So I love open-ended RPG's. My only problem with them is that at some point you've done all the quests and there isn't much left to do but wander around and kill stuff.

I had an idea to remedy that while playing Borderlands. In the game you get a majority of your side-quests from a bulletin board. They're all simply worded messages and the quests are simple too, usually requiring you to just go to a location A and collect or kill X number of B's. It's not much but it gives you something to do.

And of course Borderlands has that random weapon generator I discussed in a thread awhile back. I put 2 and 2 together and thought of a (seemingly) easy system to generate maybe thousands of simple little sidequests and distractions.

So the idea goes that you have a this bulletin board, right? The game picks a random quest type, like a fetch quest. The game then picks out a Madlibs style posting that would say something like "Hey I need [X number] of ______ for _______. Ingredients are located in and around _______. I'll pay you ________. Get to it." There could be different variations on that message, all worded differently so it doesn't get too stale. And thus you'd go out and get X number of whatever the game wants you to get and you'd get a little cash reward (or maybe something else) and a tiny bit of XP. Of course that's probably the simplest quest the game could generate.

More complicated ones might make you located a special, named item in some dungeon somewhere across the map (or maybe in a chest in someones house). Others might ask you to kill a randomly generated NPC who might be, again, hiding out in some dungeon across the map. Alternatively, if the game wanted to make things difficult for you, it would place the NPC in the middle of a town and you have to assassinate them Hitman style.

There are other variables the game could throw in to make things more difficult like throw in a time limit or something like that. The quests don't have very much depth and only give you a tiny bit of XP, but it gives you something to do, which is the whole point here.

In order for this to not be abused, the game would only generate a handful a week and after a certain amount of time they'd disappear.

Thoughts? Criticisms? Suggestions?

There is speculation that this may be what Radiant Story does.

It wouldn't be the first random quest generator in TES. Daggerfall had it.

That's only part of radiant story, which I would imagine is moreso a complex, complete version of what we where initially promised for radiant AI (http://twitter.com/DCDeacon/status/23821788408446977). This is quite likely to be the case, considering they seem to be running in the direction of the oblivion improvements (more flexible 'get better at the things you actually do' system, combat overhaul, etc) and this seems to be a natural thing to work the new game engine around (it's in-house, remember).

Damn, and I thought I was onto something :laugh: