Can a quest take too long?

[Lord Vectra 414]

I wanna know if a quest can take too long. How would you feel if you were doing a quest that took a long time to finish?

[JaiCrimson 22]

Depends on how fun the quest is. If I'm mindlessly grinding for furs or something it would most likely put me off and I'd never finish.

[HeckHound 61]

It depends really on the content of the quest, rather than the length. I would happily take the time to complete an engaging and fun quest that takes 2 hours over a quest that takes 20 minutes because I had to kill 10 rats and collect their tails.

 

Artificially extending the content with making players run back and for or forcing them to collect items - especially items subject to RNG - tend to be the biggest turn-offs for doing quests.

 

Just simply make the quest as long as it needs to be to keep it engaging.

 

Also, just food for thought: the main storyline of a game can also be thought of as a quest in itself comprising of multiple stages.

[Nhale 6]

I totally see no problems as long it is interesting, or has a good reward , or even if i can do it at the same time as i do other quests or something like it.

[Rikifive 3,411]

Yeah, as long as it's not "kill 1000 rats and bring them to me, so I can make a tea *wut?*" the quest can be very long and there's no problems.

The longest one is the main quest of a game and it takes the whole game to complete and nobody is complaining, if you know what I mean.

[+ Novem 344]

This is all about engagement. When you are making a quest, and you come up with either the objective or set of objectives that lead to the completion of that quest, think about not just how long it is going to take the player to complete that quest... but whether or not the quest is going to be engaging the player the entire time they are performing their assigned task. If an objective is getting boring, either make that objective take a shorter amount of time, or grant a new objective to keep things interesting. A quest can take any amount of time as long as the player doesn't get bored. Just think about how your game engages the player. If it does it with story, make sure that story bits are frequent enough that the player doesn't lose interest. If it does it with gameplay, make sure that the execution changes frequently enough to keep the player from feeling like they are just repeating the same action over and over again (ex: Change the enemies they are fighting).

 

Also make sure to take into account how stereotypical the objective for your quest is. Kill X amount of monsters in Y area is super common so it can feel like a chore when a player is doing it, and they lose engagement faster than if they are told to retrieve an item from a dungeon or defeat a specific powerful creature. 

 

Remember, thinking about whether the player is engaged at a point in the game is more important than thinking about the actual length of the quest itself. Any quest or section of a game can be engaging as long as you don't have the player continuously doing the same thing over and over again.  

[+ caelumania 54]

Well, they say too much of even a good thing is bad for you so I'm guessing it could.

[devonm0 37]

I have to agree with most people here.  Stereotypical fetch quests can be really annoying.  For one thing, It's difficult to really make them stand out.  As for other quests, maybe you make an NPC with a simple sounding quest that theoretically shouldn't take long, but something like the player getting a bad feeling may hint at there being more to that request to see why the shepherd's flock is so antsy than was originally implied.

 

Sorry, this was more about immersion than length I think.  Sorry about that.

[lonequeso 1,921]

I can (sorta) recall a very long quest I did in an MMO, Runescape called Recipe for Disaster. My memory is hazy so feel free to Google it to read about it in greater detail. It was an extremely long quest, but executed so well, it was a both fun and challenging. I never felt like any part of the quest is was a chore. You could begin the quest pretty much right when you enter the game. It beings as a simple novice quest- gather some ingredients for a cook- then the story continues. Each section gets of the quest  progressively more challenging and requires you to have higher and higher skill and combat levels. The final sections are at expert level. Even if you tried leveling up your combat and other skills as fast as possible, it would still take months to complete (remember it's an MMO). You were also required to have completed certain other quests to gain access to certain items, NPC's, and/or areas to begin/complete sections. 

Even though it was a very long quest, you could pick and choose when you wanted to do the next section or try to level a skill to

qualify to start it. Each section you completed would yield a reward as well. The culmination of all those rewards was substantial.

Completing the entire quest gave me a strong feeling of accomplishment- something that seems to be more and more lacking nowadays. Well worth the time and effort.

[gunsage 161]

Well, the short answer is yes. The long answer can't be simplified into a simple yes or no, however. I'm going to take Breath of Fire 3 for an example, and yes, there are spoilers, so I'mma wrap that now...

 

Early in the game you tick off the wrong people and have your tree house destroyed with Rei and Teepo presumably killed right before you by evil entities Balio and Sunder. For a long time (maybe 10 hours of gameplay), you're traveling the countryside attempting to escape them going from one place to the next. In the context of a "quest," this takes an unbelievably long amount of time and removes focus from what the game should be focusing on: Ryu and his backstory.

 

While it does eventually pick back up with it and I certainly did not mind the quest (I actually thought it was one of the more fun storylines in any game period), it does take a long time to finish it up and focus back onto the main task. With many JRPGs, there is no true "questline," so you're just going from one place to the next, not necessarily on several small quests, but one main one with focus redirecting here and there.

 

 

tl;dr version - any quest can overstay its welcome if it's not longer fun, but if it remains fun, then it doesn't matter how long it is.

[+ CVincent 234]

A quest can be the total length of a total game if you set it up in a few specific ways. In games like Skyrim you will sometimes need to do a few tasks in order to complete a quest. This idea of giving the players multiple objectives could be applied to larger parts of the game to keep a player interested.

 

Quests should be relevant to the needs of a certain area of a game. Fetch quests and kill 'x' amount quests are usually quite boring because they don't add much story-wise and have repetitive gameplay. Keeping the player engaged is a very difficult thing in quest writing, however you can work around some of these problems with a bit of creativity.

 

I've always felt that gameplay should be defined by the story a game is set by. Instead of a kill 'x' amount quest it may be more interesting to have a raid or horde of monsters attack a village and the player can help fend them off. As opposed to a fetch item quest, have a player try to steal supplies from a bandit's camp which had been taking from a village.

 

Setting is truly one of the most important parts to making these quests interesting. It's hardly a quest if I need to poke a few rats dead and retrieve some grain for a village bakery, right? A quest needs to be an epic moment in a character's life that defines them and their role in the story.

 

So, can a quest take too long? It sure can if it's done poorly. A game can be the entire length of a single quest but with everything I mentioned I'm sure it wouldn't be impossible to keep things fun and interesting.

Edited August 16, 2015 by CVincent

[HumanNinja 144]

I agree with most of what everyone else has already stated.

 

I might also add that you can break long quests up into shorter segments as well so the player is not 'stuck' in a long quest. Even an interesting quest can become tedious and the player may want to take a break and play a mini game for a while or just go grind for a weapon or item they've been wanting. Of course all the details are going to be dependent on how your game is put together.

 

My opinion is that the length required to complete a quest, or any part of the game for that matter, is directly related to the type of content the player will be experiencing.

[gunsage 161]

As a side note, it might be fun to have a game that starts off as a fetch quest, let's say the idea is you have to find 5 rubies, but then suddenly the economy collapses after you find the fourth and your character has to go on this massive, ridiculously hilarious journey parodying fetch quests in general just to get the fifth ruby.