Theory on Quest Design

[rpgdreamer 3]

I think quests could be an integral part of a game to learn more about the world if they are designed for it. Something investigative is always cool. I don't necessarily like, "fetch x item, get gold" and things like that... but I'll take it if it's something like, "fetch x item, get awesome bg story/lore/character info" in return. It's a learning experience, and I find it more rewarding than assets sometimes... but it's also good to have quests like that, as long as they're transparent. I don't mind doing some courier quest if it gives me some gold and I need it to buy weapons/items, etc. So, I think they should still be a part of the design. I don't necessarily find it lazy... as long as in the end they serve the character/player purpose.

[Shiggy 630]

My opinion on quests mostly reflect those of KZ but here are a few additional thoughts

In what you describe as bad quests, what I dislike in them is walking. If I'm playing the game, I probably enjoy the combat system and won't mind killing the stuff , but movement is rarely interesting in an RPG and going back to the quest giver is the bad part of the experience for me. (If I don't mind farming XP, I won't mind farming a specific monster)
But I don't think you shouldn't do them, first you could use them to reverse expectations and make something actually happen in the middle of that boring quest. The stuff you were bringing back gets stolen, you killed too many X and it has disturbed the whole ecosystem ...

You could also use these quests to give player gold if you don't like "every monster has gold on them" thing.
Takeo answer actually made me think of something. You put an NPC at the entrance of a zone whose job is basically gather info about what people need in town but they can't get themselves because it's full of monsters. You talk to him, he tells like today people need wolf pelts and mushrooms and that stuff drops only if you talked to him (why would you take the wolf pelt of every wolf otherwise), when you finish zone, you automatically give stuff back to him and he pays you.
It's convenient for the player and it's somewhat realistic because it would be convenient for the adventurers/townspeople as well (we can imagine the NPC takes a commission)

In Terranigma, most side quests were fetch quests , but they had a big impact , you see the cities thrive and grow . I really liked it despite being fetch quests

If wouldn't make "quests" in my game because I'm not interested in creating lore so to me a side-quest would be an optionnal dungeon or a late zone of the game accessible early so the player can get big challenges and big rewards  

[Rezanta 373]

Well, I think I'm in the boat of all those quests being good. Why? Well, let's get to that.

 

Fetch Quests: This can get the player starting to understand the importance of certain items in the world's practices, like smithing or medication. It can be tedious to a degree, and I would never just rely on many one style, but I like these as they help you learn the reasons behind certain characters, extra story information, or even just getting that hidden gear.

 

Kill Quests: Honestly my favorite. They put your medal to the test and see how far you've grown since you started. Yes, some games, like Crystal Saga, Xenoblade, and RuneScape, can be very relentless of all the kill quests they throw at you. As for the reasons behind them and why I would use them, I feel they give depth to the creatures of your world.

Example: In Scalvose: Demons and Dragons, you eventually are given the task of finding and slaying a subspecies known as a Hailstorm Coral Dragon. You learn how they come to be, and also learn that they can flood an entire continent in under eight minutes. You learn other facts through the fight, but that's spoiler grounds.

 

Courier Quests: Want to add depth to your NPCs or MCs? Look no further! A game's story will never fully explain a character. Whether it be family, practices, ethics, etc, there are things left out. If you put everything in about the characters, it just starts to inflate the dialogue and game feeling when you do that. Do you learn everything behind Lock's Quest's characters without some digging? I'll leave that for you to decide.

[lonequeso 1,921]

I don't think any quest type is inherently bad. It's more an issue if a game over uses them or poorly executes them.

 

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Fetch Quests: This can get the player starting to understand the importance of certain items in the world's practices, like smithing or medication. It can be tedious to a degree, and I would never just rely on many one style, but I like these as they help you learn the reasons behind certain characters, extra story information, or even just getting that hidden gear.

I agree. These can be excellent for tutorial purposes. Same can be said for Kill X enemies to familiarize players with combat system. 

However, they can get old really quick if all they are is going from Point A to B and back to A. You need something interesting in the middle if you want to use them with frequency or else they will become tiresome. Not many people like to relax by doing chores. 

 

Ah, Kill quests. I'm working my way through Arkham Knight atm. There's plenty of instances where you have to take out a mob of enemies through various means. Most objectives require it at some point. When I say various, I truly mean various. There are many little wrinkles in the combat/stealth system that make each encounter unique, and the game makes you plan out how to approach them. Essentially they are just Kill X Enemies, but they designed and executed well enough that they stay fresh. The annoying ones are where you just mindlessly kill enemies without nay real strategy at the behest of some random dude and then go back to that dude for you reward. Those get old pretty fast. I do have a few in my game, but they are used very sparingly. All of them are optional, too. 

 

The devil is in the details, isn't it?

[Kayzee 4,032]

I guess the thing is, I for one tend to play in a 'explore first, interact later' way. I get comfortable with an area first before I try running around and fiddling with things. Nothing annoys me more then mapping out an area, killing enemies and stuff and getting used to things on the way, and then having to go back and do something I have already done because the first time didn't count as it wasn't part of a quest. If you want to give me a reward for killing x monsters or for getting x item, let me get the reward for stuff I have done without needing to talk to an NPC before hand to make it count.

 

I am not opposed to the thing some sandbox games do where you will sometimes run across a little event or challenge in the world, but I don't like it when they nag at you or give penalties for not doing them. Running across a bunch of thugs somewhere and getting a reward if you take care of them? That's fine. Neat even. Having to constantly be nagged by popups and big red text telling you you failed to do something you didn't notice or care about is annoying, doubly so when you lose some kind of points. That just turns it from "Oh look at this cool thing I can do!" into "Ugh, not another damn distraction I don't need".

[lonequeso 1,921]

What games nag you with pop ups for optional stuff? I've played plenty of games where it will tell you you can't progress until you do something or talk to someone on occasion, but I can't recall a game ever yelling at me for not doing something optional. Well expect for Candy Crush trying to get me to join challenges and events because they want me to get addicted and pay $$$. Outside of mobile games w/ in-app purchases, I've never been pushed to do an optional quest. Riddler does taunt you about his riddles and his sidequest in Arkham Knight randomly, but that's more entertaining than annoying. Maybe cuz it's the Riddler. I think you'd like the quest structure in that game. Every sidequest is unlocked directly through the main story. You never have to seek out that one NPC to give you a side mission. When or if you complete them is completely up to you. There's zero pressure to try and complete them. On top of that there's collectible Riddler trophies and riddles to solve. Assassin's Creed has a similar set up, too. Those games are more open ended than say Dragon Age where you're running from quest giver/object to objective and sometimes back to quest giver. 

[Kayzee 4,032]

I am thinking about older games mostly, haven't played many newer ones. Anyone remember the PS2 game Spiderman 2 I think? That had some annoyingly insistent side missions I think,

[lonequeso 1,921]

It does sound annoying. That would be an example of bad quest design. 

[Kayzee 4,032]

Also: I just thought of this, but what if most NPCs who had some thing they wanted doing, if you just did it they would hear about it and mail you the reward as thanks if you never came by to collect it. Give the player a house and mailbox and let you just collect all the rewards at once. If there is some NPC you haven't met, they could introduce themselves and tell you where they are in a letter too.

[lonequeso 1,921]

Once in great while, I've run into a quest like that. The only drawback would be having to check the mail. Still, if the game has a lot of quests like that, you can collect several rewards at once instead of walking to each NPC. If the game is set in more modern times, the NPC can just shoot you a text. They can even wire reward money to your account 

[roninator2 257]

On 8/3/2017 at 1:10 PM, Kayzee said:

Also: I just thought of this, but what if most NPCs who had some thing they wanted doing, if you just did it they would hear about it and mail you the reward as thanks if you never came by to collect it. Give the player a house and mailbox and let you just collect all the rewards at once. If there is some NPC you haven't met, they could introduce themselves and tell you where they are in a letter too.

I've found those to have only one flaw, the timing. I've seen quests before where you get a task from the king then he says when complete talk to the city guards. So you go about and do the quests, when finished, you take three steps (lets say), and talk to a guard and your done. 

It would make more sense if it took at least a few minutes if not a day to get rewarded, unless your game is futuristic and your actions are recorded as you do them.

Edited August 7, 2017 by roninator2

[Kayzee 4,032]

Well, I had in my head some kind of Harvest Moon/Animal Crossing thing where you got your new mail the next morning rather then right away. The idea I had was always either find and talk to the NPC to get it right away or wait till the next day or even a few days and it would automatically be sent in case you forgot about it. I would assume most of the time if you got it in person they would have it ready, though there is the matter of proof if all they had was your word. It's entirely possible to just have all rewards delivered by mail and NPC interaction would just be for reputation and politeness. I could see them saying 'I need to go verify this and will send the reward later' or something. Also, magical scrying is totally a thing, so even without future recording it could work right away.

 

All that said, you have to remember this idea is a gameplay convenience. You could probobly make all sorts of excuses for it if you really tried, but in the end even if you couldn't, it doesn't matter. Because making a game play in a better way is an acceptable trade off for a few wonky unrealistic things. I mean, unless you want to make a system where you need witnesses or proof for your every task you do, which sounds like it would lead to the same tediousness and formality which I have complained about with quests.

 

Unless you are talking about having a system where people witnessing you do stuff helps and hurts your reputation or gets rumors spread about from person to person in a dynamic way, maybe people just sending you the letter when they heard of your deeds and investigated. Would that work in a game? Maybe. I don't think that system would play very well without tons of dynamic elements and advanced AI stuff though, and I definitely think it would be frustrating to most players to wait around until x NPC hears enough to be convinced.

 

Point is, if you can't make actual good game mechanics that revolve around the wait between doing a quest and getting a reward, why have that wait? Even my solution of waiting for the next day for a letter is a compromise to make it feel a bit more real and only really makes sense if you have a home you return to every night with a mail box you can check in the morning. And I can even see how that would be annoying.

 

You know, I guess the real thing about 'quests' is in the end that no matter how good of a system you have for them, if you have to deal with it over and over and over and over, thousands of times. Any little annoyances and flaws in the system get magnified until it's just a pain. Every little flaw and inconvenience, every delay and forced following of steps, every interface problem and extra button press, it all adds up into a frustrating pile of annoyance. That's why I kinda like achievements better. You do something, a popup appears, done. I think there is a compromise between the two, but it's not as easy as it seems.

 

 

Edited August 7, 2017 by Kayzee

[lonequeso 1,921]

On 8/7/2017 at 5:03 PM, Kayzee said:

Unless you are talking about having a system where people witnessing you do stuff helps and hurts your reputation or gets rumors spread about from person to person in a dynamic way, maybe people just sending you the letter when they heard of your deeds and investigated. Would that work in a game? Maybe. I don't think that system would play very well without tons of dynamic elements and advanced AI stuff though, and I definitely think it would be frustrating to most players to wait around until x NPC hears enough to be convinced.

 

A simper version has been done many times, and it works quite well. The ol' good/evil spectrum. People react differently to you depending on where you are on it. There's lots of things you can do with it from dialogue options to unlocking quests to changing the story to gaining/losing abilities. None of it is dynamic at least not in any game I've played. I'm sure it could be done. I think it's more of if it should be done. As you said, making things more convenient for the player is more important than realism. It'd be interesting to see it attempted.

 

Waiting for a response for a reward via letter or some other media would work, but if the goal is convenience, then why not just have the player gain all the rewards immediately upon completing the objective? Plenty of games do exactly that.

[Kayzee 4,032]

I think the good/evil system in games really isn't quite the same thing (nor do I think it 'works quite well' in most games that use it, but that's besides the point). I am not talking about judging the player's actions, I am more talking about something like a stealth system, or it's logical opposite. Imagine a game where the player is a thief, spy, or something like that and has to sneak in and do something. Now you ideally don't want to call attention to yourself while doing so right? In a longer game with more long term stakes, you want to leave as little trace you have been there as possible. But what if there was a game with a situation that worked in the logical opposite way? Where you DID want to call attention to what you did, and every npc that saw you and saw what you did could calibrate your story. Or maybe a situation where you want to call attention to somethings but not others?

 

And sure, a game just giving you the reward works too, if you want to do that.

Edited August 12, 2017 by Kayzee

[lonequeso 1,921]

You can do either in Dishonored. For calling attention to yourself, the more people you kill along the way, the more enemies appear in later levels and if you kill enough you get a darker, bittersweet ending. 

You could take that concept and apply it to other aspects of a game. Dishonored just has a running total throughout the game calculated at the end of each level. It'd be a lot more complicated if you tried to put that into an open world game where you can pick and choose what to call attention to, and parts of the game change depending on what you did and how you did it plus any other stuff you did. Yeah.... that's pretty complex. Probably why games just use the good/evil method 

 

I'd love to see a developer try and pull it off though. Accurately express social Darwinism in a game while solving puzzles and killing things.  

Lolz! Just though of something funny. People in the world like you more when you kill scary creepy things like spiders and snakes, but as soon as you kill something cute, all hell breaks loose. 

[Kayzee 4,032]

I think there is a fundamentally different kind of attitude between 'giving you explicit choices and grading them on a binary meter' and 'creating a system of interactions and consequences', even if it ends up kinda the same. Makes more sense to me though if there are multiple dimensions to things and not just a flat good/evil divide. Heck the first game to use a 'moral choice system' scored you in no less then eight ways at least.

[lonequeso 1,921]

I agree it'd be more realistic that way.  It just a matter of actually being able to pull off something that elaborate that's difficult. It'll eventually happen someday with the way technology keeps plugging along. Unless we all die in a nuclear holocaust before then. 

[Kayzee 4,032]

It's already more or less has been done. It's less that it's really difficult to do, and more that it's really difficult to do in a way that is balanced to accomplishing the kind of design goals people might want in an RPG. In a game like the Sims or Dwarf Fortress? Sure. But I remember, for example, Bethesda working on their 'Radiant AI' thing and talk about how civil wars would start over stolen pieces of bread, so in the end they had to tone the whole system down to the point it's hardly there. Now I for one would have loved to see a game where they embraced the crazy sim aspects like that, but that wasn't the game they wanted to make. Because for most RPG designers (perhaps too many) don't really want to make interesting complex systems to play around with, they are more focused on delivering a particular experience or expressing whatever vision they have in their head.

 

And there is nothing wrong with that. Not all games need to go that far into complex systems or simulations. Most simulations are in some way incomplete and abstracted anyway (Dwarf Fortress alone seems to go out of it's way to subvert that as much as possible, but even it is incomplete in so many ways, though the game isn't done and legend says it won't be until it is a one to one quantum simulation of our universe), and some game designers might very well reasonably assume that prewritten and prescripted content is preferable to most people then something like the Sim's gibberish little icon dialogue or randomized content that ends up looking the same after a while.

 

But it's not that stuff is 'unrealistic' or 'not dynamic' that I am really complain about. It's gameplay elements that they aren't really gameplay, that aren't really mechanics that you can play with. Morality systems barely are except in a few games, but that's really a topic for another thread and we have blabbed on about it enough. Let's get back to quests. It just doesn't seem to me like quests really exist to serve the gameplay at all. Yes, I know there is more to a game then the gameplay, though I would still argue gameplay needs to be the primary thing or else there is no point to something being a game at all. And yes, I understand quests can be used to organize gameplay in some ways. But my point is, the quest system feels to me like an interface to a database, not a gameplay element. Going up to an NPC to get a task and then getting a reward after isn't a fun thing to do. Sure the task it's self may be, but having to deal with the clunky interface superimposed on my game playing just serves to take me out of it.

 

I guess that's my central point. The reason why I keep bringing up ideas for complex systems? Because they are involving. They are things I can play with. Yeah, maybe most of them are crappy ideas. But I rather see either experiments with complex unconventional gameplay or sidequests cut out altogether then a bunch of rote scrolling through lists and checking things off. Heck, I could go further with this. How much of exploring the world for example in most RPGs is actually meaningful? Some for sure. But when you go into a town, talk to NPCs that give one line responses, or heck even if they have huge dialogue trees talking about their backstory, how much actual gameplay is there? Would it be better to just replace towns with a menu for shops? Not always, some games hide fun secrets and stuff. But then again how many of these are meaningful? Dungeons, yeah I can understand those. You have fun puzzles and navigation challenges.

 

And am I saying all games should devolve into linear corridors like FFXIII? Heck no. First of all if they were going to do that why even have the corridor? Just have a series of battles and checkpoints if that's all you care about. But more importantly, if there are elements of older games that you don't feel work anymore, I say don't just cut them out willy nilly, see if you can figure out a way to make them more interesting. Maybe that means a super complex system, maybe it dosn't. But then again I have lots of ideas for all sorts of weird things and never end up doing much of anything, so maybe I am just being a dreamer.

[lonequeso 1,921]

@Kayzee- Ooohhh. They way you were talking, I thought you meant something far more complex. What you're describing is just the tip of the iceberg of what I envisioned. 

 

Assume your goal in the below is to maintain if not improve your relationships in every scenario:

 

Kayzee has two good friends, Sam and Bob who are also good friends. They all have common, but not identical interests so what you're able to say and do when you're with Sam or Bob individually is a little different. When all three of you are together the options also vary a bit. 

 

Sam and Bob begin having a falling out. Sam is able to civil when all three of you are together so there's little no effect on options with him. Bob is an asshole. Being around Sam makes him irritable and defensive and takes it out on you. Just about everything you try to say of do is met with hostility or indifference. Bob also has a girlfriend.

 

You aren't BFF or anything, but you can have a actual conversation with her, maybe hang out from time to time. But now that Bob and Sam are falling out, and you're still associating with Sam, Bob's gf begins distancing herself from you.

 

Now imagine that with even larger groups. Now imagine there being 100, 200, 1,000 NPCs to interact with all with the same amount of depth. Now imagine those interactions shape what quests become available and how you complete the quests. Now imagine they shape your allies and enemies all the way up to the central characters including the main antagonist. 

 

That's what I thought you meant by complex. Your version is cute 

 

As far as what's meaningful in game, that's always going to be highly subjective. If a player doesn't care for minigames, then they won't have much meaning. If you don't care about the world's history and culture, then hearing NPCs ramble on about it will bore you. Anything that can enhance a player's overall experience in a game is meaningful. Devs like to put as many different opportunities as they can to cast a nice wide net. The better ones can balance between keeping their core audience while still attracting causal gamers. (Kayzee probably has an issue with is ) You shouldn't though because more players equals more money whichh equals getting more and better equipment and larger teams with more skilled people which ideally equals continually producing better and better games and being able to work on several projects at the same time. In other words, a successful company. 

 

Getting back to quests, I'm not all that picky on what method a game uses. I don't care if it's a bunch of quest givers or if the quests are unlocked simultaneously as you progress in the main quest. I don't care if you're choices in a game change which quests you can do or how you complete them. As long as they're there, decently designed, and the types are well varied, I'm happy. Tedious quests- especially when 90% of them are redundant = ZZZZZZZzzzzzzzz. The basic idea of how to design good quests is really very simple. 

[Kayzee 4,032]

Isn't that kinda what the Sims does? Less characters but isn't it the same basic idea? I donno, I never played any of the Sims games myself, I just heard lots about them.

 

But I don't think you are getting it. My whole point is that such a system would replace quests, not that it should be used to complement them. What is the point of a quest telling you to do something when you already have a gameplay reason to do it? Let's take a common setup for an RPG. If some group of bandit NPCs is bothering a town, you don't need to make a 'quest available' to get rid of them, you do it if there are gameplay consequences and rewards already set up for dealing with the bandits. You don't even necessarily need to do it personally, just manipulate the situation so they are taken care of. Maybe by getting a third party involved. But if you do that you personally get less reward and glory. Or maybe the bandits have a powerful backer and it's best to leave them alone even if they are disruptive? Maybe the bandits want something and they will go away if they get it? Yeah, you could do exactly what I said through branching 'quest chains', but you would have to write out every possibility, still constrain the player to a few choices. What if instead you make the whole thing more systematic and less 'questy', made the pieces on the board (either whole factions or even individual NPCs) have their own internal goals and programing? It becomes a far more interesting. Suddenly we have choice and consequence, real gameplay instead of a fake 'quest' some NPC gives you. You have mechanics you can play with. What is the point of quests under such a system?

 

That's a theoretical over the top example of course. We don't need to go that far. We don't need to have every piece on the board be moved by some unseen complex system. But compare most RPGs to most any other game genre. In most platformers, shooters, and other action games they have simple physics based interactions the player is always dealing with. The challenge and the fun comes from interacting with the environment and objects in it using physics-based rules. In puzzle and adventure games you have abstract puzzle challenges. Though some adventure games are notorious for having inane moon logic puzzles, the idea is that you are supposed to work out what to do through deductive reasoning with a set of logical rules. In most strategy and tactical games there are a set of tactical or political decisions to be made, weighing the choice of every outcome with a set of tactical rules. The fun and challenge there is in coming up with and executing a long term strategy while at the same time dealing with the unexpected moves of your opponents.

 

So what do RPGs do? Well they can do any of those things really. Action RPGs at least can be physical, RPGs can have lots of puzzles, RPGs can do tactics and strategy. But for the most part most of RPG gameplay is focused on combat and dungeon crawling, leaving a big void over most everything else. It's filler pure and simple. Oh I am not talking about the story really. Story is it's own can of worms, but it has it's place. But NPC interaction? In most RPGs is a lackluster lifeless thing. There is nothing interesting gameplay wise about most RPG NPCs. Quests don't help. Quests are just a cheap way to give NPCs some use by making dealing with them a required part of the game, and only really serve to push the player into playing with other things. I am just saying, if you want your NPCs and your world to be a fun interesting place, give them an interesting function in the gameplay, don't resort to have them rattling off ideas of things you could do.

 

Funny thing is, this only really applies to video games. In Tabletop RPGs NPCs were all sorts of important to the gameplay. When was the last time you saw a video game where Bards had their hella useful D&D 'bluff' ability and could use it well for example? This is the weakness of not having a real person play an NPC I know, but it isn't completely impossible to at least overcome. It's just that most video game RPGs don't try and turn their NPCs into either glorified vending machines, exposition dumps, or quest dispensers.

[lonequeso 1,921]

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Isn't that kinda what the Sims does? Less characters but isn't it the same basic idea? I donno, I never played any of the Sims games myself, I just heard lots about them.

Not at all. Unless they really upped there game since the version I played when I was younger. All the NPC are basically mindless drones waiting for your input. Their actions/responses are completely depending on what you do. They don't have their own lives running behind the scenes, and very rarely does your actions toward one NPC directly effect another, and never indirectly .  The only thing I can think of directly is if you get caught cheating. 

Replace good/evil with love/hate. Every NPC's love/hate spectrum is dictated (almost) entirely by how you interact with them. There's no ripple effect where people are more or less open to you based on who and how you associate with others. 

 

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But I don't think you are getting it. My whole point is that such a system would replace quests, not that it should be used to complement them. What is the point of a quest telling you to do something when you already have a gameplay reason to do it?

That's just a quest that is placed seamlessly into the gameplay. Quest. Mission. Objective. They're all essentially the same thing. You're not replacing anything. Only just hiding it. 

Edited August 14, 2017 by lonequeso

[Kayzee 4,032]

1 hour ago, lonequeso said:

Not at all. Unless they really upped there game since the version I played when I was younger. All the NPC are basically mindless drones waiting for your input. Their actions/responses are completely depending on what you do. They don't have their own lives running behind the scenes, and very rarely does your actions toward one NPC directly effect another. The only thing I can think of is if you get caught cheating.

 

Huh, I thought for sure it was more involved then that. I thought it was more how Dwarf Fortress works in that all the characters have their own sort of thing and you just kind of push them in the direction you want to go.

 

1 hour ago, lonequeso said:

That's just a quest that is placed seamlessly into the gameplay. Quest. Mission. Objective. They're all essentially the same thing. You're not replacing anything. Only just hiding it. 

 

You might as well say Super Mario Bros. has 'quests' placed seamlessly into the gameplay if you are going to say that. It has goals and objectives, obstructions placed in the way, even little mushroom men who tell you to go to another castle, and you eventually rescue a princess. But just having all that doesn't make things a 'quest' in the sense that we have been talking about. But okay, maybe you would say the difference between 'quest' and 'level' could be debated in some way. What about Metroid? Are you going to say that every time you find a thing you need an item to get by it's the same as a 'quest' in an RPG? That seems kinda silly to me. And what about when you see a nice structure in Minecraft and want to make a fortress out of it? How about in a strategy game where your enemy gets some new resource, do you mean to tell me it's a 'quest' to destroy or capture it?

 

I say no. A 'quest' is an arbitrary task the game gives you to keep you busy. A 'quest' is when an NPC tells you 'go kill 50 monsters and I will give you my stick' or something, a distraction with a promise of a reward, not actual game goals that emerge organically. There is no game reason to be the task, it's just a random chore that has nothing to do with the game's mechanics. If you have to kill 50 monsters to get the gold they drop to buy the sword? That's gameplay (not necessarily very good gameplay, but gameplay). There are mechanical reasons for doing what you are doing. There are ways around it, maybe you can just sell old crap. Heck I will even accept trading x number of rat tails form a particular monster for something in a trading system or using them to craft something in a crafting as better then a quest. It's still kind of a waste of time and too questy for me, but if it has an actual trading or crafting system for stuff it becomes at least three or four times as interesting. Even a simple system is better then an arbitrary task.

 

Maybe to you it doesn't make a difference, but if I want goals I want them to be something I decide based on the systems I have to work with, not something the game's creator just told me to do to keep me busy.

Edited August 14, 2017 by Kayzee

[lonequeso 1,921]

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Huh, I thought for sure it was more involved then that. I thought it was more how Dwarf Fortress works in that all the characters have their own sort of thing and you just kind of push them in the direction you want to go.

Sure. NPCs have a set of likes/dislikes, and they'll interact with objects around them. They don't talk amongst themselves though. If you have  party, you'll never see someone angrily storm off or two people sneak up to one of the bedrooms unless you're the one causing it. Your relationship with one NPC is almost never effected by what you do with another.

 

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You might as well say Super Mario Bros. has 'quests' placed seamlessly into the gameplay

That's exactly what I'm saying. The quest is rescuing the princess. Completing levels are the objectives. Getting items in Metroid would also be objectives. 

 

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 And what about when you see a nice structure in Minecraft and want to make a fortress out of it? How about in a strategy game where your enemy gets some new resource, do you mean to tell me it's a 'quest' to destroy or capture it?

Nope. Minecraft is truly open world. You can go anywhere and do anything at your leisure. If you wanted to consider them quests, the player themselves would be creating them. 

Kinda of an interesting query actually.  Seeing is everything is entirely up to the player, I'd say it's also up to them if they consider what they;re doing to be a quest. There is an adventure mode in Minecraft, too where you can explore dungeons and stuff. I'm not sure if that has quests in the traditional sense of the term or is just like the other mode though.

 

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 A 'quest' is a task the game gives you to keep you busy. A 'quest' is when an NPC tells you 'go kill 50 monsters and I will give you my stick' or something, a distraction with a promise of a reward, not actual game goals that emerge organically

Those are definitely quests  That's the traditional quest structure. "Go do this and I'll give you that." I'm saying the definition is much broader than that at least form a philosophical standpoint. Your definition would only cover sidequests though. RPGs typically have a main quest line that follows the same format. The reward is finishing the story. That's really all quest is. A story. It can be as simple as "Go rescue the Princess", but it's still a story. Minecraft has no story, therefore no quests.

Edited August 14, 2017 by lonequeso

[Kayzee 4,032]

Eh, I think there is a difference between attaching a story to a bit of gameplay and attaching gameplay to a bit of story. I guess that's the thing. Saving the princess in Mario is the goal in the story used to provide context to the game that you play. But that's not how 'quests' tend to work in rpgs. Instead you are being told a story and are expected to do something to turn the next page, and I find that really annoying from ether perspective. Also in no way is getting items in metroid really that relevant to the story at all.

[lonequeso 1,921]

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Also in no way is getting items in metroid really that relevant to the story at all.

If you need them to complete the story, they are. I can't 'member if the OG game required them. Later games for sure.

 

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But that's not how 'quests' tend to work in rpgs.

I said "philosophically", didn't I?  By the literal definition, Super Mario Bros. doesn't have quests. All I'm saying is they're tant amount to the same thing in the end.