Metaquests - Story-based quest system idea
Posted: Mon Nov 30, 2015 6:47 pm
A thread on another forum spawned the following question, and a stream-of-thought answer. I've edited the answer to clarify points; hopefully this idea will be helpful. The meta-quest idea I'm reposting seems like it could slot into the existing quest system, once DU has support for quests.
Narf the Mouse wrote:The easiest way to start, I think, would be to add "metaquests" - quest-glue that takes appropriate random quests, and chains them together into a plot.greenGIANT wrote:If those include features like more characterization/story driven quests as opposed to 90% of the world running on the 'who/where/what' formula, then my interest level in this just climbed. Problem is; with a world as huge as Daggerfalls, how do you even accomplish that in such a way that the player actually notices it? In other words, if you go and add a bunch of proper story-driven quests, what are the chances of the human player ever finding them?
For example, the "random animal in a house", and a "someone's trying to kill me quest", and a "kill this enemy" quest. The random animal quest is the first murder attempt, which chains into a later protection quest involving someone at that house, which chains into $Faction or character hiring the PC for one of the Kill_Enemy quests. Probably some sort of meta-data would have to be added to quests to describe their type, so that the meta-quest can make appropriate selections.
This would probably be written as a layer above the quest system; items from this layer (or the layer itself) would identify as quests to DU. Appropriate "glue text" would have to be added, and it would not be easy, but the actual implementation seems the simplest I can think of. On the downside, it would also provide the least short-term gain. However, it could be used to build additional content, and expanded on.
Overall, Daggerfall has a faction system, although it is very bare-bones, it does influence gameplay through quests and dialogue. The faction system could be used to influence the metaquests; for example, a character in opposing factions could be given opposing quests from the same meta-quest, and have to figure out how to resolve them. With the right code hooks, meta-quests could spawn side-quests, which may be meta-quests themselves.