Quests, kind of

Today we got our third team member as TVdata joined our ranks to fill up the 3D artist’s position. Welcome!

The interactive web page has taken some steps forward and in general I’m pretty pleased with the text. I haven’t yet tried my hand with the concept art but hopefully I will find some time for that tomorrow.

I had to spend most of the day in meetings about technical aspects of the game and didn’t have a chance to get much real work done. But the meetings are also very important so everyone is on the same page and knows what we are doing.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the story of the game. Sandbox games usually don’t have much stories in them or the stories are left to the imagination of the players and server owners. It’s difficult to come up with a concept that’s both open and supportive. We can’t make the story/stories too linear as it would stamp out creativity from our players and restrict their freedom. On the other hand a 100% plain old sandbox game would be rather boring in my opinion. It needs to have stories and lore in it.

So I came up with the idea of having instances in the game. An instance would be a chance encounter, a happenstance, accident or a peculiar turn of events which would silently open up the chance to follow up the storyline of the instance that it’s part of.

The instances would be included in the base game and they could be short or long, epic or everyday little things. The point is that the server owner would have the power to disable/enable the vanilla instances and/or add his own to his worlds. 

For example an instance could be something like a strange and cryptic note lying on the ground waiting for someone to find it and read it. The note would say “Cedric. Meet me in the forest clearing when the moon is full at midnight by the old willow tree. -XXX” and this would open up a chance to investigate further and open up a whole storyline of adventure.

The game could easily keep track of landmarks like “the nearest forest, the nearest forest clearing, the nearest river in relation to the nearest forest”, and the forest could have subsequent landmarks such as “the old willow tree, a fox’s nest, a circle of mushrooms, flower field” etc.

Or the server owner could build and define his own landmarks in addition to these generated ones and use those in his pre-scripted adventures.

So, yes, basically they are quests. But they are not quests, they are instances in the world and the fate of the world doesn’t depend on a hero succeeding in them (or does it?). The instances are things that happen rarely in the world by default. They could be as simple as some old lady having lost her kitten with no ominous evil story behind it (or is there?!). You would not see the instances very often in the vanilla game. They could be somewhat random generated and sparse making them more interesting when they happen. They would make the world a bit more alive and have you think “this is strange, I haven’t seen this happen before.”

And the basic infrastructure of the instances could be used to build very elaborate adventures by the server owners in their worlds. Or they could be just disabled if that’s the way the server owner rolls.