Quests Are a Book, not a Chapter!

by **Dark Avorian** Tue Feb 02, 2010 11:27 pm

First topic message reminder :

[Note: this is a thread I intend to post on the RSOF]

Hello. My name is Dark Avorian, and I'm here to talk about quests, the decline of the quest, and some other details.

Part the First: What is Required

One of the most important things in any quest are the requirements. To a large degree these are used as an exclusion mechanism. If every quest were to have low requirements than many of Runescape's best areas, items, training grounds, shops etc. would be available to almost anyone. Nowadays however there is a tendency towards arbitrary and unused requirements.

Jublex employees seem to want to push the envelope in regard to required levels, but don't seem to feel it necessary to think more than a few seconds about the quest. In fact, if we compare recent quests to old quests it's pretty self evident that nowadays challenges are designed around requirements, whereas back then challenges/puzzles/ dungeons were designed, and appropriate skill was designated as the required one and a level appropriate to the quest difficulty was chosen.

Examples

Nomad's Requiem

The reqs were so obviously chosen before the challenges, and the mod's put little thought into how to best utilize said requirements. I mean seriously...the corruption room, a river and some slabs, and barrels of explosives in front of a machine...once one has the concept of the machine and those reqs I think most game designers pressed for time would come up with something similar.

Within The Light

Ooh...elves are agile rangers who live in a massive wood...Woodcutting, Agility, Fletching, Ranging! Now how can we incorporate these into a puzzle...erm...ballistae at target...cut a crystal tree and fletch it and some spiky things on some high up platforms!

Example of Good Req Use...

WGS: In this quest there was obviously something like this going on in the head of the developer. Hmmmm... so i want them to give Surok a truth serum, but what if they need some extra herb to make it...so they'll have to grow it and i can use farming and herblore *adds to list of reqs*

Part the Second: Book, Not Chapter

Recent Quests seem to forget that a quest should have a a story and instead follow the theory that they are but chapters in the book that is a quest line. However, for a long time quests have been more like books in a series. Most of the time the books in a series have an internal plotline but also add to a larger more complex one.