How Hard Should Quests Be?

Okay, weird question for you. How easy should it be to understand the quests you're playing in a game? I mean, at first the answer seems obvious, but then we dig a little deeper and it definitely becomes more murky. Thanks so much to HelloFresh for helping us complete the quest of what's for dinner. When designers started making quests for video games back in the day, there was very little rigor behind their design. As the industry was just starting and everyone was amateurs learning as they went. So everyone just made quests that they thought were interesting. Puzzles to tease the mind, but a lot of them in early games were basically incomprehensible without a strategy guide. I'm looking at you, Simon's Quest. But as design became more formalized and it became more of a profession, people realized that wasn't, well, great. That those sort of quests frustrated players and often led them to put down a game in disgust. I'm calling you out, Castlevania II. Wait, did James and I just separately take a dig at Belmont's sophomore outing for the NES in our individual script passes? Did that really just happen? Geez, looks

like the morning sun never quite vanquished that horrible curse that left in our minds. And you know, oddly while typing out this silly occurrence that did actually happen, mind you, we both did this independently and had a good laugh about it. It kind of solidified the point. Quests like this can sometimes be so bad that they burn into a player's memory for years and not in a good way. Simon, I love Simon's Quest. It just it still makes me angry. That led to the prevailing wisdom that quests should actually be easy to understand. In fact, they should be so easy you don't even have to read the quest text. Heck, you shouldn't even have to figure out who to go to to get your quest from. Just slap a big exclamation point over the quest giver's head and then when the player just whales through their text, a dot should appear on their map telling them exactly where to go. Ooh, and then when they get there, they shouldn't even have to figure out what to do, right? Rather it should just sort of happen by them killing things in the area or just sort of happen by going to another person with a giant exclamation point over their head or even just sort of happen right when you arrive. And I hope you're getting by my tone that I'm being a little facetious here. That was the

ideal that World of Warcraft popularized and series like Assassin's Creed championed. And it stood as the design standard for almost a decade and a half before FromSoftware brought to the fore the idea that quests should actually kind of sort of be confusing AF again. And now in the last few years, there's been a raging debate among game designers as to what direction to go in. So, let's list the four broad categories of how much work is needed to understand quests with examples. Maximal work like Elden Ring, substantial work like EverQuest, some work like Genshin Impact, and no work like Assassin's Creed. First up, the Elden Ring. This is totally opaque, I hope you have a guide style of quest design is perfect for forcing the player to really understand the world they're in. It makes them dig deep and truly try to piece together the lore in order to figure out not only what they're supposed to do on their quests, but if something is actually a quest at all. This is great if your game can support it. Because to make this work, you better be absolutely sure that your world is actually that deep, that

you've put enough in there that it's worth it to your players to really marinate in it. You also need to make sure that you're making the type of game where a player will want to do this. Because seriously, if these type of quests start showing up in my I've just had a long day at work casual zone out in grind games, I'm probably going to start throwing some bows. EverQuest style of quests on the other hand are a little less opaque. They still come from the hardcore school of you have to search out your quests. As you don't have any little markers on your mini map and there really isn't a quest log per se, but at least you're pretty sure that something is actually a quest when you find it. Now, these are great for hardcore adventure. When you want your quests to be as tough as your gameplay and you don't want to have the player feel like you're holding their hand. But, the quest grind is also integral to your gameplay. These still encourage your players to dig into the world and spend time researching when they can't be playing, but they also direct the player to search out quests, continually feeding them back into that part of your game loop. Next, there's the Genshin Impact style of quests, which we really

should be calling a sort of hybrid style. In this, there's a lot of exclamation point above the head style quests, but also a fair number of quests hidden in the world that range from Zelda style puzzles to almost EverQuest levels of figure out this riddle from the lore. This approach appeals to a broad audience. There's something for everyone, and even if it doesn't quite provide the level of lore delving that the previous two methods do, it does tell all players that they're welcome here. But there's always a but, right? Because this method also requires that your game make around a billion dollars every few months to sustain itself. Because to pull this off effectively, you need a lot of quests and puzzles. You need there to be a variety of them, meaning less reuse. You can't just have a million rat butt fetch quests. And you'll need to continually be updating them, since you have to split up your efforts and thus can only build a fraction of each type, because players will blaze through their favorite types fast. So, if you want to build a giga successful MMO and happen to have a metric butt ton of working capital on hand, this approach seems like a reasonable plan. But if you're like the rest of us and are working on a game

with a much more meager budget, you might want to rethink using this hybrid style. Which then leaves us with the exclamation over the head go to this dot on your map style quests. And I know we were poking fun earlier, but I do think these got a bad rap for the longest time because they were kind of all that was out there for a while, at least in the triple-A world. But the truth is, these two have their place. There are times when you want to play a game to tune out, to turn off, to just let go for a little while and not think too much. And this quest style is great for those moments. Though truthfully, they're not that great for narrative-centric games, because they encourage the player to simply click through the quests. Yet at the same time, they're also often still used in narrative-centric games because they also match the intensity of play perfectly. I mean, after all, if you're there for a story, you might not want some hardcore quest that's it's to make you get up off the couch and find your phone so you can look up a guide on the internet. Yet, flipping back once again because the way these quests are often incentivized with in-game rewards, they do encourage the player to simply do them as fast as possible, not lingering on whatever the quest giver might be trying to say. So, to use this method,

you have to strike a balance and find a way for these quests to be more than just things to be checked off a player's list. Now, with all that laid out, is there a clear answer to the question, how clear should your quests be? How much should your game hold the player's hand? Well, of course there's not a definitive answer for that cuz spoiler alert, everyone's different. But, I think the point we're trying to make is that none of these methods are necessarily better or worse. Rather, they can just be applied in better or worse ways. So, when you're crafting your quests in your game, remember to ask yourself what you desired experience is that you want your players to have, and then design your quests around that. Are you going for a deep lore experience that demands a lot of the players going in, or are you going for something more laid-back where the main goal is to give the player a sense of accomplishment? Both, of course, are valid, but both require different types of quests, and woe be to the designer who gets it wrong. Because, honestly, at that point, it's kind of like gathering all the right ingredients for a specific dish you're cooking or something, right? I mean, you really can't go putting sardines on

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Turk, Angela Valenciana, Arclight Games, Casey Musgraves, Dominic Valenciana, Joseph Blane, and Skyler Holmes. Thanks so much for your support, all.