» Wed Aug 26, 2009 9:42 am
It's difficult for me to suggest specific ideas for quests. Aside from needing to come up with ideas for quests, to suggest quests that could actually fit into the game might require knowing a bit about where the game is set and the background that fits in with it.
There are some things that I'd like to see without going into specifics, though.
First of all, I want to see an element of choice and concequence involved in quests. This is something that the Elder Scrolls often lacks, while you can choose whether to do a quest or not, once you accept it, there is often only one way to do it, and when you do recieve options, these usually have any significant concequences. For example, in Oblivion, the Mages Guild was in conflict with a group of necromancers, but you could only join the Mages Guild, not the necromancers. It would have been nice if you could have also chosen to join the necromancers instead (this could also lead to some interesting rewards, which is something I'm going to get at in a bit.) of course, if you chose to do this, instead of necromancers attacking you on sight, they should be able to talk to you, give you quests, and offer you services, of course, your quests would involve you going up against the Mages Guild, and while they might not attack you on sight, they should refuse to let you join, maybe even refuse to offer you services. That's just on a large scale, though. On a smaller scale, there are also examples. For example, if you're given a quest to kill a specific person, when you find that person, if you talk to him, he could offer you an alternaive, to help him escape, or maybe to even kill the person who asked you to do it. This way, you might not recieve the original quest giver's reward, but the original target could have some other reward to offer you if you help him, maybe he tells you where to find a secret stash of some valuable items or something. The point is that there shouldn't only be one way to solve quests.
Another thing that a good quest should have, of course, is an interesting premise, because there are some activities that just aren't very fun no matter how many ways there are to do them. Also, quests should be varied, sure, killing enemies is fun and all that, but I don't need every quest to end in killing something, whether that was the original goal the player is given or not. Variety helps to keep the game from becoming stale. Choices and concequences can also tie into this, for example, if the player is given a quest to root out a smuggling operation, once you find the people behind it, you could be presented with the option to help them with their operation for a cut of the profits (Or maybe even an option to tride in smuggled goods, which would allow them to sell you some items hard to find elsewhere, such as skooma or other illegal things, they could also buy contraband as well.)
A good quest also needs good writing, obviously, because a good premise can still be handled poorly. And why would I want to choose to side with one character or another if both are people I don't have a reason to care about? Aside from having an interesting story and well written dialog, the programming for a quest should also be done well, you shouldn't be able to mess up the entire quest if you simply do two steps out of order.
Another thing is that quests shouldn't hold your hand. I don't actually mind if the game includes a quest compass, but it shouldn't reveal everything to you. If NPCs give the player clear directions to their quest target and it would be easy to figure out where it is (especially if the location has been marked right on your map.) then I don't mind a compass pointing me to it. But ig I'm told to find a hidden cave in some general area, then there should be no compass marker, Most importantly, the compass shouldn't tell you something you shouldn't be able to know, for example, if I'm told that an item that I need is somewhere in a dungeon, the compass shouldn't point to its exact location, if I'm not told exactly where to find it, I should have to look myself. Aside from the compass, I don't need journal entries telling me exactly what I need to do. If I'm sent to find a character who was carrying an important item, for example, and I find that person dead, I don't need the game to tell me to search the corpse, I'd have figured that out on my own.
One more important aspect of a quest is reward, because why should I want to do a quest if I won't get anything for it or what I get for it won't be worth the trouble? The reward of a quest of course should fit the difficulty of what you have to do for it. For example, helping two lovers work out their differences is probably not going to fetch you an ancient artifact of great power, on the other hand. I'm not going to want to go all the way to the other side of the province, cross the Forbidden Swamp of Death, find the hidden Cave of Ultimate Despair (which has five levels, all filled with high level enemies and traps that will instantly kill you if you make one small mistake.) and kill a powerful foe who can take off half of your health with one strike only to get 100 gold as a reward. If I'm given a difficult, epic quest, I expect to be given a great reward in return, if I do a simple quest, my reward should also be simple. Rewards don't always have to be items or gold either, someone could also teach you a spell as a reward, or you could be given a house instead, or maybe your reward could be access to some rare (and good.) service, maybe someone who is the master trainer of some skill could let you train as a reward. The reward should also fit the quest giver, a common peasant is probably not going to give you 10000 gold and a pile of gems as a reward, but he might offer you some family heirloom, someone in the Mages Guild might teach you a powerful spell. A merchant might offer you a discount on his services or access to rare items that he reserves for important customers, a wealthy collector might offer you a large sum of gold or one of the items he has collected. Also, I'd prefer if the rewards for quests are something unique, or at least rare. That was something Bethesda did right in quests in Oblivion, the rewards recieved for side quests are often unique enchanted items. In Morrowind, many quests gave you fairly common items as rewards, even though they may be enchanted, they were often not very good. It hardly seems worthwhile to do a quest for an enchanted amulet if I could easily find an identicle one exploring a tomb, if I get enchanted items from quests in Morrowind, I sometimes just sell them. Yet in Oblivion since they are often unique, even if I don't want to use them I want to keep them to display in my house. In Morrowind, I often didn't want to do that. In short, quests need to provide a suitable incentive for completing them, otherwise, they just feel pointless.
Though, writing that, I did think of a couple quests that may be interesting.
One quest idea could be investigating some sort of crime, such as a murder or theft of a valuable item. There would be two or more suspects, and one of them is guilty, the player's job is to find out which. The quest giver, probably a guard or something working on the investigation and who is seeking outside help. Could offer you what information has been gathered about the crime so far, but after that, you have to perform your own investigation. You would have to search for clues until you have enough evidence to come to a verdict (You could accuse any of the suspects, but without enough evidence, your accusation wouldn't hold up.) There would be no compass pointing you to the next clue or anything like that, you could ask around to see if anyone knows anything, or search on your own. The key here is that the game never explicitly tells you who the real criminal is, you have to draw that conclusion yourself based on the evidence, and once you have enough, you need to present the evidence to the quest giver and say who you believe is the real killer. The game would check if you have enough evidence to support your accusation or not, however, you don't necessarily need to have found all the possible clues to solve the case, and the game won't tell you if you've found them all or not, so if you miss something, you could end up accusing the wrong person, leading to an innocent person being arrested, and the criminal going free, and if you don't accuse the right person, the real criminal might eventually commit another crime, or leave the province.
Another one I thought of would be a quest where your told by a noble to kill someone, you don't know why you need to kill that person, or if the noble tells you, it might not necessarily be the truth, when you find your target, he doesn't attack you, and you can talk to him, he sounds rather worried, and asks you if the noble who gave you the quest sent you. When you talk about that person, or say that you were sent by him depending on whether Bethesda keeps the silly dialog system they have now or gives the player actual conversation options or not, he tells you about how you shouldn't trust that person so easily and you can either listen to what he has to say, or just choose to attack him (the latter option puts you in combat with him.) at first, he might not trust you enough to tell you, but with a bit of persuasion, he reveals that he uncovered evidence that incriminates the noble, maybe a message which shows he has connections to a criminal organization or something like that, those details could be worked out when writing the quest, it's because of what he has discovered about the quest giver that he wants you to kill him to silence the truth. He gives you this evidence, and asks you to expost it. What you do then is your choice, do you betray the man's trust in you and finish your original task even though you now know that the noble's intentions are less than pure? Or do you spare the target's life? Whatever your choice, what you do with the evidence is your decision to make. You could take it to a guard and let the authories handle the rest, or you could directly confront the noble with it, then you could either threaten to reveal the information if he does not give you extra payment, or you could take justice into your own hands and kill him. Or maybe you would rather just complete the quest and pretend you don't know anything about the noble's illegal dealings, or maybe some other people who might be interested in information that could be used against this noble will be willing to pay you a lot for it. Each decision you make would lead to a different outcome, and may have a lasting effect on the game.
