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[kurtataylor]

My partner and I at Monster Tree have been working on the game Privateers for about 2 years.  We are really getting into quest writing, and we have been debating on what is the best types of quests to include in our game.  So I thought, the community might like to weigh in. 

Privateers is an open world sandboxy roguelike fantasy sailing RPG.  You have a crew, and sail around interacting with quest nodes that give you several options, many of which lead to actiony fight scenes.  If you'd like to get a taste of the game play, you can play the latest build on our blog: http://amindiedev.blogspot.com/

[JWK5]

Neither. Bread crumbs.

Feed the player little scraps of story leading them along to important surprises and discovery. You want them to want to learn more and actually want to seek out the story, do not force it upon them or there is a good chance they will get restless and try to make use of whatever skipping option you provide (or just get annoyed with it if you don't).

I'd posted this in the writing forum about backstories but it works well for quest writing as well: treat the story like you are recounting to a good friend something that had happened...



Story: "So the other day I got a cheeseburger from McDonald's..."
Player: "Okay... and?"

Story: "Yeah, there was a tail sticking out of it."
Player: "Wait, what!? What do you mean a tail!? What kind of tail?"

Story: "I don't know... it was long and grey."
Player: "A rat tail?"

Story: "No, I don't think it was a rat tail."
Player: "Okay, so then what did you do?"

Story: "Well, obviously I opened up the cheeseburger right away."
Player: "Yeah? Well, what did you see!?"

Story: "Oh, it was weird, I'd never seen anything like it."
Player: "What do you mean? What did it look like?"

Story: "Okay, so... "




With your quests keep the player eager to know what is going to happen next, keep them asking "...and then what!?" You don't need long winded dialogue and overbearing cut scenes, you just need to drop them bits and pieces, little clues, little bread crumbs that feed them but still keep them hungry enough to want more.

[kurtataylor]

Thanks JWK5.  That's good advice.  Would you advise that we find other places to add extra pieces of story?  When you go to a town, people in the town are generated with a random text blurb that's pulled from a common pool.  We're talking about adding and removing from that pool of blurbs.  This way, when a player goes to a town, the townsfolk might have comments that are relevant to the quests you are on or add extra info about the quest you are on. 

[JWK5]

The main thing is don't strip your NPCs of personality and charm by giving them only a generic dialogue source. Maybe give them each personal lines and then when the player has finished that then they start spouting the generic pool stuff.

I like to break my stories up into chapter-like chunks, so that instead of making NPCs (etc.) focus on a single quest or the entire game they kind of have this sphere of influence they are a part of, if you've ever played the Dragon Quest games (particularly any of the DS/3DS ones or 7 and they kind of do this by keeping everyone wrapped around the current story arc with loose bits of reference to what the player has already accomplished and the overall adventure ahead.

For me, it kind of goes something like this (with each chapter):



Anyways, the dialogue pool isn't a bad idea you just need to give it a more personalized touch so that your NPCs don't just break down into faceless dialogue parrots.

[kurtataylor]

I like your story diagrham.  I might be able to pull some direction for an over arching story.  Thinking about it, maybe I can apply it to each of our zones and to the main story.  We are constructing several zones which have a stories inside of the zone.  When you play the game you get I think 15 zones placed randomly.  We are crafting 30 zones as well as a pool of general stories that can be encountered anywhere.  The different zones have their own difficulty level dependent on distance from player start location or more accurately the players nearness to the end zone increases difficulty.  This looks like a handy template for constructing the arcs for each of those zones.  Thank you.