The Raedric's Hold questline was one of the most well-regarded ones in the game. A multi-area set-piece, lots of choices, lots of approaches, multiple actors with their own agendas. Most of Pillars of Eternity's quests weren't as elaborate and it really stood out. As the designer of Fallout: New Vegas' remarkable Beyond the Beef quest, you're no stranger to that sort of thing. Can you tell us more about the making of the Raedric quest? Can we expect to see more quests like that in the future?
We all liked that one internally, too, and you'll see a similar paradigm for a couple of our larger quests in White March Part 2.
In my position, when I'm writing, I'm usually focused on the critical path, and I don't often get a whole lot of time to help flesh out side quests, but this was early in production and there was some opportunity to work with the level designers in conceptualizing the storyline for the quest. So I think that one, on the narrative side, began with the image of Raedric on his throne, half-crazed, after slaying his wife and child. We wanted strong ties to the central crisis of the game, to help the player begin to understand the stakes of the plot.
Then the level designers ran with the quest design and added some nice touches to the plot there as they went - Kolsc, the would-be usurper you could prop up or kill off, for instance, and the NPCs inside the keep that give insight as to Raedric's state of mind. Olivia Veras, who does writing as well as level design, did most of the writing for the quest and I thought executed it beautifully. Because it was early, that quest got a lot of scrutiny and a good amount of iteration, and I think it came out so well as a result of strong collaboration among the team.
The thing to know about a quest like this is that it is expensive. Introducing layers of complexity like multiple start and end points inherently takes much longer to implement, and generates far more bugs (geometrically, I'd say) than a simpler, more linear quest. There is a quest in Defiance Bay with a wizard masquerading as a drug dealer, and one in Dyrford about someone hiding from the local crime family, and those quests both had those types of complexities about them, and both required substantial iteration to make serviceable, and had to essentially be scrapped and redone multiple times. Those quests then start to eat into time that could be spent polishing other content, and it's not always clear-cut whether the quest will be worth the trouble. Over the course of production, we've gotten better at making that judgment and identifying red flags, but it's always a little risky. All of that is to say, we love doing that kind of quest - maybe too much - but if we tried to do every quest like that, the game would be a disaster, so we try to choose our battles based on the ones we think will pay off the most.
On New Vegas I worked on Beyond the Beef but I also did one of the vaults - Vault 11. Vault 11 was a relatively linear, exploration-based quest and probably had half a dozen bugs reported total during production. I probably spent triple or quadruple the amount of time I worked on Vault 11 working on Beyond the Beef. So much of it depended on nondeterministic systems (AI, scheduling, pathing...) that the whole thing was a nightmare to debug. And when the game came out, it was interesting to see that Vault 11 got a lot of public praise, but hardly anything was said about Beyond the Beef. I'm glad people like it now, but at the time it did teach me that there are many ways to make a memorable quest, and some are harder than others.
