[MUD-Dev2] RANT: The Future of Quests

[Mike Rozak]

Damion Schubert:
> I've worked on autogeneration before, and I now work at a company that
> champions hand-crafted content, and I can tell you, it is nearly 
> impossible
> to autogenerate content with the emotional depth and resonance that
> hand-written content provides.

I agree, mostly.

I think that the core content needs to be hand-crafted. However, there can 
still be procedural content placed around the world. Both Bioware and 
Bethesda use this trick. There's the core quest chain, which is very tightly 
written. Around that are hand-written but more cookie-cutter FedEx side 
quests - which, if you squint, could almost be procedurally gnerated. Around 
them are (basically) wandering monsters, which are procedural.

I don't think you'd disagree with this. I just wanted to point out that 
hand-crafted and procedural both have their places.


> There's a serious gotcha here, though.  Is there anything
> more ham-handed than 'this time... it's personal'?  Doesn't anyone else
> roll their eyeballs when Robin and/or Aunt May have to get saved again?
> Would you really like to play a Batman game where your full-time job is
> rescuing Robin and Alfred?

Make a game which is not about saving the world, and which is not about 
killing. It's about something more mundane, like helping Aunt May hunt down 
a long-lost sister. Find the sister, see the cut scene, end the game.

I post on interactive fiction and adventure game forums and tell people 
there they should look at MUDs and MMORPGs and steal some tricks. 
Conversely, MUD/MMORPG developers could learn a thing or two from 
IF/adventure games.

In general, IF/Adventure games gave up "saving the world" a long time ago. A 
lot of players post on IF/Adventure forums "looking for games that don't 
involve killing." The sub-text of that is they are looking for games without 
the cliche "save the world" plot.