I was involved once with a group who tried to abstract a 'PLOT' as a object using object-oriented analysis and design methodologies. It was quite amusing as an exercise -- write software to write stories. I don't remember everything we came up with, but some of the key components that I remember were.
Attributes:
Originator. Person or group who instigates this plot.
Resources. A group of attributes including money, time, etc.
Scope. How widespread is this action? Global, local, personal, etc.
Nature. Public or private plot.
Goal. Group of attributes determining success. Includes Target, Reward, etc.
Methods:
Advance. Drive the plot forward one stage.
Plan. Develop the next stage in achieving the goal
There were several other methods to drive the plot along that I don't remember, including several ways to terminate the plot. The plot could link to itself as subplots (stages) to break out smaller and smaller pieces.
We had originally thought that a good randomization mechanism to populate the various details could make an excellent way to devise a simple, dynamic game quest generator. Mr. A wants to build a new alarm bell for Town Y. Mr. B and his friends want to stop the king's daughter from marrying that 'outsider', Mr. G. Mr. C wants a new home. We wanted to build a stock set of plot items and have a engine capable of creating new content as needed, based on randomness, failure or success of other plots, and other reader interaction.
To my knowledge, nothing ever came of this particular effort. If I had to develop a mechanism to dynamically change quests (content) in an MMORPG, I'd probably approach it from this angle.
Logic, my dear, merely enables one to be wrong with great authority.
I was involved once with a group who tried to abstract a 'PLOT' as a object using object-oriented analysis and design methodologies. It was quite amusing as an exercise -- write software to write stories. I don't remember everything we came up with, but some of the key components that I remember were.
Attributes:
Originator. Person or group who instigates this plot.
Resources. A group of attributes including money, time, etc.
Scope. How widespread is this action? Global, local, personal, etc.
Nature. Public or private plot.
Goal. Group of attributes determining success. Includes Target, Reward, etc.
Methods:
Advance. Drive the plot forward one stage.
Plan. Develop the next stage in achieving the goal
There were several other methods to drive the plot along that I don't remember, including several ways to terminate the plot. The plot could link to itself as subplots (stages) to break out smaller and smaller pieces.
We had originally thought that a good randomization mechanism to populate the various details could make an excellent way to devise a simple, dynamic game quest generator. Mr. A wants to build a new alarm bell for Town Y. Mr. B and his friends want to stop the king's daughter from marrying that 'outsider', Mr. G. Mr. C wants a new home. We wanted to build a stock set of plot items and have a engine capable of creating new content as needed, based on randomness, failure or success of other plots, and other reader interaction.
To my knowledge, nothing ever came of this particular effort. If I had to develop a mechanism to dynamically change quests (content) in an MMORPG, I'd probably approach it from this angle.
Quest generation couldn't be anymore generic than 75% of quest we get in MMORPGs. Help my farm has wolves in the field and will until the server closes. Kill 10 of them and get 5 wolf femurs along with the 200 hundred other noobs killing at the wolf spawn generator.
This sort of story generation was done in Murder on the Zinderneuf's murder mystery game, for Atari 8bit. Of course, it had the advantage of a constrained enviornment.
Personally, I think GrumpyMel's scenario devisor sounds great. How easy it would be to do, I don't know. Anything to get rid of spawn in place, waiting to be killed foes, imo.
Big picture power ecology could be scripted or just organized by the developers, with consequant ripples of effect.
If you are holding out for the perfect game, the only game you play will be the waiting one.
What I would like to see is quests being actual quests again.
A few multi-step quests (plus side-quests) you focus on and get involved in, with storylines you can follow (you should always be able to know and have motivation for why you are doing what you are doing) and can enjoy, instead of just ticking off a shopping list of 20 to 30 meaningless "quests" you don't even care about one by one from your journal.
I would also enjoy less handholding. Where to go and what to do should be a part of the story, told by the partaking NPCs/locales/events, not some tacked on UI system of arrows and green dots.
This is personal taste ofcourse, your mileage may vary and I won't blame you for it.
Things like this can be mostly procedurally generated, it's just a matter of allocating enough budget to the task of developing good systems.
Obviously randomizing which 10 animals the player should kill is not what I mean.
There are studies about the structure of RPG/MMO quests and they imply that quests have well defined structures and thus can be procedurally generated to quite high standard. Will they be AS good as handcrafted quests? Only time can tell. Then again... many handcrafted quests in current MMOs are definitely under par anyway, certainly a standard that can be procedurally reached.
You could build something that combines the concepts that GrumpyMel proposed with the generated tasks/stories concept of Mendel. If you can make the NPCs self aware of their surroundings (not omniscient but aware of a pre-determined area of land around the town/village/camp/outpost .... ) and also aware of their lot in life (eliminate endless supplies of coin/items). With this self aware information the NPCs would know things like what their greatest needs are at any given times and how much they can pay for it. You can programmatically generate tasks based on input such as what kind of NPC it is (local drunk, bartender, farmer, herbalist ...) , how aware of the world around them they are, what their feelings are about the player, etc. Now based on the inputs mixed with the fact that an orc camp has recently sprung up not to far from the area ... this will lead to a series of quests leading up to removing the threat. Once that threat is removed, the people may or may not have any more tasks to offer until another threat emerges. The NPCs could also run out of money/items so it would be up to the players to continue helping or leave the area and let the orcs take over.
I think the biggest change would be to not have persistent quests with constant rewards. How would a farmer in the middle of nowhere get the coin needed to pay off all those quest rewards? with games on the horizon touting smarter AI on creatures it might be hard to have permanent kill 10 orc quests, since there might not be any orc close by, so the NPC dialog and quest delivery needs to change along with the mob AI.
Make it so that quests aren't the primary way of leveling. Bam, you've solved 75% of the quest problem. Now when you find the quests, they're more meaningful, because they are fewer in number.
Also, somehow incorporate a living world like GW2 with the quests, so that everything you do changes the game world, and you have yourself a winning formula.
Not sure I'd like to see MMORPGs revert back to grinding mobs as the chief advancement activity. What are you replacing questing with in such a system?
Doing bounty hunts, turning in trophies, killing overland boss mobs, xp from PvP, xp from exploration, group exp bonuses and monster camp bonuses encouraging you to roam around. Quests were best when they were something to do now and then.
And mob grinding with friends wherever you want to explore is much preferable to following a pre scripted quest path by yourself with your brain turned off.
You're essentially describing SWG?
For every minute you are angry , you lose 60 seconds of happiness."-Emerson
I would just like to see a separation of tasks, chores, and quests and the acquisition of these things to appear and occur naturally (remove the overhead displays or points on a minimap). Chores and tasks could be picked up by overhearing npcs talking about ol'bill the farmer having some issues with some creature that keeps stealing his cattle, or that the taverns cook just quit and they could use some help. While quests could be wanted posters or other civic minded duties all the way up to being sent on the quest to find the holy grail. But the quest needs to fit the surroundings and feel like it belongs not only to the place, but the place at the time the quest is given. If someone else has returned with the bandit chiefs head then you should not be able to get that same quest until a new bandit chief has become a pain in the ass to the town.
Make it so that quests aren't the primary way of leveling. Bam, you've solved 75% of the quest problem. Now when you find the quests, they're more meaningful, because they are fewer in number.
Also, somehow incorporate a living world like GW2 with the quests, so that everything you do changes the game world, and you have yourself a winning formula.
Not sure I'd like to see MMORPGs revert back to grinding mobs as the chief advancement activity. What are you replacing questing with in such a system?
Doing bounty hunts, turning in trophies, killing overland boss mobs, xp from PvP, xp from exploration, group exp bonuses and monster camp bonuses encouraging you to roam around. Quests were best when they were something to do now and then.
And mob grinding with friends wherever you want to explore is much preferable to following a pre scripted quest path by yourself with your brain turned off.
You're essentially describing SWG?
I was describing DAoC, as well as features from a few other games.
In the few times I played SWG, all I remember doing was following waypoints to missions and blowing up nests.
Well, my point of view is that you're not really missing content because it's generated scenarios that your making choices about. I don't see how its an illusion is your making choices about what happens in the story by your actions.
Content has to be created. A developer has a budget of time for creating content. Every choice a player makes creates a fork in the road
Imagine the developer has budget to create 7 events. If you string them together without there being choices, each player gets to see 7 developer-created events.
If instead, at every quest, the player gets to make a right/left decision that sends them down a different path, each player only gets to see 3 developer-created events
Character ----> 1? ----> 2R or 3L ---> 4 RR or 5 RL or 6 LR or 7 LL
(if you go left at quest 1 , then right at the next quest, you only see events 1, 3 and 6 ... nothing else (unless you make an alt).
Every decision point doubles the number of events the developers need to create to make the choices meaningful. Thus my question: how valuable are choices to you? What's the value in *knowing* that events 2,3,5 and 7 really existed and that your choice of path actually mattered? Would you rather play a game with 10-step story where every step of the story had a decision that really mattered to what happens from that point on or a game with 1023-step quest chain taking you through a long story where the the choices were illusionary and there was really only one possible outcome to each step.
( obviously, not every sideplot has to fork the entire state of the story and events can be tweaked based on small bits of history like whether $redshirt is still alive or not without being two seperate events, but as long as you have a writer deciding the consequences of decisions and allowing decisions to actually matter in the long term, you have inescapable forking and thus the budget of resources becomes diluted across more and more possible world-states as the plot goes on )
Of course, you may be thinking of procedurally generated events that aren't being indivdually hand-crafted, but if that's what you're imagining, it didn't come across in your original post.
And if you're just tlaking about having questgivers spawn their neediness in less-static, less-predictable ways, that's fine, but make sure that before you decry quest hubs, first be careful that you understand why quest hubs have come to exist in the first place (this is not just a themepark thing).
Well, my point of view is that you're not really missing content because it's generated scenarios that your making choices about. I don't see how its an illusion is your making choices about what happens in the story by your actions.
Content has to be created. A developer has a budget of time for creating content. Every choice a player makes creates a fork in the road
Imagine the developer has budget to create 7 events. If you string them together without there being choices, each player gets to see 7 developer-created events.
If instead, at every quest, the player gets to make a right/left decision that sends them down a different path, each player only gets to see 3 developer-created events
Character ----> 1? ----> 2R / 3L ---> 4 RR / 5 RL / 6 LR / 7 LL
(if you go left at quest 1 , then right at the next quest, you only see events 1, 4 and 6 ... nothing else (unless you make an alt).
Every decision point doubles the number of events the developers need to create to make the choices meaningful. Thus my question: how valuable are choices to you? What's the value in *knowing* that events 2,3,5 and 7 really existed and that your choice of path actually mattered? Would you rather play a game with 10-step story where every step of the story had a decision that really mattered to what happens from that point on or a game with 1023-step quest chain taking you through a long story where the the choices were illusionary and there was really only one possible outcome to each step.
Of course, you may be thinking of procedurally generated events that aren't being indivdually hand-crafted, but if that's what you're imagining, it didn't come across in your original post.
Yes, I was thinking procedurally generated not handcrafted.
EDIT: I mentioned using AI to create the stories. The story branches would have to be developer created of course but the AI puts it together. Not handcrafted multi-branching quest.
Yes, I was thinking procedurally generated not handcrafted.
EDIT: I mentioned using AI to create the stories. The story branches would have to be developer created of course but the AI puts it together. Not handcrafted multi-branching quest.
But adding those manual story branch points is what's worrying me, where I fear the cost/benefit breaks.
Yes, I was thinking procedurally generated not handcrafted.
EDIT: I mentioned using AI to create the stories. The story branches would have to be developer created of course but the AI puts it together. Not handcrafted multi-branching quest.
But adding those manual story branch points is what's worrying me, where I fear the cost/benefit breaks.
I agree this is a tricky problem.
I am assuming the main storyline would be written by authors, including all the main branches, quality kinda demands this. The story needs a good emotional arc, needs to flow fluidly, needs to be paced well, etc. etc.
What if the writers only predefine some main branches (these will need the additional manual care when getting implemented) and smaller embellishments/sub-branches get added procedurally.
Things like if an NPC gets saved or not and his/her later reappearence (or not) can be auto generated easily and still add more "my decisions mattered" feel.
The part that could get really complicated is how the player's decision's impact the world. The "everyone is a hero" problem is already tricky in a non-branched scenario and requires tricks and a lot of work to be solved, more decisions/branches/points of impact just add to it's complexity.
Gw2 pve content is a step towards this direction, the only real issue is it's not random, it just repeats over and over and only changes if you fail, and only a little bit. It also lacks rewards that match the type of content. Karma = Gear = grind, whereas if they would of kept the ability based progression of guild wars 1, you'd see a whole different reason to be out experiencing the world story content(not personal story). I think if they had better AI, and more time to randomize events, with an improved ability based rewards system ala gw1, Gw2 would have nailed questing in MMo's.
Originally posted by maplestone Content has to be created. A developer has a budget of time for creating content. Every choice a player makes creates a fork in the road Imagine the developer has budget to create 7 events. If you string them together without there being choices, each player gets to see 7 developer-created events.Character ----> 1 ---> 2 --->3 --->4 ---> 5 ---> 6 ---> 7If instead, at every quest, the player gets to make a right/left decision that sends them down a different path, each player only gets to see 3 developer-created eventsCharacter ----> 1? ----> 2R / 3L ---> 4 RR / 5 RL / 6 LR / 7 LL(if you go left at quest 1 , then right at the next quest, you only see events 1, 4 and 6 ... nothing else (unless you make an alt). Every decision point doubles the number of events the developers need to create to make the choices meaningful. Thus my question: how valuable are choices to you? What's the value in *knowing* that events 2,3,5 and 7 really existed and that your choice of path actually mattered? Would you rather play a game with 10-step story where every step of the story had a decision that really mattered to what happens from that point on or a game with 1023-step quest chain taking you through a long story where the the choices were illusionary and there was really only one possible outcome to each step.( obviously, not every sideplot has to fork the entire state of the story and events can be tweaked based on small bits of history like whether $redshirt is still alive or not without being two seperate events, but as long as you have a writer deciding the consequences of decisions and allowing decisions to actually matter in the long term, you have inescapable forking and thus the budget of resources becomes diluted across more and more possible world-states as the plot goes on )Of course, you may be thinking of procedurally generated events that aren't being indivdually hand-crafted, but if that's what you're imagining, it didn't come across in your original post. And if you're just tlaking about having questgivers spawn their neediness in less-static, less-predictable ways, that's fine, but make sure that before you decry quest hubs, first be careful that you understand why quest hubs have come to exist in the first place (this is not just a themepark thing).
Spot on.
Sadly OP does not even understand what procedurally generated content is(see his post above), not to say implications of any what was said so far.
Yes, I was thinking procedurally generated not handcrafted.
EDIT: I mentioned using AI to create the stories. The story branches would have to be developer created of course but the AI puts it together. Not handcrafted multi-branching quest.
But adding those manual story branch points is what's worrying me, where I fear the cost/benefit breaks.
Well, you're creating pools of plots and scenarios. I think the hard part comes into creating an automated system that can competently create storylines applying to characters and linking or creating npcs. I am not talking about a never ending questlines. A quest could be resolved in 1 step or more depending on what the system pulls from in the pool and the choices of the player
For example if you talk to NPC A and you trigger a quest from him. The plot is pulled randomly from plot pool that qualify for you and that NPC. Quest that is pulled is NPC is scared there are noises in his cellar. You investigate and its a child stealing food. You are given 2 approaches to deal with it 1. scare off and the quest ends. 2. Ask questions you are given 2 more options. You find out kid has lost his parents and hungry. You can 1. Give money and send him on his way ending the quest. 2. you can escort him to his parents. If you escort him a location is created for the parents to spawn when you come near. If the kid dies you fail. The quest ends on bring the kid home. The NPC could be flagged as connected to the necromancer guild and a qualifying plot pulled from the pool could have been him knocking you out while talking to him and tying you up in the cellar for evil purposes. Even if you got the same scenario from another NPC the child maybe really a vampire instead of lost or a runaway who has trouble controlling his powers depending on whats pulled from the scenario pool.
These are not designed to be a single player grind for exp quest lines like in a themepark but supplemental automated content in a sandboxy game. I don't think the hard part is creating scenarios. I think its making an automated system that can make sense of the scenarios.
Originally posted by maplestone Content has to be created. A developer has a budget of time for creating content. Every choice a player makes creates a fork in the road
Imagine the developer has budget to create 7 events. If you string them together without there being choices, each player gets to see 7 developer-created events.
If instead, at every quest, the player gets to make a right/left decision that sends them down a different path, each player only gets to see 3 developer-created events
Character ----> 1? ----> 2R / 3L ---> 4 RR / 5 RL / 6 LR / 7 LL
(if you go left at quest 1 , then right at the next quest, you only see events 1, 4 and 6 ... nothing else (unless you make an alt).
Every decision point doubles the number of events the developers need to create to make the choices meaningful. Thus my question: how valuable are choices to you? What's the value in *knowing* that events 2,3,5 and 7 really existed and that your choice of path actually mattered? Would you rather play a game with 10-step story where every step of the story had a decision that really mattered to what happens from that point on or a game with 1023-step quest chain taking you through a long story where the the choices were illusionary and there was really only one possible outcome to each step.
( obviously, not every sideplot has to fork the entire state of the story and events can be tweaked based on small bits of history like whether $redshirt is still alive or not without being two seperate events, but as long as you have a writer deciding the consequences of decisions and allowing decisions to actually matter in the long term, you have inescapable forking and thus the budget of resources becomes diluted across more and more possible world-states as the plot goes on )
Of course, you may be thinking of procedurally generated events that aren't being indivdually hand-crafted, but if that's what you're imagining, it didn't come across in your original post.
And if you're just tlaking about having questgivers spawn their neediness in less-static, less-predictable ways, that's fine, but make sure that before you decry quest hubs, first be careful that you understand why quest hubs have come to exist in the first place (this is not just a themepark thing).
Spot on.
Sadly OP does not even understand what procedurally generated content is(see his post above), not to say implications of any what was said so far.
Yes, I do. Its quest generated by the game based on algorithms and not handcrafted. For example in Skyrim a simple one is the Assasin guild will generate quest to kill people. It will create a target NPC and location. My system is also generates quest through algorithms. Do you know what it means is the question.
The problem is people like action and reading quest dialogue is not action.
What I'd like to see is something like the bulk of xp coming from grinding or dungeons (similar to old ffxi, but it doesn't have to be forced grouping), and quests to be special things to break up the monotony, rather than being monotonous themselves.
Each one should be unique and none of them should be about killing multiple mobs or collecting multiple of the same thing.
Originally posted by Margulis I think The Secret World has the best quests in an mmo currently - some of them are more traditional but many are exceptional
The problem is, to achieve that, they mostly made a singleplayer game.
Random plots could be really interesting as a questing vehicle. I also like the old school single player RPG style quests like in the Ultima games. But those types require much more effort than your basic kill 10 rats quests.
Make it so that quests aren't the primary way of leveling. Bam, you've solved 75% of the quest problem. Now when you find the quests, they're more meaningful, because they are fewer in number.
Also, somehow incorporate a living world like GW2 with the quests, so that everything you do changes the game world, and you have yourself a winning formula.
Not sure I'd like to see MMORPGs revert back to grinding mobs as the chief advancement activity. What are you replacing questing with in such a system?
Some existing alternatives:
Passive skill gain (ex: EVE Online)
Player skill gain (ex: Puzzle Pirates)
Event rewards (ex: dynamic events, world events)
Skill usage advancement (ex: Ultima Online)
Engaging, witty, rewarding and fun (Ex: Runescape)
Yes I have to say runescape has one of my most favorite questing/quest solutions
I want them to get rid of them and come up with some other way(s) to progress. I'm not creative enough to dream up something like that and companies are too risk adverse to try, so I'm afraid we're going to be stuck with quest hubs for a long time to come.
Quests should be like Ultima single player RPG quests where there are few of them, they are very long and they actually take brain power to figure out what you are supposed to do. The Secret World is one MMO that does some pretty good quests.
Most things MMOs call quests are actually "menial tasks" which isn't the same thing at all.
The best way and the way that makes more sense is the way ffxi did it.That means garnering fame for various regions and with the npc's themselves to get more quests from them.You also might go on a quest to learn a special weapon skill or spell.
Simply making 1000 quests to support leveling makes no sense at all,it removes the rpg in gaming and turns games into tools for leveling.
Quests should also involve cut scenes with your player,they should not be simply lazy fetch me quests just to get some xp.I would also like to see more interaction with the game world,instead of just heading out to kill some mobs roaming around.With that interaction i do not want to see arrows or sparklies or any hand holding turning a quest into some joke to you guessed it,to get xp,i want it to feel like a player in a game world doing a quest for a role playing reason.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
Comments
I was involved once with a group who tried to abstract a 'PLOT' as a object using object-oriented analysis and design methodologies. It was quite amusing as an exercise -- write software to write stories. I don't remember everything we came up with, but some of the key components that I remember were.
Logic, my dear, merely enables one to be wrong with great authority.
Quest generation couldn't be anymore generic than 75% of quest we get in MMORPGs. Help my farm has wolves in the field and will until the server closes. Kill 10 of them and get 5 wolf femurs along with the 200 hundred other noobs killing at the wolf spawn generator.
This sort of story generation was done in Murder on the Zinderneuf's murder mystery game, for Atari 8bit. Of course, it had the advantage of a constrained enviornment.
Personally, I think GrumpyMel's scenario devisor sounds great. How easy it would be to do, I don't know. Anything to get rid of spawn in place, waiting to be killed foes, imo.
Big picture power ecology could be scripted or just organized by the developers, with consequant ripples of effect.
If you are holding out for the perfect game, the only game you play will be the waiting one.
What I would like to see is quests being actual quests again.
A few multi-step quests (plus side-quests) you focus on and get involved in, with storylines you can follow (you should always be able to know and have motivation for why you are doing what you are doing) and can enjoy, instead of just ticking off a shopping list of 20 to 30 meaningless "quests" you don't even care about one by one from your journal.
I would also enjoy less handholding. Where to go and what to do should be a part of the story, told by the partaking NPCs/locales/events, not some tacked on UI system of arrows and green dots.
This is personal taste ofcourse, your mileage may vary and I won't blame you for it.
Things like this can be mostly procedurally generated, it's just a matter of allocating enough budget to the task of developing good systems.
Obviously randomizing which 10 animals the player should kill is not what I mean.
There are studies about the structure of RPG/MMO quests and they imply that quests have well defined structures and thus can be procedurally generated to quite high standard. Will they be AS good as handcrafted quests? Only time can tell. Then again... many handcrafted quests in current MMOs are definitely under par anyway, certainly a standard that can be procedurally reached.
You could build something that combines the concepts that GrumpyMel proposed with the generated tasks/stories concept of Mendel. If you can make the NPCs self aware of their surroundings (not omniscient but aware of a pre-determined area of land around the town/village/camp/outpost .... ) and also aware of their lot in life (eliminate endless supplies of coin/items). With this self aware information the NPCs would know things like what their greatest needs are at any given times and how much they can pay for it. You can programmatically generate tasks based on input such as what kind of NPC it is (local drunk, bartender, farmer, herbalist ...) , how aware of the world around them they are, what their feelings are about the player, etc. Now based on the inputs mixed with the fact that an orc camp has recently sprung up not to far from the area ... this will lead to a series of quests leading up to removing the threat. Once that threat is removed, the people may or may not have any more tasks to offer until another threat emerges. The NPCs could also run out of money/items so it would be up to the players to continue helping or leave the area and let the orcs take over.
I think the biggest change would be to not have persistent quests with constant rewards. How would a farmer in the middle of nowhere get the coin needed to pay off all those quest rewards? with games on the horizon touting smarter AI on creatures it might be hard to have permanent kill 10 orc quests, since there might not be any orc close by, so the NPC dialog and quest delivery needs to change along with the mob AI.
You're essentially describing SWG?
For every minute you are angry , you lose 60 seconds of happiness."-Emerson
I was describing DAoC, as well as features from a few other games.
In the few times I played SWG, all I remember doing was following waypoints to missions and blowing up nests.
Content has to be created. A developer has a budget of time for creating content. Every choice a player makes creates a fork in the road
Imagine the developer has budget to create 7 events. If you string them together without there being choices, each player gets to see 7 developer-created events.
Character ----> 1 ---> 2 --->3 --->4 ---> 5 ---> 6 ---> 7
If instead, at every quest, the player gets to make a right/left decision that sends them down a different path, each player only gets to see 3 developer-created events
Character ----> 1? ----> 2R or 3L ---> 4 RR or 5 RL or 6 LR or 7 LL
(if you go left at quest 1 , then right at the next quest, you only see events 1, 3 and 6 ... nothing else (unless you make an alt).
Every decision point doubles the number of events the developers need to create to make the choices meaningful. Thus my question: how valuable are choices to you? What's the value in *knowing* that events 2,3,5 and 7 really existed and that your choice of path actually mattered? Would you rather play a game with 10-step story where every step of the story had a decision that really mattered to what happens from that point on or a game with 1023-step quest chain taking you through a long story where the the choices were illusionary and there was really only one possible outcome to each step.
( obviously, not every sideplot has to fork the entire state of the story and events can be tweaked based on small bits of history like whether $redshirt is still alive or not without being two seperate events, but as long as you have a writer deciding the consequences of decisions and allowing decisions to actually matter in the long term, you have inescapable forking and thus the budget of resources becomes diluted across more and more possible world-states as the plot goes on )
Of course, you may be thinking of procedurally generated events that aren't being indivdually hand-crafted, but if that's what you're imagining, it didn't come across in your original post.
And if you're just tlaking about having questgivers spawn their neediness in less-static, less-predictable ways, that's fine, but make sure that before you decry quest hubs, first be careful that you understand why quest hubs have come to exist in the first place (this is not just a themepark thing).
Yes, I was thinking procedurally generated not handcrafted.
EDIT: I mentioned using AI to create the stories. The story branches would have to be developer created of course but the AI puts it together. Not handcrafted multi-branching quest.
But adding those manual story branch points is what's worrying me, where I fear the cost/benefit breaks.
I agree this is a tricky problem.
I am assuming the main storyline would be written by authors, including all the main branches, quality kinda demands this. The story needs a good emotional arc, needs to flow fluidly, needs to be paced well, etc. etc.
What if the writers only predefine some main branches (these will need the additional manual care when getting implemented) and smaller embellishments/sub-branches get added procedurally.
Things like if an NPC gets saved or not and his/her later reappearence (or not) can be auto generated easily and still add more "my decisions mattered" feel.
The part that could get really complicated is how the player's decision's impact the world. The "everyone is a hero" problem is already tricky in a non-branched scenario and requires tricks and a lot of work to be solved, more decisions/branches/points of impact just add to it's complexity.
"Everyone is a hero" but only some become legend.
And everyone seem forget one of quests problem : they keep players solo and take always party/group time.
I ready hate when my group level up and moving to other area , left me alone solo those left over quests/tasks because i have less time to play.
If you can solver that problem , half of season why "quests/tasks hub are boring in MMOs" are gone.
Gw2 pve content is a step towards this direction, the only real issue is it's not random, it just repeats over and over and only changes if you fail, and only a little bit. It also lacks rewards that match the type of content. Karma = Gear = grind, whereas if they would of kept the ability based progression of guild wars 1, you'd see a whole different reason to be out experiencing the world story content(not personal story). I think if they had better AI, and more time to randomize events, with an improved ability based rewards system ala gw1, Gw2 would have nailed questing in MMo's.
Spot on.
Sadly OP does not even understand what procedurally generated content is(see his post above), not to say implications of any what was said so far.
Well, you're creating pools of plots and scenarios. I think the hard part comes into creating an automated system that can competently create storylines applying to characters and linking or creating npcs. I am not talking about a never ending questlines. A quest could be resolved in 1 step or more depending on what the system pulls from in the pool and the choices of the player
For example if you talk to NPC A and you trigger a quest from him. The plot is pulled randomly from plot pool that qualify for you and that NPC. Quest that is pulled is NPC is scared there are noises in his cellar. You investigate and its a child stealing food. You are given 2 approaches to deal with it 1. scare off and the quest ends. 2. Ask questions you are given 2 more options. You find out kid has lost his parents and hungry. You can 1. Give money and send him on his way ending the quest. 2. you can escort him to his parents. If you escort him a location is created for the parents to spawn when you come near. If the kid dies you fail. The quest ends on bring the kid home. The NPC could be flagged as connected to the necromancer guild and a qualifying plot pulled from the pool could have been him knocking you out while talking to him and tying you up in the cellar for evil purposes. Even if you got the same scenario from another NPC the child maybe really a vampire instead of lost or a runaway who has trouble controlling his powers depending on whats pulled from the scenario pool.
These are not designed to be a single player grind for exp quest lines like in a themepark but supplemental automated content in a sandboxy game. I don't think the hard part is creating scenarios. I think its making an automated system that can make sense of the scenarios.
Yes, I do. Its quest generated by the game based on algorithms and not handcrafted. For example in Skyrim a simple one is the Assasin guild will generate quest to kill people. It will create a target NPC and location. My system is also generates quest through algorithms. Do you know what it means is the question.
The problem is people like action and reading quest dialogue is not action.
What I'd like to see is something like the bulk of xp coming from grinding or dungeons (similar to old ffxi, but it doesn't have to be forced grouping), and quests to be special things to break up the monotony, rather than being monotonous themselves.
Each one should be unique and none of them should be about killing multiple mobs or collecting multiple of the same thing.
The problem is, to achieve that, they mostly made a singleplayer game.
MurderHerd
Quests should be like Ultima single player RPG quests where there are few of them, they are very long and they actually take brain power to figure out what you are supposed to do. The Secret World is one MMO that does some pretty good quests.
Most things MMOs call quests are actually "menial tasks" which isn't the same thing at all.
The best way and the way that makes more sense is the way ffxi did it.That means garnering fame for various regions and with the npc's themselves to get more quests from them.You also might go on a quest to learn a special weapon skill or spell.
Simply making 1000 quests to support leveling makes no sense at all,it removes the rpg in gaming and turns games into tools for leveling.
Quests should also involve cut scenes with your player,they should not be simply lazy fetch me quests just to get some xp.I would also like to see more interaction with the game world,instead of just heading out to kill some mobs roaming around.With that interaction i do not want to see arrows or sparklies or any hand holding turning a quest into some joke to you guessed it,to get xp,i want it to feel like a player in a game world doing a quest for a role playing reason.
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