how do you make a great video game quest?
originally published september 30, 2018
Imagine this: you are working on a game, and you are responsible for designing a quest. It might not have that name, but that’s how most people will think of it. In a quest, the player is given a task or series of tasks which they must then complete in order to advance in some meaningful way, whether through an experience reward, because they can’t finish the story without it, or something else. How do you make a good quest?
Alright, now imagine something else. Imagine you’re a player, and you’re playing as an expert monster slayer who just rolled into town, seeking revenge against Bogbort Denglesmith, a guy who killed your dog. Looking for clues to Bogbort’s whereabouts, you amble into the nearby tavern, where the barkeep tells you that he’ll tell you who knows where Bogbort is. All you need to do is go into the cellar, kill 10 rats, and bring back their tails as proof. So you do. You walk into the cellar, mindlessly kill some rats, and the barkeep tells you to go talk to the priest.
So… you talk to the priest. And the priest says “well, I’d love to help you, but right now, I’m trying to help Sadie Jenkins with A Personal Problem, so if you want to know where Bogbort is, you’re going to have to find Sadie. I think she’s at the market. If not, ask around, and I’m sure someone will tell you where she is.”
So you go the market. She’s not there, because of course she isn’t. So you find someone who says she’s at the tavern, so you go back there, but she’s not there. The barkeep says she usually goes to the graveyard this time of day, so you head to the graveyard, and sure enough, there she is, but she’s surrounded by goblins! So you fight the goblins, save her, she says “thank you, I need to gather my thoughts, go back to the priest and tell him you helped me out.” So you go back to the priest, and he tells you that he knows Bogbort had been somewhere else, and if you went there, you’d probably find some clues.
Here’s why precisely none of that is fun.
First off, we’ve got our generic starter tutorial. It’s a standard fetch quest, which means someone wants you to go do mindless busywork for them. You know it’s busywork, they know it’s busywork, literally none of it is fun. More importantly, you know the outcome of the quest. It’s quid pro quo. Ten rat kills, one piece of information to advance the storyline. This means that the only way anyone is going to see that quest as anything other than an obstacle is if the combat is literally the best, most fun, most perfectly joyful combat system in the history of the universe, and can you honestly say that your game is going to have a combat system that feels like falling in love for the first time every time you kill a rat?
Probably not.
Now, most gamers understand this. Nobody puts a fetch quest on their list of “best quests in a video game ever.” Nobody even remembers them, except for the mild frustration at feeling the intense friction of “you are a mighty hero, now go take out the trash.” You’ve almost certainly heard of someone, somewhere, telling you how bad fetch quests were, and if this piece was just about fetch quests, I wouldn’t have written it.
But what about the next quest, with the priest? Why does that one suck?
Okay, so a long time ago, people figured out that the number three was pleasing. We call this The Rule of Three. Three little pigs, three billy goats gruff, three little bears. It’s too cold, too hot, just right, that kind of thing. It just seems natural, right? Every story has three acts, a beginning, middle, and end. It’s not something we tend to question. But we should. Consider, for instance, the three act structure. It sounds awesome, right? But did you know that most television shows rely on a five-act structure? Shakespeare did too.
But I’m not here to say “don’t use The Rule of Threes in your game design.”
Consider Sadie’s quest. Let’s say we completed the objective four times. Go to the market, she isn’t there, go to the tavern, she isn’t there, go to the library, she isn’t there, go to the graveyard, she’s there. We still run into the same problem we had before. The quest is still predictable. It still feels like busywork. It doesn’t match up with the fantasy we’ve established for our character. It’s mindless and dull.
But most importantly?
It’s not dramatic.
I come from a film background, and they drilled the importance of drama into us at every single turn. Drama is, simply put, the thing that occurs when a protagonist who wants something runs into an obstacle and must overcome that obstacle to reach their goal. Drama happens when our protagonist wants to get a glass of milk, drives to the grocery store, is about to get their milk, and then a robber comes in waving a gun demanding cash. Wasting our time by going “well, the person isn’t here,” that’s nowhere near as interesting.
There’s a playwright/movie writer, David Mamet, who wrote Glengarry Glen Ross, who had some pretty interesting things to say on the topic.
AS WE LEARN HOW TO WRITE THIS SHOW, A RECURRING PROBLEM BECOMES CLEAR.
THE PROBLEM IS THIS: TO DIFFERENTIATE BETWEEN *DRAMA* AND NON-DRAMA. LET ME BREAK-IT-DOWN-NOW.
EVERYONE IN CREATION IS SCREAMING AT US TO MAKE THE SHOW CLEAR. WE ARE TASKED WITH, IT SEEMS, CRAMMING A SHITLOAD OF *INFORMATION* INTO A LITTLE BIT OF TIME.
OUR FRIENDS. THE PENGUINS, THINK THAT WE, THEREFORE, ARE EMPLOYED TO COMMUNICATE *INFORMATION* — AND, SO, AT TIMES, IT SEEMS TO US.
BUT NOTE:THE AUDIENCE WILL NOT TUNE IN TO WATCH INFORMATION. YOU WOULDN’T, I WOULDN’T. NO ONE WOULD OR WILL. THE AUDIENCE WILL ONLY TUNE IN AND STAY TUNED TO WATCH DRAMA.
QUESTION:WHAT IS DRAMA? DRAMA, AGAIN, IS THE QUEST OF THE HERO TO OVERCOME THOSE THINGS WHICH PREVENT HIM FROM ACHIEVING A SPECIFIC, *ACUTE* GOAL.
SO: WE, THE WRITERS, MUST ASK OURSELVES *OF EVERY SCENE* THESE THREE QUESTIONS.
1) WHO WANTS WHAT?
2) WHAT HAPPENS IF HER DON’T GET IT?
3) WHY NOW?
THE ANSWERS TO THESE QUESTIONS ARE LITMUS PAPER. APPLY THEM, AND THEIR ANSWER WILL TELL YOU IF THE SCENE IS DRAMATIC OR NOT.
IF THE SCENE IS NOT DRAMATICALLY WRITTEN, IT WILL NOT BE DRAMATICALLY ACTED.
THERE IS NO MAGIC FAIRY DUST WHICH WILL MAKE A BORING, USELESS, REDUNDANT, OR MERELY INFORMATIVE SCENE AFTER IT LEAVES YOUR TYPEWRITER. *YOU* THE WRITERS, ARE IN CHARGE OF MAKING SURE *EVERY* SCENE IS DRAMATIC.
THIS MEANS ALL THE “LITTLE” EXPOSITIONAL SCENES OF TWO PEOPLE TALKING ABOUT A THIRD. THIS BUSHWAH (AND WE ALL TEND TO WRITE IT ON THE FIRST DRAFT) IS LESS THAN USELESS, SHOULD IT FINALLY, GOD FORBID, GET FILMED.
IF THE SCENE BORES YOU WHEN YOU READ IT, REST ASSURED IT *WILL* BORE THE ACTORS, AND WILL, THEN, BORE THE AUDIENCE, AND WE’RE ALL GOING TO BE BACK IN THE BREADLINE.
Why he wrote it in all caps, I don’t know, but the point is simple: if your scene isn’t dramatic, people won’t care. If people won’t care, then they aren’t going to want to keep playing. You know about those crazy stats that say most people don’t even finish games? Look at the completion stats for short games–they aren’t completed any more than long games are. Length was never the problem. It was always about whether or not people cared. People don’t care about nondramatic quests.
When you give someone a rule of three quest, you’re telling them what’s going to happen. One of the worst offenders is a mission in Halo 4 that has you entering a tower, standing still on a platform as it travels from point A to point C, getting off the platform at point B, fighting through some enemies, pressing a button, getting back on the platform and resuming your journey to point C… and then repeating that entire process two more times. Riding the platform isn’t fun. Fighting the exact same group of enemies isn’t fun. It’s basically just copy/pasting the same environment three times. If you did it once, you know what happens next. If you know what happens next, you have no reason to care unless the combat is flawless.
But the dirty little secret about video games is that even with absolutely flawless gameplay (say, for instance, Alan Wake), if players feel they’re doing the same thing repeatedly, it will feel boring. This means that you, as a game developer, have to change up objectives, environments, and stakes in a meaningful way. If the player can predict the outcome of the quest, if nothing changes throughout, if they simply perform busywork, then everything is, well, bushwah.
Let’s not forget, our question, our very important question, wasn’t “what makes a bad quest?” it was “how do you make a good quest?” To understand what makes a good quest, we have to understand this one, simple thing: no drama makes bad quests. Drama makes good quests.
“Wait!” protests the reasonable game developer, “we’re not wealthy! We don’t have infinite budget! One of the reasons we do fetch quests and rule of three quests is because making custom assets is expensive!”
Yeah. That’s true, but not every quest needs immensely expensive, custom, scripted sequences to be good. In fact, a quest can be mechanically poor and still feel brilliant. It all comes down to context.
A while back, I played a game that had been directed by some former developers on The Witcher 3, a game known for its great quests. If I recall correctly, one of the people was specifically cited as having worked on The Witcher 3’s quests, so I figured the quests would be great. They weren’t.
Now, I could just shrug it off and hypothesize that these people lacked some “secret sauce” that made The Witcher 3 great, or I could dig deeper. Maybe the quests were different mechanically? After all, the games themselves were very genres. So let’s look at the quests.
In The Witcher 3, a number of quests involve talking to people, following clues (pressing a button, looking for highlighted objects, and wandering after them), and then searching in a large circle for an objective. In fact, most of the game’s quests are like that. Maybe you go here or there to kill a certain number of monsters, but honestly… most of The Witcher 3 is just walking somewhere, talking to someone, using your witcher senses, searching big circles on the ground, and interacting with objects.
The Witcher 3 wasn’t great because it had unique mechanics, it was great because it contextualized those mechanics in interesting ways. There’s a quest in The Witcher 3: Hearts of Stone that has Geralt herding pigs into a pen, playing Gwent, the card-playing minigame, getting into a fistfight, fetching some wine for his friend Shani, and diving for shoes in a nearby pond. The quest steps themselves are simple, with each one utilizing pre-existing mechanics. In the case of the pigs, AI animals will often run away from Geralt when he gets near, so the quest simply uses this behavior and awards Geralt a point whenever he chases an animal into the right zone. What makes this questline memorable and fun aren’t unique mechanics or expensive set pieces, but the fact that none of it seems like busywork.
The entire quest involves flirting with your friend Shani, hanging out as her plus one at a wedding, even meeting one of the greatest villains in The Witcher 3 in the process. It’s fun. It’s memorable because it fits with the character. The quest steps seem frivolous, but they’re fun games you play at a party, not boring quid pro quo chores. It’s about spending good times with people.
One of my favorite quests is structured something like:
Fight people
Investigate pigs
Talk to someone
Find a hut, enter it, and investigate
Talk to a pig
Kill wolves
Lead pigs to safety
Cure the pigs and turn them back into people
Doesn’t seem that dramatic, but the context (humans have been turned into pigs!) and the fact that it’s hilarious being a grown man talking to pigs and hoping they’re humans that were turned into pigs and not just normal pigs.
The Witcher 3’s quests often rely on narrative progression; rather than “go to one hut, go to the second hut, go to the third hut where the pigs are,” you think there’s something fishy about the pigs, you try to figure out why the pigs are weird, once you do, you try to save the pigs by protecting them and leading them to safety. The steps are different every time; it feels more natural and engaging. There’s a sense of progression, rather than feeling like you’re performing a lot of useless action.
The other game had none of this. It was a lot of “search in this circle for x number of things,” or “get me y number of pelts.” It was busywork that didn’t match the character, that didn’t serve any purpose other than to be an arbitrary progression gate.
Good quest design is good storytelling. Good storytelling matters; there’s a reason each scene or beat is there. Turning three cranks to open a floodgate or something isn’t exciting or meaningful. When you design a quest, think about how the player will feel about it. What can you do to surprise and delight them? How can you use the mechanics you have to tell a story? In Paratopic, my game, we used a lot of the same mechanics to do different things. We used shooting mechanics for both photography and actually shooting someone. We gave players dozens of meaningless interactions, like putting out a cigarette, looking at a box of ramen, or squeezing a bottle of ketchup, to give each space a sense of real purpose. The only time we made the player repeat meaningless action was when we wanted to create a sense of boredom that comes with driving for hours across the open countryside.
Making a good quest means making a dramatic quest, one that surprises and delights players. If they can predict what comes next and it doesn’t excite them, then we’ve failed to make great quests.
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