I’ve been thinking about quest items recently trying to decide if they should exist in the game world before the quest is given to player, and what effect that should have on the quest structure if any. For instance if there is an optional quest to find some incriminating evidence about a corporation and the player decided to break into their office before getting that quest. Should they be able to find the evidence? And if they can should they now it’s a quest item? From a realism perspective it would make sense that they could find it, and even sell it never knowing its true worth. From a game play perspective it open up a host of structure and continuity issues. Does finding the evidence give the player a new quest “blackmail the corporation, or find a buyer. “. Does the quest giver now ask the player to find the person who stole the evidence, rather than break in and find it? If during the flow of the original quest the corporation sends an assassin after the player to steal back the evidence should the assassin still be triggered even if the player hasn’t gotten the quest? Making the quests malleably and changeable by player actions I feel would make a more interesting and layered gameplay but the resulting complexity could make scripting and testing a nightmare. It could also mean the player looses out on some quests if their actions can invalidate a future quest. Thoughts?

Being able to fumble a quest without realizing it would be a grave design mistake. In your example, it should be impossible to accidentally trash the quest item without knowing its value.

I think the most feasible approach is to make it impossible to acquire the items before the quest. You can always construct story barriers.

Again for your example, you may have been in the corporate offices before, but the quest giver has a keycard to the executive level that allows you to access the area with the incriminating evidence.

Quote:Original post by Pete Michaud
Again for your example, you may have been in the corporate offices before, but the quest giver has a keycard to the executive level that allows you to access the area with the incriminating evidence.

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That happens a lot in games like Dragon Age or Elder Scrolls games, and it's disappointing. You either get NPCs standing around with no dialogue because you don't meet the quest requirements, or you talk to someone holding the right randomly found item to trigger the end of a quest you never started.

Also, another thing to consider, is why you would even notice the "incriminating evidence"? It's really just lying next to all other junk in the background that doesn't interest you. If you weren't looking for it specifically, it's not even on your radar.

This whole business of scripted quests in freeform games seems to me oxymoronic. If it's freeform it shouldn't have items the world isn't prepared to react to naturally in a variety of ways and places.

I think I agree with Diodor on this one. Rigid scripts really hurt the whole spirit of a freeform game.

Quote:Original post by TechnoGoth
For instance if there is an optional quest to find some incriminating evidence about a corporation and the player decided to break into their office before getting that quest. Should they be able to find the evidence? And if they can should they now it’s a quest item?

What if you design gameplay intentionally around a whole "stumble upon" mechanic which relies on the fact that quest objects can be discovered at any point? Rather than lame story gates that you have to hide things behind, maybe think in terms of scripts which spawn "quest objects" for locations you can predefine and test, and for which there's a whole set of gameplay rules for finding more about. So you break into TransOrbital and find something about "Project Xerxes?" Well, who would know what it's worth? Can there be a system of info brokers, with layers of gear dependent security and ways of finding out who to trust? How dangerous would it be to have the information? When people start gunning for you in attack helicopters, that may become easy to figure out. (And this doesn't have to be wildly unbalanced, either-- if you have a character leveling system via stats, implants or gear, the juicier stuff is just harder and harder to get to but nevertheless always available).

Instead of going to a person and getting a quest, think instead of maybe designing all your areas to have spawn points for a wide variety of both characters and objects: A hotel lobby or cybercafe, for instance, or monorail depot could be used over and over again for meetings, skulking about, firefights, ambushes and near escapes from the law. They could be randomly populated by bums, or kissing lovers, any one of which could turn out to be a spook, broker, or assassin.

You might even trigger off events partly by giving "quest objects" time limits. Maybe if an object is in a "stolen" state long enough, Maas reps start getting picked off by their chief enemy, Maas. You could set up regions to experience significant events based on common objects-- a car bomb, for instance, or power being cut to a cybercafe which is stormed by SWAT raiders.

If there's some system for recording trust and betrayal as well as freeform faction standings, I think the player can wander the world at will picking up whatever they like. Should the assassin come after them anyway? Absolutely! Isn't that the basis for many good cyberpunk plotlines, the "what we found was way more important than we thought, and they'll stop at nothing to get it back..." trope?

I think one neat possibility about all of this is that your world could potentially be more dynamic and you could reuse your levels over and over again, concentrating on scripting behaviors and spawns more than specific sequences. Your action can take place in slightly altered sets ("Maas Offices, Chicago" or "Maas Offices, Beijing" just have different writing, security spawn locations and twists on furniture orientation). You could then generate, test and repeat, tweaking and tuning more abstract state variables like "level of assassin armor" or "chance for cybercafe ambush".

Quote:
It could also mean the player looses out on some quests if their actions can invalidate a future quest.

You probably would only care about this is there were a limited amount of quests. I started avoiding areas in Morrowind and Fallout because of this exact problem. I really recommend focusing on the idea of continuous renewal. Even if you generate highly specific quests (so that everything doesn't start feeling generic) you can still use more traditional barriers and make them very rigid provided the player has a surfeit of other quests to engage in.

Quote:Original post by Wavinator
What if you design gameplay intentionally around a whole "stumble upon" mechanic which relies on the fact that quest objects can be discovered at any point? Rather than lame story gates that you have to hide things behind, maybe think in terms of scripts which spawn "quest objects" for locations you can predefine and test, and for which there's a whole set of gameplay rules for finding more about. So you break into TransOrbital and find something about "Project Xerxes?" Well, who would know what it's worth? Can there be a system of info brokers, with layers of gear dependent security and ways of finding out who to trust? How dangerous would it be to have the information? When people start gunning for you in attack helicopters, that may become easy to figure out. (And this doesn't have to be wildly unbalanced, either-- if you have a character leveling system via stats, implants or gear, the juicier stuff is just harder and harder to get to but nevertheless always available).

Excellent! The trick is once you decide to make the game about knowing stuff and knowing who knows about your knowing and so on you have to be ruthless in eliminating stuff from the game that doesn't further exactly that. It's no good if six months into the project you're doing pathfinding for real-time tactical pets.

For instance a cyberpunk game might need like cyberninja battles, these could be done tightly as a map-less real time simulation where the player fits operatives into various operation-specific slots and gives them slot specific commands. That way missions would be contained and their outcomes nice and sharp and well defined, and an enormous amount of headaches gone just like that (no game map, no 3d rendering, no moving characters, no gunshots raytracing).

Then one would want hacking gameplay - and this would use the same slot-based system with different slots - in fact many missions would have hacking and fighting components all sharing the same screen and user interface.

Quote:Original post by Wavinator
You might even trigger off events partly by giving "quest objects" time limits.

As an aside, the idea of renewable tech trees, with high level technologies/items falling towards the root after a while (or after a game event). WoW does what amounts to this by adding new gear tiers with expansions, other games by providing deep tech trees.

Quote:Original post by Wavinator
What if you design gameplay intentionally around a whole "stumble upon" mechanic which relies on the fact that quest objects can be discovered at any point? Rather than lame story gates that you have to hide things behind, maybe think in terms of scripts which spawn "quest objects" for locations you can predefine and test, and for which there's a whole set of gameplay rules for finding more about. So you break into TransOrbital and find something about "Project Xerxes?" Well, who would know what it's worth? Can there be a system of info brokers, with layers of gear dependent

Some good ideas there

I hadn’t thought about making the stumble upon mechanic as central mechanic, but it makes sense and opens up all sorts of possibilities. Especially if there are restrictions like time, and inventory size. You’ve broken into TransOrbital and on your way to ceo’s office you notice a security door that wasn’t on blue prints do you stop and explore now, or mark it down to investigate later.

One thing I really want to avoid is the ever annoying quest locking of areas. There is nothing I hate more than a game where you can hack through every locked door except for one that is locked for a quest. Locking areas by difficulty is much more interesting and gives the player meta challenges. No one may have asked the player to break into the undocumented secure area, but the player can make a meta quest gathering intel and the equipment necessary to break in, and perhaps gain a quest from what they find inside.

Quote: If there's some system for recording trust and betrayal as well as freeform faction standings, I think the player can wander the world at will picking up whatever they like. Should the assassin come after them anyway? Absolutely! Isn't that the basis for many good cyberpunk plotlines, the "what we found was way more important than we thought, and they'll stop at nothing to get it back..." trope?

The one thing I’d probably have to include or would I? Is a hidden threat rating to cap the overall level of risk to the player at any one time, a player’s max threat rating would increase as they develop. This would prevent a situation like in the “The Warriors “ where everyone in a city is after the player.

Just a quick thought about this: Spawning pursuers and interested parties could give the game a feel of a dynamic world, but there's no reason why the forces in play all have to be against the player. What if you had freelancers or interested aligned parties that rose in strength proportional to the threat? So yes, you're being pursued by a deadly cyborg assassin, but maybe the forces against the forces that sent him give you gear or info so that you have a leg up. If they're not necessarily altruistic they could be doing it simply to keep a pawn in play, so to speak, in a larger chess game that you're slowly becoming aware of.