Personal Review: Quests and Consequence

A few days ago I talked about learning from past mistakes I'd made in my modding creations. I'd like to continue in that theme again today, this time concentrating on quest design. I'll be discussing my Neverwinter Nights 2 (NWN) mod Fate of a City again, but also referring to Alley of Murders.

Fate of a City (FoaC) had a few problems with the quests I'd developed, particularly the sidequests.  The most notable weakness of these was my tendency to "extend" quests further than players initially expected.  A simple quest to talk to someone to solve a problem would never be that simple. There would almost always be new information that would force the player to talk to yet another person in the chain and then potentially return to one (or both!) of the original people involved within the quest. While this is fine to do on occasion, repetition of this can frustrate players.

For one, the begin to feel like they are getting the run-around. They begin to realise that every quest is not going to be straightforward and there is going to be something to throw a spanner into the works. They start to become jaded - it's like watching a M. Night Shyamalan movie - you know there's going to be a twist. Worse, if the player has to traverse areas in order to talk to person a, then person b, then person a again, then back to ... you get the idea. This quickly becomes tedious. In case any game designers or modders haven't got a message they should have heard long ago: backtracking is not fun and should be avoided whenever possible!

Force Speed: Making backtracking (slightly) less painful since 2003

Backtracking is whenever you're covering ground you've covered before. Walking back over the same territory quickly becomes tedious, and doubly so if there's nothing new to make the journey interesting. Commercial games seemed to have learned from some past mistakes. The original Halo made you backtrack for almost half of the game, simply with different enemies. KotOR involved a lot of backtracking for quests that force speed helped make bearable. The Witcher "investigation" has a hideous amount of backtracking. Morrowind used silt striders to help eliminate backtracking to a degree, but it still proved tedious at times. But even Grand Commute Auto, I mean Grand Theft Auto IV had far too much menial travel with little real enjoyment - some people still haven't quite got the message. I tried to reduce backtracking tedium in FoaC by using a world map, but there was still "dead" transit time involved. Backtracking can tend to give people "courier/fedex syndrome", where they feel like a messenger running back and forth delivering or collecting packages. This isn't enjoyable, and it certainly isn't heroic. People don't play games to feel like they're doing a day job.

The issue isn't when you have quests that have twists or are lengthy and complex. The issue occurs when every quest is like this.  Quests should vary in both content, length and pacing, just to keep the player guessing. Two of the most popular quests (and probably my two most favourite) were very different in style and length. One involved exploring and finding a set of clues to lead you to a deadly "Shadow Being", one whom you had to defeat in a puzzle style manner rather than combat.  The other involved a daughter complaining about strange noises in the night, which eventually led to the discovery of two creatures having inflicted a death sentence on the father and the daughter unless the player intervened.  It started off as an investigation, resulted in a short combat, sent the player on a quest to find a cure, and finally deciding how they wanted to resolve the quest. The player had a variety of solutions, ranging from the noble path of spending exorbitant amounts of money to saving both their lives, to fleecing the family for their money and their lives.  The two quests were very different in terms of style and length, providing interesting variety for the player.

A family's fate in your hands

However, the latter brings me to another point, specifically that of unexpected consequences.  If the player chose to kill the family, then later on in the main quest one of the NPCs would choose to limit the assistance they provided. I also implemented a similar consequence in Alley of Murders (AoM), in that if the player helped an elf in one quest, it would result in someone's life being spared in another.  In FoaC, the NPC in question directly tells you that you previous actions are why she will not help you, whereas in AoM the link is only hinted at. But in either case, the consequence cannot be predicted when the player makes the initial choice.  It exists so as to enhance the cohesive nature of the world and demonstrate that actions have consequences, but the player cannot possible foresee the long-term effects of their decision.

This raises the question: Are unexpected consequences a bad thing?  Should the player's progress potentially be affected in unforeseen ways because of decisions they made in quests that seem unrelated to their current actions? One issue of concern is whether to ensure that the consequences do not penalise the player when dealing with such choices.  In FoaC, the NPC provided help in a reduced form, but this did not have any significant impact on the rewards the player received in terms of experience or money, but it may have increased the difficulty of battles at the game's climax. In AoM, the potential death of the NPC had little real effect on the player. The player received a minor monetary reward if the NPC remained alive, but otherwise had little effect on the game's mechanics.

One of these templars will always die, but the other might live

Is having unexpected consequences fair on the player? Should players be expected to have a clear understanding of the consequences of their actions in order to make a reasoned decision, or should they potentially be penalised (or alternatively be rewarded) at a future time due to past decisions? In a way this is somewhat of an argument of the visibility of mechanics versus the verisimilitude of the setting. To an extent, I must confess that I'm more of a fan of the latter because I love being presented with choice in games, but I understand that a balance must be struck between the two. The designer must strive to reinforce the basic mechanics of choice in the majority of cases, for too many decisions that result in unexpected consequences will not only serve to frustrate the player, but also ruin those special moments when the player realises that their previous decisions have come back to haunt them.

The main take home message is to ensure variance in a player's experience. Presenting the player with something unexpected will get their attention and usually make them remember their experiences, and creating something memorable and enjoyable is what designers should constantly strive to achieve.