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Quest givers - an Idea
expresso
Member UncommonPosts: 2,218
This might of been done in other games but I have yet to experience it.
Why not give quest givers X amount of quests on a rotation & cool down.. let me explain.
You happen across a travler who has set up camp in the woods, all around him are deadly wolves, yummie burries on the bushes, dead wood on the ground and some bandits hiding waiting to pounce the weary traveler.
The NPC has 4 quests thus.
Kill x amount of wolves as he cannot sleep safley with them about
Collect X amount of berrys so he can cook up a tastey pie
He needs a fire but wont venture from his camp to collect fire wood
He knows he's being watched by bandits waiting to steal his stuff when he sleeps
When you approch him he gives you just one of those quests and you go and complete it and he says thanks gives you gives you some epic loot, he then wont give you another quest for another 30mins, he hints at you to come by later though.
But heres the thing, he will only give out 4 quests at a time, if it's after your cooldown and your the 5th person to speak to him he wont give you a quest as there are 4 others on each of the other quests already. You'll need to drop by in 30mins and hope to nab a quest from him. He'll say somthing like "Hi again I might have a task for you later should you drop by, some other adventures are helping me at the moment".
Once you have completed all 4 quests then your done with this NPC.
The great thing is you might see others doing the other quests but no one will be on the same quest as you so it's kind of exclusive for a time... if you dont complete it within 30mins then you lose the quest to keep balance.
Now this would only really work for out of the way quest givers, those in major hubs and towns etc could not work with this system as there would be too many players.. but it's a nice idea for those odd quest givers we all come across and will encourage adventure I guess.
Comments
2 things come to mind; Face of Mankind, and a concept I posted a while back in the dev corner. Not gonna dredge it up though.
Face of Mankind has a mission system where the faction leaders can set a number of goals based on their designation as being civic or war oriented, and each player gets a cycling set of 5 goals based on the ratios set between these duties. You can see things like "mine X something", "patrol this planet X minutes", "scout that place" or "hack security barriers". once you do three of the 5 it resets and you earn XP and money equal to the rewards given by the goals (minus taxes and other stuff).
As for my system, it was more of a mix between cycling goals on questgivers, and cycling open-world event-type quests. An NPC in a city will have a list of jobs you can do that recycle every 8 hours, and these jobs relate to the NPCs specific designation in the lore's society. Brickmakers will have you collect clay, make bricks, or even clear mobs from the resource areas if you are combat oriented.
The event-type stuff is very much like a PQ from WAR, only it never ends. You would pick up a mission from an NPC in a hunting lodge, who then has you meet with an NPC doing a long patrol around the local woods. You would follow that NPC troupe, along with whatever other players are in tow, and do your tasks (lay traps, get X pelts, w/e) as mini-events spring along many parts of the track based on random chance. The spots would never change, but the event and the likelyhood of occurance is all based on a ratio of things. You could end up fighting off a bear with everyone else, or a horde of human NPCs trying to attack another player in tow along with you. Lots of stuff like that, which is always going and never ending - on top of having a social aspect tied in.
I do like your system though, as it would get players to wander NPC to NPC, and that would have them make a choice in which ones to spend their time on. Hopefully the most efficient route to rewards isn't just the sole reason, but it will end up like that. With mine, I had the intention to allow players to spend all day working for a specific NPC (or clan of NPCs), but that would probably end up shooting itself in the foot from players overdoing it. Locking the player out just long enough to make him seek a break through other content types is a great idea.
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The problem I see with it, especially if the game is busy, is people are going to end up camping the quest-givers because there's always going to be a line waiting for one of the quests (or the specific quest you need) to open up. This is especially true if the quests aren't quick 5-minute things. What happens if someone gets a quest but doesn't complete it? Or someone goes around and collects a dozen quests from all the quest-givers they can find? People won't have access to any of those quests for hours on end, perhaps days. What then?
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Ya, I didn't even take note of that.
Well I personally take a stance against quest-stacking, as it just exemplifies how pointless the tasks are. Probably best to simply remove the usage caps if you can stack them, but if you run one at a time you can divide them up based on the completion of your predecessor's current quest and timers. You can set it up so it cycles players around so that they won't clash into each other unless the goal to kill, and not collect. Even this can be stressed to an extent, but not as much as if the player had more choice over the matter.
Writer / Musician / Game Designer
Now Playing: Skyrim, Wurm Online, Tropico 4
Waiting On: GW2, TSW, Archeage, The Rapture
With limited quest you will soon have people wandering about with no quest to be had.
I am more for a global quest everybody can take part of. Like a general quest: Rebuilding a town/city after a disaster. Where you collect things, defend caravans, build items buildings, scout/patrol around the town, guard supply etc etc...ongoing till all is fixed and for set time busy with the quest you get gold or rewards.
Or a random battle quest. Form for battle/collect supplies/ make weapons and armor/ travel to the battleground/ defend supply train/scout enemy positions/ the battle.
A quest that is ongoing and apply to the whole server instead of just one person.
That's a very good description of how I believe an mmo should be. Its pretty obvious that making every individual player the hero of a story doesnt really fit properly into an online rpg. Large dynamic events that everyone can take part in to have their effect on the gameworld is the way to go. Fortunately some games are finally beginning to implement this. I'm very interested to see how these games fair.
I'd like something like this but would like to add one thing.
There should be lots, hundreds, of these generated quest giver NPCs and many of them could even be roaming which you may have to ask around player or NPC about their wereabouts.
I think with a time limit on the quests it would make the system work pretty well and not let players stack up a bunch of quests.
This is starting to remind me of Mount & Blade, which I love =D
WOW has already tried that. There were a series of quests on the sunwell isle where the isle opens up more and more depending on the total activity of the players there.
I like the idea. Maybe the in-town/newbie quest givers quests would not be exclusive but low traffic/highlevel ones would be.
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