48 minutes ago, RPTD said:That's interesting. Why you call it "academic"? I'm seen different games where I'm convinced they do it this way. I'm also venturing down the same road where the story comes first and the locations required for it to play out are put in place as needed.
True, some real games, such as Bethesda's, create a story first and then modify the world to support it. There's absolutely nothing wrong with that. Bethesda's goal is to drive players to unexplored areas. Placing a quest there that has context to their character is a great solution. But the academic projects I examined, like Jonathon Doran and Ian Parberry's, and Young-Soel Lee's, model it in a little more depth. Then again they didn't need to fit it into a AAA game running at 60+ fps.
I like the idea of consequences in an open world. So in my implementation quests rise organically out of the current world state. (Starbound is another good example of this approach.) I think this shifts the focus more toward player-generated stories versus imposing a story on the player. If the player introduces rabbits to a new land, he might come back later and receive a quest to exterminate some rabbits that have overpopulated the land and are crowding out native fauna. Compare this to a generator that first creates a quest to exterminate rabbits, and then spawns a bunch of rabbits. In this case, there isn't as much player-driven cause-and-effect. But I will admit that the drawback is that it takes more work to annotate world objects with interesting things that can be done to them, and to annotate NPCs with a motivation system that lets them recognize what objects they want the player to manipulate and why. Without sufficient annotation, quests can feel drier than your story-first approach.
