Failure States

[Nonek]

Why not make our quests not exactly time sensitive, but single chance affairs. If we fail to achieve our goals in one expedition, there may be consequences. for instance the Black Hand, ruthless thieves and assassins disappear into the shadows, leaving you in the empty mansion where they previously resided. A gibbering horror is let free from the cult of Yog Shothoth, to breed and grow strong in the dark places of the earth.

 

These need not be necessarily negative, they may lead to other opportunities but when you come across the broken and twisted sacrifices to the cultists hideous "god," you'll be left in no doubt that you failed them and possibly have lost certain benefits and contacts. And a coterie of assassins watching you from the shadows would make a nice turnabout, the hunter becomes the hunted.

 

Thus we get the feeling that the antagonists are not merely sitting around waiting for steel enemas courtesy of our heros, they'll react to our attempts like Benny in the Tops or Surkov in Moscow. They'll attempt to regain the upper hand, and perhaps ally with other more dangerous foes.

[Kilroy_Was_Here]

There was something like this at the beginning of IWD1 I believe, and Deus Ex:HR as well. When those games tell you there is a limited amount of time to do something, they mean it.

 

The issue with implementing an idea like this is the cascading effects. It becomes much more complex once you get past one or two quests with variable results like this. If you failed to defeat the gibbering horror in time it lays waste to a town. So now any other quests that may have been in that town are gone. Should they be replaced with new quests, given by new npcs? Should those be time sensitive too? I don't know if a project of this scope can deliver that level of interactivity.

[Nonek]

You could be right, still with the choice and consequence we find in New Vegas and Alpha Protocol, i'm fairly positive about them pulling such a thing off. Wouldn't it be great to see that devastated town though, infested with abominations and all your own fault.

 

I'm not saying time sensitive by the way, just single chance affairs, they don't know you're coming until you attack.

[JediMB]

I'm all for this. It could add some interesting twists and replay value.

[Moonlight Butterfly]

You could be right, still with the choice and consequence we find in New Vegas and Alpha Protocol, i'm fairly positive about them pulling such a thing off. Wouldn't it be great to see that devastated town though, infested with abominations and all your own fault.

 

I'm not saying time sensitive by the way, just single chance affairs, they don't know you're coming until you attack.

 

Good I hate timed quests lol. I like the idea of clearing up your mess but I don't want the game to treat me like an idiot for something I didn't know about or could do nothing about.

There's nothing worse than NPC's gloating at you for something you had no control over lol

[duskwind]

It would be nice to have more possible outcomes for most quests than "succeed; or die, reload, and then succeed".

[Oerwinde]

I don't mind timed quests if they make sense. If a quest giver comes in all urgent about you needing to hurry, amd you go off travelling and doing 5 or 6 more quests before you get around to it, there should be consequences. People aren't going to stand in an alley with their hostage for 3 days waiting for you.

[Hornet85]

It would be nice to have more possible outcomes for most quests than "succeed; or die, reload, and then succeed".

Ideally yeah, I agree it would be great.

 

But I think the real challenge is how do you make the various outcome in such a way that people would actually proceed rather than reloading because they do not like the alternative outcome anyway. The moment you have one outcome being advantageous to the other, people would aim for the advantageous one. At the same time if the outcome doesn't hold any weight one way or the other, then we may lose the motivation to try and succeed simply because there is no success if the outcome doesn't matter one way or the other.

[duskwind]

The alternative option could make for an interesting story. Or lead to finding out useful information in the process (eg expository speech from triumphant villain), or great treasure (eg the village got razed to the ground, but some of the innocents who died were rather wealthy). It's common enough to be railroaded into failure (eg getting captured and locked up in the dungeon from which you need to escape); why not avoidable non-game-ending failures?