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What is Quest Design?
sunfrog
Member, Founder, Kickstarter
What is Quest Design and how do I become one?
Here's my application.
The quest starts with a young boy named Jack. Jack is a weird kid and gets bullied in school by some Dark Elf kids. One day Jack fights back and wins, well, sort of, but one of the Dark Elves' bigger brothers shows up and breaks up the fight. The trouble between the teens continues and you (the player) are sent on the [1st quest] to fetch Jack's homework from the Haunted Woods. Upon returning with his schoolbooks you expect a reward, but Jack doesn't have any money. So Jack sends you on a [2nd quest] to sell his cow Bessie. You can keep 1/2 of what you get but you must return the other half of the money to him. He gives you a note to give to the butcher in town and the cow. On this quest you meet the Dark Elves and their older brother who harass you and curse the cow. Upon arriving in town you discover the butcher will not buy a cursed cow, so you try to sell it around town. [3rd Quest] It turns out that no one will buy a cursed cow because it gives sour milk and the meat will make you sick if you eat it. Now you are stuck with a cow so you decide to take it back to Jack and demand your money.
On the way back you meet a strange traveler who offers to trade you for some Magic Beans. You figure you can sell the beans so why not? They are magic so they should fetch some money. After trading for the beans you try to sell them in town. [4th Quest] but every time you sell them the beans return to your bag. Of course this makes people very angry and they come after you for revenge. They don't like being ripped off. Now you're stuck with Magic Beans you can't sell so you throw them away in disgust but when they hit the ground something magical happens and they grow into a giant beanstalk! You have a choice. Climb it or chop it down?
If you climb it you meet a giant on the way down that attacks the nearest node and becomes a worldwide event.
If you chop it down you will need help and this becomes a worldwide event. Some people will choose to chop and some to climb, but either way, the chopping of the tree causes it to tremble and shake and gets the attention of the giant at the top who meets the climbers half-way down. Then it attacks the nearest node etc...
Your prize for defeating the giant is a sack of Golden Eggs with enough eggs to go around for everyone. The giant was just trying to sell his Golden Eggs at the nearest node. He wasn't attacking it. You just killed an innocent giant! What the heck!? You guys are murderers!
Here's my application.
The quest starts with a young boy named Jack. Jack is a weird kid and gets bullied in school by some Dark Elf kids. One day Jack fights back and wins, well, sort of, but one of the Dark Elves' bigger brothers shows up and breaks up the fight. The trouble between the teens continues and you (the player) are sent on the [1st quest] to fetch Jack's homework from the Haunted Woods. Upon returning with his schoolbooks you expect a reward, but Jack doesn't have any money. So Jack sends you on a [2nd quest] to sell his cow Bessie. You can keep 1/2 of what you get but you must return the other half of the money to him. He gives you a note to give to the butcher in town and the cow. On this quest you meet the Dark Elves and their older brother who harass you and curse the cow. Upon arriving in town you discover the butcher will not buy a cursed cow, so you try to sell it around town. [3rd Quest] It turns out that no one will buy a cursed cow because it gives sour milk and the meat will make you sick if you eat it. Now you are stuck with a cow so you decide to take it back to Jack and demand your money.
On the way back you meet a strange traveler who offers to trade you for some Magic Beans. You figure you can sell the beans so why not? They are magic so they should fetch some money. After trading for the beans you try to sell them in town. [4th Quest] but every time you sell them the beans return to your bag. Of course this makes people very angry and they come after you for revenge. They don't like being ripped off. Now you're stuck with Magic Beans you can't sell so you throw them away in disgust but when they hit the ground something magical happens and they grow into a giant beanstalk! You have a choice. Climb it or chop it down?
If you climb it you meet a giant on the way down that attacks the nearest node and becomes a worldwide event.
If you chop it down you will need help and this becomes a worldwide event. Some people will choose to chop and some to climb, but either way, the chopping of the tree causes it to tremble and shake and gets the attention of the giant at the top who meets the climbers half-way down. Then it attacks the nearest node etc...
Your prize for defeating the giant is a sack of Golden Eggs with enough eggs to go around for everyone. The giant was just trying to sell his Golden Eggs at the nearest node. He wasn't attacking it. You just killed an innocent giant! What the heck!? You guys are murderers!
1
Comments
Those are two contradictory statements.
That states that the Giant attacks the nearest node.
If the Giant doesn't attack the nearest node, I have no reason to attack the Giant.
The GM/Questgiver doesn't get to decide what the player actually does.
If you type this question into google, you might find some article with some insight from professionals about how to.
If you don't know where to start, you can check in youtube for some professional spreading free wisdom like the GDC channel on youtube.
Make a functional quest line in a popular engine and send demos and hope they notice you.
I also like the idea of J&tBeanstalk + sour milk
You could actually have a whole bunch of questlines inspired by nursery rhymes - with a twist. Probs best to ideate more though.
Spicy ideas to toy with:
If you wanted to make the quest non-linear, you can also introduce ways to un-curse the cow, fool the butcher, feed the beans to the cow, get the cow as a mount, etc.
I'd be careful about insulting the audience's intentions - those kind of things can backfire easily. If you want to do it properly, you need to get the audience to a place where they knew there was a "nice" way to do things, but they chose the "not nice" way anyways. Or just do the Witcher 3 way: both ways have horrible consequences that were out of your control, so it's not really your fault.
The other thing is, you could do more to hit the MM aspect of MMO. Things like: climbing the beanstalk grants you access to the Giant's Castle Raid content. Or have a high level quest where other players need the sour milk of a cursed cow, and have high level characters trading with people wandering around with cursed cows, or the beanstalk requires 120 magic beans to reach full size so you need multiple people to do the quest to hit the jackpot. Or Jack keeps running out of cows, so you need to do a quest for him to get a new cow, etc.
I'd also suggest you make use of the other NPCs you made to create their own branching quest lines. A redeption story for the Dark Elves. A Backstory for the butcher. The evil plot of the strange traveller who gave you the magic beans.
Not listening to any and all feedback and assuming your work is perfect as is is honestly not constructive towards you getting better at this.
There have been many good point brought up here. You can either accept those critiques and make the next one better or.... do whatever you want to call your last post (I'd call it whining btw)
As someone who is working on a fantasy novel, I know full well anything I ever write can be better and is never good enough. But that's how you get better. If I thought any line I wrote was perfect as is, what would be the point of things even the pros do: multiple drafts, rewriting entire chunks if they don't work, listening to your beta readers (sometimes the promises made in your text aren't well framed or understood and the payoff feels unsatisfactory etc) and editing over and over.
@sunfrog
Nobody hates you for trying things. You gotta push into the criticism, man.
I don't think you can expect any audience to give you 100% perfect feedback.
You need to look at why the audience reacts a certain way to what you've done, and consider for yourself what feedback was bad, useful, or mixed. Usually audience suggestions aren't great, but their base reactions are useful.
I don't think it's appropriate to boo anyone here.
I think he was saying the players always attack the Giant because that's what MMORPG players do: kill everything.
You think?
In that case, I've misunderstood - sorry.
Players can be very kill happy
They're a little hard to explain but if you look at quests within games and then parallel to what I say here, it might make sense, depending on the game (a lot of modern MMOs are poor at quest development, but I believe that most of the time, you can see how the quest 'feels less good' by comparing the same principle)
Part 1: Timeframe
Since players often just skip through quest dialogue, and partially skip it because of the immersion failure, the actual first thing you probably look at in a nonlinear game is 'what is the player's experience at the point where they encounter this quest'. How many different player pre-experiences can you manage to get into the quest line?
e.g. A farmer has lost her prize chicken and needs you to find it, your reward is some eggs.
This sort of thing is usually intended as an early game quest, and built around the feeling of a new player, but there are lots of ways, through just dialogue, to make this more engaging. The main thing here is 'how can I get a level 50 player to care about helping this farmer?'. Even if you succeed at this, the resulting feeling won't really be 'overwhelming' to a level 2 player, unless you go too far and mess up on...
Part 2: Communication of Difficulty
Sometimes it's hard to be immersive with communication of how difficult something is, because the quest-giver 'shouldn't' have the knowledge themselves. But most quest-givers live within their world, and they should have at least enough information to know this. For repeatables this is easy, just have them imply that they got help from someone before, or "I need X again... oh, hi, can you help me with the X task today?' And then go into that. Long narrative single shot quests, usually you should just make it as clear as possible. Use another NPC in a conversation moment or reference one, which lets you have more realistic communication. Some other person 'scolding the quest giver' for 'always bothering adventurers with simple tasks'. Or the opposite 'don't ask random people for difficult things, you could put them in danger'.
Part 3: Branching and Timeframes
I think games have mostly done away with 'quests that expire because you didn't clear them in time', but it's still important to think about this sometimes because it helps you sort them into 'quests that the player should realistically do quickly and therefore have close access to the target' (usually nearby culling quests) and 'epic quests to find special items'. If you never do this, it ends up dry and the NPCs seem less and less immersive, which I believe leads to players eventually just not caring about quests or at least the 'emotional' or 'narrative' content of quests. If you want your quest to branch in terms of the choice you make at some point, this becomes really important, because of Part 2. Players might lose their immersion and just pick whichever branch sounds faster. And usually that is the 'kill nearest enemy' branch.
Part 4: Salience of Rewards
Salience in this case means 'how does the quest giver communicate the value of the reward?'. Most of the time, in a game where you can get standard exp for leveling your adventuring class just by doing this, you don't care that much, but it depends. Certain games have entire guides on 'how to quest to 60', etc. When you don't have this, and the game is full economy base, the rewards are often a little more complicated. The main point is to have the quest giver or situation do better than 'I'll pay you well'. You never know what anyone will think that means. Even the 'nicest' player will remember 'getting nothing' from doing something helpful, and your quest has to carry a lot of 'feel good vibes' at the end if you want to just give people a sword or something, because of Part 1. Reputation can be worse than even that.
I've definitely gone on long enough, so I'll give you the breakdown of the one written:
First part of quest passes Part 1 requirement easily. You helping Jack has nothing to do with what you've done before, only the type of person you are. Part 2 is passed if the danger of the woods is communicated or if the player is likely to already know it. Then it fails part 4, your reward is... another quest? One that makes a specific type of player feel too greedy and unlikely to continue the questline, and another type of player go 'this is giving me the runaround' and discontinue. It then fails part 2, because even if it's interesting narrative for the cow to be cursed and all that, the player's probably losing interest or building up a memory around this quest that doesn't make them remember it fondly.
It then proceeds to pass part 1 again, you meeting the traveler eventually has nothing to do with what the player's done before other than this quest. Part 2 is failed because even if someone didn't already know this story, trading one cursed item for a random magic item that they don't know how to use, is something they will definitely do, but not care about enough to go further. This might result in instantly throwing the beans away unless you communicated the effect, or the cash value.
Passes part 3 by default, you get a choice, climb or chop, but fails part 2. No difficulty is communicated other than 'the size of the beanstalk'. If it says 'you will need to gather multiple people to cut it', then this decision is made already, and if this quest is not Unique, it will never reach the point where most players help out after the first time, pushing most players into climbing it, and probably triggering the Giant anyway. In an MMO this is 'worse' because of too many reasons to go into.
In the end, the result is that it fails part 3 after all, and completely fails 4. Why either climb OR chop it? Sure, most people will climb, but in an MMO, most saner people will just 'ask what happens if they climb' and the whole thing gets weird.
Um... hope this helps?