In favor of Repeatable Quests?

[metacontent]

I'm talking about certain quests (eg. gather 20 coconuts) that you can complete over and over again (eg. once per day) for a reward.

 

For a game that could potentially have 10000 quest events (random guess) I think it is going to be quite a challenge for the developers to create 10000 completely unique quests without a considerable percentage of them becoming more or less repetitious.

 

If 500 of those unique quests were shaved off and dumped into a 20 quests that could be repeated once per cycle, then that would mean the developers would have to create 480 less quests, and could use that time to make the remaining 9500 quests just that much better, and it might also potentially make the remaining 9500 quests slightly less repetitious.

 

Of course that would mean that we would need to run those 20 repeatable quests about 25 times each (20*25=500) which doesn't exactly sound fun.

 

Repeatable quests are a tool, with both pro's and con's.

 

Should they be in this game, or not?

Edited October 19, 2012 by metacontent

[Dianjabla]

If I wanted that, I'd play an MMO.

[cdx]

Can't think of any real pro's, doing the exactly same quest a second time is already a con. I'd rather have 20 good non-repeatable quests than 20 repeatable ones.

 

And btw, 10000 quests

[Luridis]

If the world is sufficiently sandboxy huge, lots of time passed since you last did it, and it makes sense that it's repeatable from within the context of the quest; then yes. IE, clean the giant bats out of the cave they nest in that the village water supply comes from.

[Calmar]

I would not like repeatable quests in PE. The ones I've seen in other quests quickly became boring work you repeat all over again to gain more money.

 

Maybe randomly generated mini FedEx quests would be a possibility: random NPC X wants object Y. If you, let's say, are tasked to find a snow wolf pelt by some shopkeeper that normally doesn't offer quests, the quest is long or short depending on how close to snow wolf territory the quest-giver is.

[Vandoon]

I like Calmars idea however it would have to be within limits too much would be a bore.

Edited October 19, 2012 by Vandoon

[SeekDWay]

I voted NO, but it's more of a YES given the option to have a repeatable battle arena where the party or a single character will face semi-random oponents in order with different modes and an end reward that varies from cosmetic to of little importance to actual gameplay (The Village Cup in NWN2) and maybe getting some reputation with heavy diminishing returns.

Edited October 19, 2012 by SeekDWay

[Osvir]

I can see some quests being repeatable, but mostly I find those quests tedious because they never leave the journal/"current quest"-section. Apart from that, there should be a limit to how many times you can do a certain quest, a merchant needs wolf pelts that he can sell to start his trading business. If you get him 5 wolf pelts 5 times he gets enough to start a small business, and each time you get to him you'll see his stock of items scale.

 

In that sense, should a merchant always have the same items? Or could another side-story NPC buy items and you can later track it down/find it somehow?

[Vandoon]

I was more thinking along the lines of a trader for most of the game has no quests however at a random point in time when his stocks of x are low / gone and no traders are due they could offer a one off quests. This may be repeated with other NPCs but not the same one or at least very rarely the same one. The PC could potentially increase the chance of it occurring by clearing out their stocks and interrupting any trade routes however there needs to be a demand and it would still be a random event for the trader to set the quest.

 

On the type of quest they give it may not be a supply item x (pelt / pot / widget) it could be find out what stopped the caravan, guard the next caravan, take a message to the supplier for more, take a message to the lord about trouble, patrol the road, torch the competition for the less reputable merchant, steal from the competition

[Calmar]

I like Calmars idea however it would have to be within limits too much would be a bore.

 

Of course. That idea should at the most be a backdrop to real quests. It could make the world appear more dynamic (assuming it is similar to BG II), so that you can't completely solve all problems in an area for good.

[general_azure]

If you can do the exact same thing over and over again, then this either means the quest had no effect on the gameworld and was utterly pointless, or it's some "go forth and gather berries for todays pie, oh mighty warrior" stuff. Either way, those quests just suck as far as I'm concerned.

Skyrim tried to randomize some aspects of those quests, but I wasn't really impressed by that either.

 

And why am I allowed to vote both yes and no ? =P

[Hormalakh]

Are you asking us if we like to grind to power-up our characters? Why not just give xp for killing monsters then?

[GhostofAnakin]

This just seems kind of boring. While it could be a decent way to earn money as well as extra XP, it just seems like a mundane way to do so.

[jivex5k]

I don't like fetch quests in general, unless your fetching something extremely powerful for some other reason.

But the old, "I need X amount of Y for Z" I'll kindly say no thanks.

I'd rather have them make unique quests.

[evdk]

While it is nice that you are trying to make it Project: Eternity in deed as well as in name, I must respectfully disagree with your less than intelligent proposal, good sir.

[Nomine Vacans]

World of Eternity? Nah...

[Carlo]

This sort of grinding tends to wreak havoc with play balance in a closed-ended campaign (what PE essentially will be). Game designers need to understand roughly how powerful a party will be or should be at certain key points, in order to have challenging plot-centric encounters. Repeatable quests, unless there's a large amount of time in between repetitions, makes it almost certain there will be large variations in party experience level at these points.

 

On a related note, I hope there will be few to none respawning encounters, as these can have the same effect if the party is able to rest/recover in between them; you can just play whack-a-mole until bored.

[C2B]

No.

 

On that note, what do people here think about quests that have an ending but take a very long time to complete and consist (at least partly) of an repeated action?

[Infinitron]

No.

 

Well, maybe something like caravan guard duty in Fallout.

[LadyCrimson]

I do not want to farm coconuts (or anything else) over and over, personally. I'm not sure I'd even want quests where you get coconuts, turn it in, the guy says "well now I need 30 parrot feathers", so you do that, and turn it in, and then are told "now I need 50 hairs from the tails of gorillas." Those work fine for grinding MMO's/action-rpg's, but...yea, no. Even if a lot of quests in PE can boil down to fetch ones, I at least want them to not be exactly the same task.

 

On that note, what do people here think about quests that have an ending but take a very long time to complete and consist (at least partly) of an repeated action?

If they're long just because it's going to take me "forever" to march to the map location where something is located, that's ok.

Or if they're long because there's a part1, then after some other plot/main story point is reached, you can access a part2, and so on, those can be interesting if the reason for it feels like something you did had an effect on something.

 

But if it's like that seemingly unending "Braiinnnnns" quest in Borderlands1 1st zombie DLC ... no thank you.

[soulmata]

It depends entirely on how it's handled.

 

Bethesda had the start of something good with the Radiant system in Skyrim. It was definitely unrefined and lacking polish, but it found a way to procedurally generate quests based on templates that made the quests give you at least some immersion. For instance, each Jarl had a handful of quest templates. The templates were unique to each Jarl, but the locations and individual targets were pseudo-random. This meant while I know I'd get the same quest from each Jarl on a given playthrough, the area's I'd be exploring and NPCs I'd be targeting were different. They prevented this from breaking the storyline by having a handful of areas marked off-limits for randomly generated quests.

 

That sort of system can work well, and reduces the amount of development time needed to provide 1000 quests. If you can instead make a templating system that only defines requirements for a given quest to trigger, you can then generate a large number of quests with less effort. Finesse is needed to make it truly shine, though - that's where Skyrim falls short, as you see through the veil and break your suspension of disbelief when someone hands you a quest and you know, immediately, it was a Radiant quest.

 

 

None of that, however, compares to quests which have impact. I want my decisions to matter. If I'm given a sidequest to help deliver medicine to some remote village in the middle of nowhere suffering from a plague, and I opt to instead sell the medicine to a shady black market dealer, I want that to matter. I want that village to suffer and die out, I want to reap a huge chunk of change and I want people to know about it happening. If there are half the number of quests but twice the amount of impact from doing them, I'd be happy.

[Euclidean]

I wouldn't mind seeing something semi repeatable. As in similar but not exactly the same quest as long as there is a reason for it to keep recurring.

 

For example:

 

There is a large bandit camp in the region if you ignore it then there will be periodic random bandit attacks in the area until you go and wipe out their main camp.

[Qaladan]

No.

 

Well, maybe something like caravan guard duty in Fallout.

 

Agreed. My first instinct was to say God no to repeatable quests, but they can work within reason.

[metacontent]

Cool, so it seems more than 10-1 that people are not in favor of repeatable quests, with the exception that it seems almost everyone who posted here things that in some certain situations, if done correctly, it would be okay.

 

Thats how I feel, mostly no, but in rare situations if done in a cool and believable way, then maybe.

 

Thanks for the feedback.

[Tsuga C]

Thanks, but no thanks, to anything that smacks of grinding. If these repeatable quests are in, then Obsidian will have to implement far more scaling than I care to have in the game in order to accommodate the people who will repeat the same damn quest 1,001 times for the coins and/or experience.