Quests: How to and how not to do it

            Quest is defined as “to search for something.” In the gaming world, quests are tasks that may vary from a short walk to another NPC or killing a huge boss monster. In a way, they do involve searching for the objective associated with the task, so it stays true to the original definition of quest. Thing is, quests are huge in RPGs and are becoming more common in other genres of games. They are a list of instructions for the player to read in order to understand what must be done at their current state. There is a right way and a wrong way to use quests. 

            The right way to do quests are to make them revolve around something important. Give players a quest to gather an artifact of demonstrable power and they will go after it. Is the task to fight a creature terrorizing a nearby town? Perfect! They will go kill it. How about a job that involves finding a location? Just point players in the right direction and they can take it from there. Need an NPC escorted? Sure. Just don’t make it tedious. Trouble with these quests is you don’t just hand it to a player and expect them to complete it. If they want to progress, they don’t have much of a choice. If you want them to enjoy it, have it tie in to the main story or have its own story and make it feel essential to the game. Make it seem as if this task is not finished, the story cannot go on.

            Quests don’t have a ton of variety to them. It’s either kill something, collect something else, or locate an object or person. Therefore, developers have to implement their own form of variety. The earliest quests in World of Warcraft were highly repetitive with tons of slayer quests, item gathering, and talking to people. In later expansion, they made slayer quests fun by adding in quests that involve various methods of disposal. One such example has you mounted on an airship gun and firing upon Alliance soldiers. You finish the quest after killing 80 targets, but you secretly want more. Firing that machine gun and downing many mobs at once is so satisfying. Why? Because players are used to the traditional method of taking down one enemy at a time or only a few at once. This quest offered an unusual means of completing a slayer quest and it worked wonderfully.

            Unfortunately, quests are easy to abuse and can make a game highly repetitive or tedious. An example of this is in Assassin’s Creed. There are side objectives that involve saving citizens from abusive guards. The first few times it feels heroic to save a defenseless villager from the Templars. After the fifth time, it starts to feel like a chore with a negligible award that isn’t worth the effort. Plus the player can come back later and that person will still be there. These side objectives are everywhere in the game and they are the exact same objective: fight the guard to free the citizen. There is no special versions of this quest that have you saving multiple victims at once or using a unique weapon to dispatch the guards.

            The worst kind of quest in existence? The escort quest. So far, I have never seen an escort quest done in a good way. An escort quest has the player standing next to an NPC as they walk from Point A to Point B. They might get attacked along the way and it is up to the player to protect them. Should the NPC die, the quest fails and must be tried again. First off, these NPCs never run as fast as the player, so the player has to move slowly. Second, these NPCs cannot defend themselves. They are just a liability that annoys the player. Third, why is the distance between Point A and Point B the length of a football field, but feels like you have to trek the entire Sahara Desert to actually get there!? Avoid implementing the escort quest. As it stands now, there is no way to make it work.

            There are some awesome quests I’ve run into. They typically have multiple steps and might be called “meta-quests.” One of my favorites is in Skyrim. It starts off with you talking to this NPC who says he lost his dog. You agree to search for him and within a minute of walking along the road you run into what you assume to be the lost dog. Its name is Barbas and it talks! This is highly unusual, but fits in the universe. The dog asks you to follow it to its real master, Clavicus Vile. After several minutes of running (Barbas runs slightly faster than the player), you are standing before the shrine of Vile. His voice speaks and he asks you to retrieve an axe. You get the axe and kill the previous owner, return the weapon to Vile and he says you can keep the axe if you kill Barbas or hand it over and let Barbas live. I chose to hand it over and Barbas lived to be reunited with his master.

            That quest took over 30 minutes to finish as the details of the quest involved lots of walking and fighting. It was kind of an escort quest, but more of a follow quest as Barbas was technically escorting the player and could easily fend for himself. The quest itself is important because the dog is looking for its master and the primary objective is to reunite it with the owner. The player gets attached to the dog and is therefore more obligated to follow it all the way to the shrine of Vile. The task also offered more than one possible outcome. You could win that axe for killing the dog or a mask as an alternate reward for sparing the dog. That is how a quest is meant to be done.