[MUD-Dev2] The Future of Quests

[John Buehler]

Eric Lee writes:

> 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.

That's because the assumption there is that the hand that is creating the
content is the developer's.  In contrast, player-run games leave the
creation of content to the natural interactions of players.  In a sandbox,
players set their own goals, and that means that they are more emotionally
involved than in any hand-crafted content created by the developers.  It is
THEIR goal, not the developer's.  Because of that, the need for an
artificial reward such as experience points is reduced.  The player's reward
is achieving the goal that they set.

I'm advocating a hybrid of the developer-crafted game and the player-run
game.

The developers implement the various actions possible in the game world and
design the game storyline at the highest level.  Then they communicate
large-scale tasks to the player community that advance the game storyline.
Large-scale tasks are ones that take at least a week for 100 players to
complete.  If you can't imagine tasks on that scale, take a look at EVE
Online.  There are always large tasks to complete, and they always break
down into things that can be done in a single session of game play.

> 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.

Sandbox games have 'solved' the quest problem.  In my opinion they only lack
the high level storyline to make them truly engaging.  The uncanny valley
problem rears its head when the developer tries to micro-manage the player
experience - an attitude inherited from single-player games.  Multi-player
games are primarily about player-to-player interaction.  Unfortunately,
we're still focusing on the single-player experience - player-to-content
interaction.

JB