Scaling Questing Design Over 103 Nodes? And Beyond?

MrBlueSky

My question is somewhat straight forward and is more on the practical side. I was wondering how the team plans to create questlines for nodes without them feeling too cookie cutter. From the outside, it seems like the brute force method for creating unique story arcs might be an unreasonable amount for the writing team.

On another hand, if questlines are not generated procedurally, the cyclical nature of endgame node progression questing could become very predictable/optimized. How are you planning to avoid large numbers of repeating quests?

Beekeeper

I would assume that, generally, the variety comes in NOT building up and tearing down the same node over and over, since one zone has one theme going for it, one kind of environment, one kind of policy. When you've done all the quests in an Economic mode, you would either go into the meta game, tactical pvp, politicking and whatnot, or you'd look to quest in a different type of environment and node. A Divine Node in a dragon-infested mountain area should offer very different stories than an coastal-based economic node.

In theory, that could mean you would have to actually explore all the 103 nodes to see all the different quests, wandering all over the world in search for new content. That fact that it repeats wouldn't need to bother you. IF it's noticable that the stories repeat.