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http://www.irontowerstudio.com/forum/index.php/topic,7181.msg145450/
Reflections on the main quest design
There are many different ways to construct a main quest in an RPG and every studio uses a different set of building blocks reflecting their own preferences and goals. We’re all about Choices & Consequences, which means 3 key types of choices:
- Multiple quest solutions (you should be able to go through the game in a different manner if you decide to replay it with a different character)
- Narrative choices (craft your own story by making different choices and reaping different consequences)
- Moral choices (aka ‘you should not be forced to play a hero obsessed with helping people’)
Needless to say, there is a lot of work involved in supporting these choices and giving them depth. Narrative choices require multiple factions, a branching main quest, and multiple endings; moral choices – evil/opportunistic bastard path, etc.
Our main quest’s building blocks aren’t that different from the ones we used in AoD...
- 3-4 factions
- Branching main quest (at some point you choices should take you into different directions)
- At least 5-6 vastly different endings
... but we’ll use them in a very different way and craft a very different experience.
Before we talk about the CSG’s main quest design, let’s talk about the AoD’s main quest to illustrate some points without spoiling anything.
The main quest started vague – "go I know not where, bring back I know not what", and then the faction quests took over as the meat of the game. Essentially, the game wasn’t about finding the temple but instead working for the factions and slowly uncovering what happened in the past. By the time you’ve visited all 3 cities and learned what you can about the factions, the war, and the gods, you know where the temple is and you're ready to make your choice. That fairly important choice affects the ending slides, but not gameplay because the game is almost over at this point.
Naturally, we want to do better. So in the CSG we’ll get rid of the vagueness, move the main quest to the center stage, push the factions’ quests back, and allow you to make key choices earlier and thus enjoy the consequences earlier.
It will start simple – while scavenging you stumble upon something clearly valuable, a long-forgotten device that wasn’t meant to be used until the ship lands (but can be used in-flight). Not being an expert on such things, you need to know exactly what this thing is to figure out what one of the factions will pay for it, which is a good way to introduce you to the three main factions in Act 1, whereas in AoD the Noble Houses were introduced one Act at a time for storytelling reasons (escalating events):
(click to show/hide)
Once you know what that device is (at about 30% of the game), you’ll offer it to the faction of your choice, at which point your relationship with the other factions will go down, introducing an aspect we didn’t really touch in AoD – factions acting against you, attacking your base of operations, and turning locations under their influence against you, which will boost replayability.
At about 70% of the game, you might realize (via learning more about the ship if you’re smart enough) that what you’re doing might not necessary be what’s best for the ship (or you personally) and get an option to do things in a very different, "fuck all factions" way. The remaining 30% of the game will be dedicated to each path within this fork, presenting different challenges and choices. So far, that’s 3 'working for a faction' paths, 3 'fuck 'em' paths, and 7 different endings without counting permutations.
This way you’ll get to play through your key decisions, instead of being told about what happened next in the slides. Obviously, the slides will still be there but gameplay-to-slides ratio will be different.
Progress report:
I’ve been working on the game for 5 months now and so far it’s going well:
- Finished the second iteration of the main quest. In the first iteration that "something clearly valuable" thingy was merely a disposable lead-in, introducing you to the factions. In the second iteration we changed it into a more important device, not something you just hand over and forget, which had a cascading effect and changed the entire main quest. In terms of AoD, imagine delivering the temple to one of the lords at the end of Act 1. It would have instantly changed the rest of the game.
That’s what I like about the iteration approach. You do the first draft and look for the weak spots. Sometimes it takes a few weeks to find a perfect "piece of the puzzle". You put it in place and it forces changes across the board, which in turn creates new weak spots waiting to be replaced. Eventually it settles down, but it takes time to slow-cook it to the point where you’re more or less happy with it.
- Finished the overviews of the first 5 locations out of 16: The Pit, Armory, Shuttle Bay, Hydroponics, Industrial “District” and passed them to a new concept artist (can never have too much quality art). It seems my progress rate is one location a month, plus other things like the CSG systems, the dungeon crawler’s dialogues and “quests”, for the lack of a better word, etc. So I’ll need 11 months to do the remaining locations and that’s just the overview (visual, basic level design, quests/points of interest outline). On the plus side, IF everything goes well, we’ll have a pretty good foundation by March 2017 and still 3 years of development ahead of us to put it all together.
- Finished the first draft of the starting ‘town’ quests, including a conflict that nicely fits into the main theme of the game: different societies and ways of governing.
- Finished the first draft of the combat system; wanted to dedicate this update to it but decided to wait and work on it some more.