NTJedi

Join Date 03/2006

+39

Quests, Riddles and Mysteries

[quote=Frogboy]

Quests

Unlike previous strategy games Stardock has developed, Elemental will have optional quests. How in-depth these get will really depend on how much time we have. But ideally, we would like players to be able to see their sovereign as a quasi-RPG unit that can go out and deal with a particular quest.

There would be a huge, and ever growing, quest pool for the game to make use of.

We are budgeting for an initial quest pool of around 500 quests. [/quote]

It's very important for the editor to include the ability for gamers to create their own quests. Map makers will definitely hunger for this feature.

Hopefully the game will include Quests, Riddles and Mysteries. There's a difference between each of them and will add more flavor into the game. Here's the differences between each of them:

A} QUESTS: This is a task usually given from an NPC to the player and once completed a reward will be given when all conditions have been satisfied. These might have time limits.

B} RIDDLES: This might be a passage locked with a magic puzzle or might be a Sphinx asking for the answer to a riddle or a magic ship where the figuring out the use of its controls so it can be used. Usually no time limit, but sometimes punishment for guessing incorrectly for the riddle.

C} MYSTERIES: These are when something very strange occurs such as a champion waking from his dreams floating above ground or one tile of land for a specific map section turns into wasteland every 5 turns or two items start glowing when brought together or one section of map covered constantly with storm clouds.

If these don't exist within the main game, hopefully they will exist within the game editor.

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I like A and C -- and B makes sense.

Quests are obvious; Riddles are an interesting concept but I'm not sure whether it would be fun; mysteries would help bring the world alive. Like random events, only with more potential than "Oh, double population growth! OOoh, more money! Oh, no money..."

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Yeah, I'm with Ron on this one. Riddles 'sound' good. but are they really? I mean this game isn't about puzzles (its about building armies and casting magic), so you're going to get 1 of 2 outcomes. A: the riddles are really easy and/or stupid making it pretty much just a waste of time or B: the riddles are difficult making people have to reference some sort of strategy guild or something if they don't want to risk loosing. Giving people a reason to have a strategy guide like that is a bad one. If the game was all about adventuring and solving puzzles, then sure! throw some riddle in. But it would flow against the turn-based strategy of the game. (can you imagine playing Civ 4 and suddently it says "answer this history question if you want a super-prophet" You'd have to stop playing, go find the answer to the question, and come back. It would be very annoying, because there is no way you'd let it just pass)

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Not to gang up on NTJeti or anything but.....riddles make me itch.

It would be cool to have the possibility of quests (or mysteries) triggered by events (the first city to reach a certain size, the first empire to have three forges, the first to contact a dragon or independant city, the first to research a certain spell or produce a certain unit ect.). Creative folks could really go a long way with tool like that.

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I think that, if quests are going to be implemented in a more scripted way, the criteria governing when a quest appears to the player should be quite detailed and specific. It will add much more colour to the game if specific quests arise in very specific circumstances, rather than having the feeling that the appearance of a quest is pot luck and that it could have appeared at any time.

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I also like A and C but am skeptical of B for the reasons already given above. But, I also don't know if Mysteries need to exist as a separate category from quests; rather, they should be a subset of quests. Really, the major difference between quests and mysteries as you framed them are that quests are usually given to you by an NPC while mysteries come about due to a random event - potentially brought about by the player. Really, that's not a very large difference, at least technically speaking.

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Riddles are fine and they can be especially usable by the map makers. General riddles shall be however only an addition with no too serious penalties for not solving them. Otherwise it is "save-load". Possible solutions of the riddles:

1) choose one possible answer from the list. I think such riddles shall be changed afther the load game

2) written text - such riddles shall remain the same after the load. The reason is you may have a good answer, however the "right answer" was a synonym. For riddle makers it may be useful to be able to add several correct answers for such cases.

A note: as for 2: the answers shall not be case sensitive and programmers should be aware of the special characters in non English languages.

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Riddles also have the problem that it might rely on some quirks and double meanings in the English language which would not be fair to people who do not speak it fluently enough to understand the riddle. And as stated above, you would need a Turing-level AI to correctly get what the user is inputting. Remember TAKE BOOK, PICK UP BOOK, LIFT BOOK, GRAB BOOK...?

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Riddles are a pain if the game is translated to other languages, it's really hard to translate them in a way that make sense (and if they aren't translated then they are a bigger pain for non-fluent english speakers).

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that is a very good point, Vicente, I had not even considered that. Play on words especially.

I find a lot of 'dirty' jokes tend to translate very well though. For example, I've found 'rubber' to have the same alternate meanings in german, french, and japanese.

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I agree with both of you however we have discussed the word "rubber" with my former English teacher. He told us about cultural missunderstanding he had with this world. This word tend to be more "something" in british English and it has other meaning in US English.

I think however there shall not be a problem with adding some riddles to the map. Actually there is no reason to treat riddles differently from the quests. Heroes IV had this thing very well solved. You had a script language to describe the quest. I suggest you to try a campaign Wind of Thorns. The scripts were so good, that the game become something more than the original one.

If you mean seriously adding "general" riddles to the game, I suggest you to create a database, where people can add new ones. I would add some too. It should be (for all) possible to see there the questions of already inserted riddles however normal user shall not see the answers. So people can avoid duplicates.

Problems with riddles: at the beginning the reward must not be too high, because it would destroy the balance of the game. Later if the reward is too small, players may simply ignore it.

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Quoting mrakomo,

reply 10

Problems with riddles: at the beginning the reward must not be too high, because it would destroy the balance of the game. Later if the reward is too small, players may simply ignore it.

The solution would be not to have a fixed prize for the reward and have the reward related with the current game turn. Here's just an example... as we don't know the average amount of turns for Elemental or the actual costs of things within Elemental.

Turn_2 = 100 gold reward; Day_20 = 1,000 gold reward; Turn_200 = 10,000 gold reward

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If fine with anything as long as we don't have to rely on plot coupons.

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Turn_2 = 100 gold reward; Day_20 = 1,000 gold reward; Turn_200 = 10,000 gold reward

Good, however the size of the map may be important too. Perhaps more important than turns is the number of cities (worldwide, not just player ones). The more cities in the world, the higher reward. As a hint may be also used the worldwide income (income of all nations), strenght of the armies and probably some others.

Spoils of victory:
1) experience for unit(s), that triggered the quest. No modification is necessary.

2) some special resource (like harmony crystals and such in GC 2) - no modification is necessary.

3) some common/rare unit(s) join your forces - the amount and the strength shall be modified by overall strength of the armies

4) gold - modified by number of cities or the worldwide income

-------------------------------

As for the quests, I have one idea (you may have already considered it, but it was not mentioned) - deliver something somewhere or kill something - use the reward modifier "the sooner the better".

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Philocthetes

Join Date 10/2003

+153

Quoting Tamren,

reply 12

If fine with anything as long as we don't have to rely on plot coupons.

What's a plot coupon?

Quoting mrakomo,

reply 13

... Good, however the size of the map may be important too. Perhaps more important than turns is the number of cities (worldwide, not just player ones). The more cities in the world, the higher reward. As a hint may be also used the worldwide income (income of all nations), strenght of the armies and probably some others. ...

IMO, one of the general weak points of GC2 is poor scaling of a variety of things, e.g. the infamous treasury>10k and >20k income penalties. I really hope that Elemental takes big steps twoards a model like this, where both random events/items and basic rules are linked to the current state of the game map and not simply hard-coded formulae or calls to a fixed dataset.

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