements on a tile that is not yet reveleaded?

Reply #5 from Elemental Forums Top

Quoting Annatar11, reply 3

G) Quest hut lifespan.

I've thought about this and personally I sort of like it, but the problem with the idea is the randomness of the map. Unless the map generation can guarantee relatively fair access to the quests for each player, it might not always be fun. Maybe your start doesn't have any marshes anywhere close. Especially if you combine it with your suggestion about quests serving as a pre-req to a new quest level, it would kind of suck if you can't get the prereq quest because the quest hut isn't anywhere near you and you have to wait for a lucky re-spawn.

The best solution for this issue is by having multiple level 2 quest locations - Witch hut for Forest/Marsh, Monastery for Plains/Hills. If you don't have Marshes or Forests near you, research the "Brotherhood in Trouble" tech that grants you the Monastery gateway quest. If you can't find Witch Huts in the game at all, just ignore that tech and go through a different questing path.

Another way to go about this is to have some checks to make sure that all players have decent access to quest locations. For example there should be an inn close by the starting location of each player, so that they can begin questing early. If there are no marshes anywhere remotely close, then spawn a Witch Hut to the next best location, a forest. If there are no forests either, then spawn a Witch Hut somewhere where it doesn't quite belong; it's not the end of the world. Of course it would be nice to always have it spawn in a suitable location, but if all else fails exceptions can be made. Should try to have that being a pretty rare event, though.

Reply #6 from Elemental Forums Top

Here's a quick list of different quest hut ideas I could think of (I don't remember which level the current quest huts are so I apologize if I made a mistake):

  • Level 1: Inn (roads, close to cities), Refugee Camp (anywhere a bit more recluse than Inns)
  • Level 2: Witch Hut (Marsh/Forest), Monastery (Plains/Hills)
  • Level 3: Ruins (Anywhere), Thieves' Guilds (close to cities), Feuding Camps (of Humans/Trolls/Whatever, anywhere but quite rare)
  • Level 4+: Wizard Tower (Island/edges of continent/other hard to reach places), Underworld (Mountain ranges, entrance spawns monsters often), Ancient Society (Island, rare quest hut which doesn't spawn at all in most games)

The higher the hut level, the lower the total number in play.

Reply #7 from Elemental Forums Top

This man speaks truth! The quest system needs some serious love because right now it feels awkward and 'gamey'. It's not at all immersive...

Reply #8 from Stardock Forums Top

yea it does need a lot of love the master Quest i did was rather lame the overlord Forge... was rather simple not enough Depth i think quests should get more involved with other Kingdoms and Empires. at this point they feel more like lower then WoW standard elemental really needs above WoW and Near D&D like quests.

also creature spawns leveling up is a bit inbalanced and a bit unfun at this point. so far its numbers that drive this game need to move away from those insane numbers...

~i don't play WoW anymore.

Reply #9 from Elemental Forums Top

One way to handle clutter could be to use the inns as quest starter spawners. You enter the inn and talk to the locals who proceed to tell you of a number of rumors (you could also pick up champions there *_* ), whereupon 3 new quest starters spawn randomly on the map. As you level up the questing tree you hear more and more dangerous rumors. This way you'd have a method of self regulating the number of quests on the map.