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Secret Quests
PebA
Member
What's up guys
These days I was watching some animes and I noticed something very common among them that I don't see in MMOs.
Secret Quests.
A hidden Npc, with no names on top of them or any indication that it's an npc.
It could be a statue, a tombstone in a forest, a rock with some hieroglyphics, skeletal remains or broken armor, etc. Something you look at and think is just part of the setting, but clicking on it will open a Quest window.
You can receive rare, epic or even unique items, enchantment scrolls, elemental stones, crafting materials, valuable and hard to get things worthy of a secret quest.
I think the thrill of you hunting and finding an npc hiding in the middle of the forest or wherever he is, must be the same as dropping a legendary item.
How this can spread quickly due to youtubers and streamers like "HIDDEN NPC GIVES RARE ITEMS"
It could set the npc to only appear at certain times or days and/or once someone receives the Quest it disappears and reappears in another location only when the Quest is completed, or even be a single Quest.
I think the best thing is that these quests can be linked to an event, where the condition for this event to start is someone completes this quest.
Quest example:
You find a tombstone in the forest that tells the story of someone who died in battle protecting a village, but is still wandering around, so you should look for this ghost (which only appears at dusk and only for those who have the Quest) and you should help you to rest and then you receive an item associated with that Quest.(Items of holy or dark element)
Ex. Event:
The ghost continued his duty to protect this land even after death and that's why the monsters he defeated were still afraid of him, now that the ghost is gone the monsters can attack the villages again (EVENT: INVASION)
Honestly, just imagining this happening makes me even more excited to play this game.
What do you think? Is it a valid idea or have I just traveled too much? xD
These days I was watching some animes and I noticed something very common among them that I don't see in MMOs.
Secret Quests.
A hidden Npc, with no names on top of them or any indication that it's an npc.
It could be a statue, a tombstone in a forest, a rock with some hieroglyphics, skeletal remains or broken armor, etc. Something you look at and think is just part of the setting, but clicking on it will open a Quest window.
You can receive rare, epic or even unique items, enchantment scrolls, elemental stones, crafting materials, valuable and hard to get things worthy of a secret quest.
I think the thrill of you hunting and finding an npc hiding in the middle of the forest or wherever he is, must be the same as dropping a legendary item.
How this can spread quickly due to youtubers and streamers like "HIDDEN NPC GIVES RARE ITEMS"
It could set the npc to only appear at certain times or days and/or once someone receives the Quest it disappears and reappears in another location only when the Quest is completed, or even be a single Quest.
I think the best thing is that these quests can be linked to an event, where the condition for this event to start is someone completes this quest.
Quest example:
You find a tombstone in the forest that tells the story of someone who died in battle protecting a village, but is still wandering around, so you should look for this ghost (which only appears at dusk and only for those who have the Quest) and you should help you to rest and then you receive an item associated with that Quest.(Items of holy or dark element)
Ex. Event:
The ghost continued his duty to protect this land even after death and that's why the monsters he defeated were still afraid of him, now that the ghost is gone the monsters can attack the villages again (EVENT: INVASION)
Honestly, just imagining this happening makes me even more excited to play this game.
What do you think? Is it a valid idea or have I just traveled too much? xD
1
Comments
Now there's obviously a question of proper repetition that wouldn't just get spoiled by all the youtubers (as you've mentioned), but I don't think that one-off quests would be a good solution cause those only work in single player games or in fictional stories that we experience through the eyes of the MC so it's all seems cool to use because we're an MC of the world by proxy.
Shifting around some triggers and then having an npc or two point you towards those triggers would probably work. This would encourage people to read npc dialogue properly and would, at least somewhat, prevent YT guides from popping up every time such a quest is found out. Especially if you change the triggers every time the quest is taken.
Or, you never see the Secret Quests in MMOs because they're secret and the people who find them never tell anyone.
(Since, if they did, they'd just be 'quests')
Classic examples: The Fiery Avenger Sword in EverQuest, or becoming a Jedi in Star Wars Galaxies.
Ashes might make this work through dynamic questing, if a quest only appears when a particular node reaches a certain rank. So it can be unpredictable.
But even that might not work. Once someone figures out the conditions to make the quest appear, the cat’s out of the bag.
Ultimately, the idea of a real “secret quest” is unrealistic. Nothing in an MMORPG can stay a secret forever. That’s why you only see them in fiction about MMOs, not the games themselves. The whole concept is rather silly.
I believe the most feasbile way to create secret quests that could remain secret is to have a program generate them.
The quest objective, reward, conditions & npcs that trigger it, conditions that'll make this quest go away (forever), lore/theme that the quest is based on, and in game hints that would lead players to the quest.
Write up a truck load of patterns and have a program mix & match them.
What's more seret than a quest that even the devs don't remember creating?
Cons being at first you risk generating some super weird out-of-place quests, some that are too-secretive that no player ever notices, or some that gives OP rewards for a simple task.
But since you can log the parameters and stats and tune the quest generator over time anyway, in the long run it could save Intrepid some quest-writing effort while supplementing the game with fresh PvE / exploration contents.
Put some truly one-off quests in random places anywhere on the server. When the first person finds such a quest and finishes it, you reward them with a cool cosmetic and a rock, which description reads "Seems tradable" (unless "tradable" will already be a description on most items, then you have no words on the stone but that). Make that rock undroppable, undeletable or unsellable to the store.
Now this first player will probably trade the rock to a friend or a guildmate. Once they do, the second player sees that the rock is now usable. By using it, they've now spawned an npc somewhere in the world and received a quest to go talk to that npc (it would be shown on the map directly, just for ease of coding). Now this second player does the same quest, gets the same cosmetic and the same stone. But because they now know what the rock does, they understand that they have just gotten pretty much the rarest thing on the server. They could sell it or just pass it along among friends/guildmates.
What would make this type of quests even cooler is if, after some amount of completions, the last person would get that same stone, but now it'd say "give this to *The first player's name*" (I'd assume tracking quest completions is fairly easy code-wise). And maybe give the name/location of first player's home node just in case the rock made its way to some absolutely random person through trading. On the off chance that the first player have left the game, make the rock name the firstest player in the chain that's been online within the past week (again, I'm assuming this type of stuff is tracked within the code either way so should be too complex to make).
And when that first player receives the stone and uses it, they get a title option of "Leader of the *blank*", where the blank is some name that suits a group of people that have the cosmetic that you rewarded through the quest. And this would end the quest chain.
The quest itself could be whatever and to avoid the possibility that the very first person was recording gameplay or writing down all their actions for some guide, make the spawn of the original npc random, so that people on other servers would still have to find it themselves.
This seems like a good type of secret quest to me. It's as random as possible, as unique/rare as possible, it promotes player to player interaction, it has the potential to make people mega rich or to create a super exclusive group of guild members that have their own signature cosmetic. Feels like an all-around win.
How this would work is a developer would have to specify several locations and then do a dice roll to figure out at which location the quest would appear between them. Or specify an area and do a dice roll between every coordinate within that area. Either way, every potential of its spawn would be written down in code. A legendary is the best weapon in the game, so everyone is hunting that. There's zero chance that its "secret" spawn locations and times don't get dug up from the code and, as you say, there will soon be a youtube video of how to do the most optimal run through X area to find the "secret" quest.
That said; I love the idea that an extra attentive (or extra lucky) player gets rewarded with rare or epic gear (whatever a step down from legendary is) so it's still worth your while to pay attention. OR get rewarded with legendary crafting recipes. I think someone aiming to be the best blacksmith in the land with a "gotta catch 'em all" attitude towards recipes is a niche enough group that even if the secret got out, the reward wouldn't be duplicated so much it would feel like everyone had it. It would feel more like a secret family recipe passed down among only the best blacksmiths/chefs/alchemists etc.
As for quests...
If there's critters in the world, maybe you can talk to one of them (Again, no quest indicator) who claims to be an alchemist transformed into a critter and they need your help transforming back. You then collect the ingredients they'd need, fighting monsters or going to dangerous locations. After returning everything they need, they turn back into, not a person, but a monster. Still friendly, they reward a legendary potion recipe and a monster coin. Just to shake up the nearby node some
An "easy" way to make them unlikely to be spoiled on the internet is to change the triggering conditions once one has already been used.
So that even if the output of the quest get to be known, since the triggering conditions have changed, the quest can't be triggered in the same way as the leaked one has been.
Ex. for a Rogue hidden quest :
Triggering condition 1 : clear a given assassination quest during winter + chatting for a while with a shabby tavern NPC.
Triggerrng conidtion 2 : find a note on a monster during a monster coin event + go to a specific location at dawn.
Triggering condition 3 : get ambushed, manage to escape, and follow the ambushers to their camp.
etc.
The more triggering conditions and the more complex they would be, the more it would be difficult to spoil theses quests