[crossfire] quest/storyline ideas

[Mark Wedel]

  Recording for posterity a discussion in IRC about quests.  I've probably 
forgotten a few things, but hopefully I got most of.

  One of the issues right now is that for most maps, there is no storyline.  You 
have a bunch of maps which you go and kill things and serve no other purpose.

  In addition, there tends not be any storyline the moves the player through the 
game.  The player may pick up snippets of information from different NPCs, but 
there isn't any good method to track that.

  One of the thoughts here is to try to take these various unconnected pieces 
and make larger storylines.  The idea being that it will help move the player 
throughout the game.  But also hopefully new players get interested in the story 
and keep on playing.  For the most part, the game right now is going out killing 
a few things and getting treasure - very easy to stop playing.  In a sense, it 
is like reading a book - if you've read the first 5 pages, easier to stop 
reading it than halfway through.

  Rather than have a huge storyline that takes the character from level 1 to 
100, instead this would be broken in smaller pieces.  The one in scorn may take 
the player up to level 15 or so before they finish it up.  There may be various 
hooks that then moves the player to navar city and start up the storyline there.

  A character could have any number of active quests at one time.  Some quests 
may have dependencies on other quests being completed.  There would be many side 
quests which are outside the larger storylines (and in fact, I would expect that 
side quests would outnumber the main storylines).  Some quests could be done out 
  of order.  Some quests may get completed even without the character having the 
quest (but if returning an item to the giver of that quest is needed for reward, 
the player may not know to do so).

To plot this out, the main things needed would be:
- quest giver/rewarder of the quest.
- level range of the character to take on the quest.
- reward for the quest.
- what background info character needs for quest - hopefully for this last case, 
the quest steps leading up here will give them the information they need.

  The first step in all this is writing out an outline of the quests.  In 
practical terms, all of the above could probably be done with existing code - it 
is just map, script, and archetype updates.

  The next piece of this is recording this information.

  I advocate that quest information should be automatically recorded for the 
player, and some way for the player to get this information.  There are 
different ways this could be done - doing a 'quests' type command, having a 
quest log item in the inventory that gets automatically updated, or perhaps even 
a GUI mechanism in the client.  I'd say that at first pass, one of the first 2 
would be easier.

  In fact, I think adding a new 'quests' command would be best.  First, since 
quest tracking information would presumably be stored as objects in the players 
inventory, a description/status of the quest could be stored in that same 
object.  So quests just has to find those and print them out.  Pretty simple - 
probably simpler than having a book automatically updated (unless it is a new 
type of item that basically calls that same code).  It also means that down the 
road, if a GUI is added on the client, it uses a similar logic - server finds 
those items and sends them to client as quest information.  If it was stored in 
a book, it means that the client is doing some special logic to get that data.

  A different point of view is that the player should just record quest 
information.  There may be new ways to do this - 'notes' type command being one. 
  This is certainly more realistic, and player may record information not part 
of a quest.  My concerns here would be that player may record so much 
information (not knowing what is important and what isn't) that any such records 
are not very useful.  Or the flip side is they don't record anything and thus 
don't realize that they have a bunch of quests they could be doing.

  That last one is probably my bigger concern, as now new players are less 
likely to get involved into the story.

  A question that remains is how to find all the quests in the first place. 
Having more NPC's redirect players to quest givers may be a method to do.  but 
that may still require that players just talk to the NPC's more.