[MUD-Dev2] The Future of Quests

[Eric Lee GAMES]

Cruise wrote:
>
My NPC's can decide on what they need, then plan out from the actions
available to them the best of way of achieving it over a long period of
time. They're becoming better at evaluating how much a particular action
or item means to them, which in turns allows them to barter, reward or
be rewarded by each other for actions and objects.
This can range from an NPC asking you to fetch them a sword to the
King's brother asking you to assassinate his sibling. Or asking any
other NPC.
>

I'd be delighted to see a system that can actually deliver on that promise in a robust and scalable way.  It's badly needed, that's for sure!  The standard quest systems of today run up against some fundamental limitations.  I guess I'm preaching to the choir here but I'll restate the problems in my own words.

The problem is that the quest goal has to be something that's measurable in the game system; visit X location, move this object from here to there, find N objects, kill N monsters . . . that's pretty much it.  There's no emotional component in the core quest goals, so they get boring pretty quickly if they're left in their raw state.  (Well, they get boring for socializers and explorers, anyway.  I guess killers and achievers don't mind so much, which explains how we've managed to limp along for 30 years this way.)

Of course, you can dress up those measurable quest goals in emotional clothing in order to hide its true nature - instead of "kill 1 prince and return to me", its "my evil brother is trying to usurp my throne so I want you to quietly assassinate him."  The problem is that creating high-quality emotional content has (so far) not been possible to automate; it has to be created by hand.  The problem with automated content creation is that our software programs are good at repeating pre-configured patterns but they're terrible at synthesizing truly new concepts out of random facts.  You may have a king in your game, and the king may view his brother as an obstacle, but the only way the king can ask you to assassinate his brother is if the game designers have explicitly built in the concept of "assassination" as an option.  This is one of the fundamentally hard problems of AI; one where we're always 10 years away from solving it and have been for the last 40.

If you don't build in enough options, you eventually get repeating patterns in the details of the storylines and then the system is exposed as a fake.  People are incredibly sensitive to the reality or artificiality of emotional content.  One lesson we can learn from movies is that often it's better to skip the emotional content altogether than to include it and do it badly.  There's an "uncanny valley" effect at work here so it has to be done by people skilled at the job.

The fact that emotional content can only be created by hand means it's really expensive, which means we have to ration it, which creates many of the other hard design problem we have in MMOs.  We have to have a (mostly) static world, each player has to do the same quests as every other player, etc.

So yeah, I think the first person to solve the quest problem will be a hero (well, at least to those of us to care about such things) but I also think there's going to be lots of attempts that die in the "uncanny valley" before we get there.

Eric