[MUD-Dev2] The Future of Quests

[Robert Flesch]

cruise <cruise at casual-tempest.net> wrote:

> It's too quiet round here, so:
> 
> The number and quality of quests in large scale POW projects has
> beensreadily increasing as each new product attempts to improve over
> itspredecessor. It's fair to say this is one of the major time sinks
> forsuch projects. Additionally, players are becoming jaded with the
> staticquest system and an unchanging world.
> 
> It is obvious this cannot keep on going - the manpower required
> would beridiculous. Something must change...but what? Here are some
> possibilities:
> 
> a) Nothing - Quest writing stagnates, and current
> popularity of POWscollapses.b) Sandboxes - EVE, and to an extent
> Warhammer's PvP let player'sgenerate their own quests out of the world
> they're given.c) Procedural - An automatic generation of quests. This is
> what I'mworking on currently.d) Community - CoH is taking the first towards
> this, by opening up whatare effectively the developers mission creation
> tools to the players.
> 
> Please discuss, comment and criticise, in which ever order you
> prefer :P 

I was recently talking to a professor at Ga Tech(Mark Riedl) who was
working on ways of generating "situation tree's" (my word). He was using
it for army training simulations, but I thought the concept could apply
very nicely to any situation where you needed a large number of quests.

Basically this system requires you to define some general goals, but
then generates a large number of ways to get to that goal. If find my
tending to like hybrid systems that balance between lots of random
quests that tend to have random loot (which I personally don't like,
since you can be on the same quest as someone else, or if you are, you
get different rewards), And fixed quests with fixed loot.. This system
is more of a fixed quest that has infinite (many) ways to reaching the
goal.

I was looking at it for helping us design a negotiation training
simulation.
 
bob flesch
http://prototerra.com - President
404 964 4279 Cell
Skype: robertflesch