[MUD-Dev2] The Future of Quests

[Nabil Maynard]

On Nov 3, 2008, at 7:00 AM, cruise wrote:

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

Even on this list, I don't think POW has quite enough traction to be 
used without a parenthetical reminder as to what the acronym means...

I think we're going to see more and more progress towards a  combination
of procedural and community driven questing.  The quality  of the
initial quests provided by the developer still needs to be  there, but
given both CoH and Vendetta Online's shift towards  empowering their
users to create new quests, I think what will SUSTAIN  an online world
is community driven content.  (If you hadn't heard  about Vendetta's
move, the info about the new "Player Contribution  Corps" can be found
here: http://www.vendetta-online.com/x/pcc.)  Other examples include
what Metaplace is doing (Hi Raph), which goes  several steps further by
empowering user ownership of the content  created.

There are several reasons why it's a good idea: economically, one of 
the biggest financial hurdles to maintaining a large virtual world is 
content creation.  By empowering users to create their own content,  you
not only foster a sense of ownership and pride (effectively 
nationalism), but provide a sandbox and training ground for potential 
employees.

Nabil