So, do any of you want Fallout 4 to have a "Radiant" quest system like Skyrim had? Where some quests are "randomly" generated and are repeatable?

Personally, i kind of like the Radiant Quest system. It reminds me a bit of the quest system in TES II: Daggerfall.

No, I really don't. You want to know why? They're the equivalent of the mountain of homework your teacher gives you over a holiday to keep you busy. That's all radiant quests are is empty busy work. That's why I never did them in Skyrim. I prefer actual individually structured quests and not quest from some old man who loses his glasses all over every corner of the earth every day.

In an ideal situation where Bethesda could just write 300 awesome quests by hand, all unique and branched and memorable, of course I would prefer no automatic quests. But in the Bethesdian reality given by my experience with Morrowind/Oblivion/FO3/Skyrim, I think having radiant quests in addition to regular ones is cool. I just think they were overused in Skyrim, I want more variation even within the radiant system.

I have very little interest in doing radiant quest, so no, I'd rather not. Even then, when Bethesda starts relying too heavily on radiant quest, we end up with the Companions from Skyrim. Which is one of the worst guilds in all of the TES series, right next to the rest of the guilds in Skyrim.

I'd much prefer more focus be put on well designed quest with actual depth to them, and even that is a tall order for Bethesda at times.

I think the idea behind Radiant quests is great. But as implemented in Skyrim, I think they tended to be far too generic. If the devs could manage to personalize the Radiant quests, make them less monotonous (almost always being sent to a dungeon in Skyrim, for instance), I think Radiant quests could be a great addition to the game.

I wouldn't mind a few "odd jobs" Radiant quests like Fix X, Guard X or scoop Brahmin poo in order to make a few extra caps but that's about it...

I think they are a great since you can always find something to do.

If you're going to explore this raider base anyway, why not get a radiant quest to get revenge for this guy, or get back his whatever? It at least gives a sense of Raiders actually raiding and raising hell.

If you can walk your caravans from one outpost to another to make sure they don't get attacked, that would be a great example of a radiant quest.

If you don't, sure they get there ok if you've got hired help, but walking yourself will see you engaging those threats and getting loot for your time spent.

I chose yes on the poll. However, I think there has to be a balance. Maybe the answer would be to limit how many radiant quests a player can have at one time? It felt like in Skyrim that the lists of quests were sometimes overwhelming and hard to dig through. I like the idea of quests that you go on based on in game decisions or general play style. I think players would not skip over as many quests if they had maybe 5-10 to choose from at a time?

Maybe if there are fetch quests in an area you visited that you can't do right away there will be a little indicator on your pip boy to visit that town again? But that might mess with the whole idea of discovery in games like Fallout and Elder Scrolls.

Even just organizing quests into different types in some sort of inventory system could solve the problem of having to read through a huge list of dynamic quests.

As poorly implemented as they could end up, I always back Bethesda for trying to push their systems further. Same with the silly random dialogue in Oblivion, I think having 'radiant' systems adds the flavor of impredictibility and fun that sometimes is missing in more man-controlled narrative. If the radiant system was THE system then it would feel artificial, but having both scripted and random systems gives me the best experience. I hope they had time to improve the radiant a.i. too for more context based actions for npcs. So yes, I sure hope there is some degree of radiant quests in the mix.

As long as the radiant quests aren't repetitively, generically & tediously dull, then I'm all in!

In Daggerfall you could pick up as many quests as you wanted, but it was a bad idea picking up too many quests at once. Mainly because quests actually had time limits on them, and if you didn't complete them in time, you automatically failed the quest, and failing a quest actually lost you reputation with that faction (you could even be demoted because of this).

That might work for some quests in Fallout 4. Like if you get a quest from the Institute to track down a runaway synth, then you only have X amount of time to start following him before the trail runs cold, or before the Railroad get him out of Massachusetts, and the quest fails.

Yes as long as hand written quests were not sacrificed for it.

I mean, radiant quests are jobs and I had to mod previous games to get them. It's nice having a steady income

Since there wasn't a middle ground option I voted no, but I'm not of the opinion that there *shouldn't* be any. I don't like them. They seem like busy work with no purpose other than "so you have a quest to do" and I didn't do them in Skyrim and I wouldn't do them in Fallout 4 unless they were vastly improved so they didn't feel that way, which I'm not sure is possible. That said, I wouldn't mind if they were in the game for the people who do like those sort of busy work quests, I'm just not gonna do them.

long as it's not abused, it's nice to have so i vote yes.

I believe that almost everyone will agree with me when I say that Skyrim's radiant quests were unsatisfying at best, and they need to be reworked a bit. And, that said, handcrafted quests are necessary for literally 98% of game content.

However, I do believe that there's still a place for radiant quests, but they require a radical redesign, and change of Bethesda's approach towards them. I will elaborate.

In Skyrim, the radiant quests basically amounted to 'Follow Marker to Location. Kill/Take/Steal randomized Person/Thing. Return for Minor Reward.' It's a very simplistic formula, and offers an experience which the word 'generic' and 'uninspired' only begins to describe. Now I can't blame Bethesda, this being their first real foray into radiant questing it gave them an easy way to say 'our game has unlimited quests' and add some meat (albeit stringy and tasteless meat) to a game that was already a little shallow when it came to faction interactions and quests.

In Fallout 4 we need a system where the game features only a small amount of radiant quests - between three and five at launch, say. But each radiant quest would be fairly elaborate, and feature a large amount of handcrafted elements and thought put into them such that they are more of an 'event', and less of a 'chore'. The old formula would be done away with, and instead each radiant quest is an interesting situation, which randomly branches into different directions.

For example. Let's say there's a radiant quest that involves escorting a caravan of traders or settlers.

1. Caravan departs from random place to random destination. It moves quickly so the player isn't loitering around thinking 'God, hurry the frack up...' Possibly it is motorized, for example a flatbed truck where the player rides in the back.

2. Event

2a. Caravan is attacked by men on motorcycles, and the player must shoot them from back of moving vehicle while caravan tries to escape.

2b. Caravan runs into a road block set up by raiders. The player can either bribe the raiders to let them through, paying a toll. He can fight his way through. Or he take other decisions

2c. Caravan breaks down and must be defended in a short battle.

2d. Caravan guards have been bribed to switch sides and help raiders in combination with one of the above.

3. Caravan arrives safely. Player gets rewarded randomly, but often with more than just a small amount of money - chance for a rare weapon, for example.

Another example. A quest involving bounty hunting.

1. Obtain quest to hunt a randomly generated character with a randomly generated name and small backstory. One of, say, 20 each...Todd told us they'd recorded 1,000+ common names to be used for the baby, why not record 20-30 names for randomly generated bad guys?

2. Hunt for bad guy.

2a. Find his hideout, and get ambushed.

2b. Go a town and find a family member/associate of his, trying to persuade them to give him up. May lead to finding him asleep, or drunk in a tavern and vulnerable, letting you bring him in alive for extra reward.

2c. Find his hideout, have an opportunity to talk him into surrendering peacefully.

2d. Have the bad guy offer you a reward for helping him fake his death. Or find out that he's not the bad guy afterall, opening up a quest to help him clear his name.

2e. You find the badguy in a public place, where he takes a hostage which puts karma and possibly rewards at stake if you can't save the hostage now.

2f. Bad guy finds you and tries to take you while you're sleeping, only possible if you've been on a bounty quest for awhile and have been ignoring it.

3. Reward.

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So the key is to make radiant quests that have enough branches and possibilities that you may need to do it five or six times before you even realize it's being randomly generated. This necessitates a large amount of dialogue, and possibly variations of that dialogue recorded to give even the same, or similar situations, a different feel to it. It's late so I won't type much more and most people probably won't read what I've already typed.

If you want to make radiant quests a worthy addition to the game, you must put a lot of effort into them, rather than kind of using them as a tacked on way to bump up the quest amount. So, if Bethesda decided to focus on only three to five radiant quest-lines, and flesh them all out with maybe six or so different paths and outcomes each, and make them more elaborate, I think they would be more engaging and more worth bothering with.

No. I do NOT want any radiant quests. In Skyrim, literally every single quest was the same thing.

"Go kill this one thing.... Okay, good. here's some money."

Nothing more to it than that. It's uncreative and frankly a bit insulting.

My ideal game would be a huge procedurally generated world full of hand placed land marks/settlements and tweaked areas that have implemented stories scattered around the world by design team and also the programmers, (as controlled procedural generation methods).

This huge world should have specific safe places/settlements, and also specific impossibly hard places/dungeons, and all the grades in between, so that the players could go anywhere they liked, and find the right amount of challenge that they liked.

The players would encounter a lot of vastly different random encounters around the world, which could lead to a lot of vastly different tasks and radiant quests, depending on the random encounter and the player actions, then again they could leat to a lot of scripted and designed quest lines, which would have a lot of random parameters, for the replayability and also lots of conditional outcomes, depending on the setting, those random parameters, and also player actions.

There would be story arc guide lines of small or huge scales, that should try to manouver the story arcs and the outcomes toward specific goals, but those guide lines would be ready to kick in between the events, whenever the conditions are right and would try to mend the story arcs, or switch to other guide lines, or even revert to free form radiant events whenever the conditions get wrong, like a key character getting killed and so on...

These types of games are hard to make, and almost impossible to develop with voice acted dialogs, so I'm not expecting such a game for a long time, but for the current games, the more random encounters, and the more intelligent radiant quest types, the better.

Yes, because as a modder, I truly know just how much of a boon the Radiant Story system is to the game design.

Conditionalized aliases. Story mode event manager. These two core aspects of the "Radiant Story" system don't just exist to make randomized side quests, they exist to make it so much easier and functionally expanding for setting up *any* quest, be it formal ones that show up in your quest list, or using them as background runtime systems that manage a variety of things that the average player isn't even aware is being handled.

Voting "no" is a vote for stepping backwards.

Yes, more content the better for me.

You know as long as hand written quests are not at risk of being removed then it should be ok. I just hate fetch me 10 Mammoth Tusks types of fetch quests.

+1 I appreciate the explanation, and I do care about the daring system hidden under the hood even though I'm not a modder.

Radiant quests don't take the place of other quests.

It's just a nice little job you're probably going to do anyway, so why not get paid for it.

Example: you're wandering around diamond city, and an npc or bartender mentions there's some raiders with an outpost at this location and they stole some random item/raided my caravan.

Bam, the PC now has been pointed to a location on a map they can explore, and they'll get a handful of caps for doing something they were going to do anyway.

I voted yes.

I'd like *some* radiant quests, where it is appropriate, and when used to flesh out the game here and there.

For example, in Skyrim, the librarian gave radiant quests to go find some lost books. That made sense to me. Comparatively.

He's got some leads on an old book rumoured to be lost in a dungeon. Go follow the leads. That was ok.

The "kill X" quests were not. I'm not even going to discuss the Thieves or Assassins RQ.

Ever since TES Oblivion I was intrigued by the radiant ai and now radiant story I think they're doing a great job trying to add generated content that can make one playthrough richer than the amount of classic quests they can write. I still prefer a well written, lengthy abd branched classic quest any day but having additional tasks can only do better for a player like me who spends a lifetime in every BGS game.

Yes, the system is good, just make sure you put enough meat on those quests (variation is key, and so is effort-vs-reward ratio).