Quest
Quest is a game term for most RPGs to describe how a character progresses through the story or accomplishes tasks. Quests are missions with varying levels of complicated objectives, normally giving the player experience, gold, items or other rewards when completed.
Quests in Diablo III will be made more in line with the story, and less obtrusive than traditional action RPGs.
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Diablo III Quests
The D3 Team wants to improve on how quests were handled in Diablo II. They want the major quests to be interesting, important, and plot-driven. Many of these quests will be character-specific; your character won't (always) just be an errand boy and the quest won't just be something minor; it will advance the story. Another type of quest are the "adventures" which are semi-random and tied to locations in the game.
Quest Interface
How quests will be presented to the player is still under construction, since the game is nowhere near finished, but the interface and menus seen in the BlizzCon demo in October 2008 were quite similar to Diablo II's. This is to be expected; the system worked and was functional, so why reinvent the wheel? When an NPC has a quest to give there's an exclamation mark (!) over their head, and when the quest is received a banner pops up with the specific quest instructions.
Once undertaken, quests can be accessed from a Quest menu that shows all active quests, and allows the player to replay the various quest dialogues. All fairly standard RPG stuff.
Quests as Story
The D3 Team is trying to make Diablo III much more story-driven. They want the characters to be individuals and to be important figures in the world; not just interchangeable errand boys, as they usually were in Diablo II. Leonard Boyarsky talked about this in an interview in September, 2008.[1]
The areas of story and character development will now be in focus, and the team wants the players to feel like they are having an effect on the world, which can also affect the character. They don't want the game to be either action or RPG, the two can mix. The story elements just need to be more engaging "without interfering with the hack-and-slash gameplay". It's possible for players to opt out if they don't care about it, "but if you do care about it, the story will bring a whole extra level of involvement to the game experience," Boyarsky said. As few as possible quests will be mandatory, and instead having a lots of voluntary quests and random quests if you want to.
The team is also "doing a lot with scripted sequences and books that you can read in the game, but once again, you can completely avoid these things if they don't interest you."
Specifics about quests related to the lore/story of the game is not given out yet but it was discussed in the WWI 2008 Lore and Environmental Art Panel, when a fan asked if there would be quests to obtain special items, such as the Horadric Cube. The team at the panel said they "look into the story and lore and we want that to drive the gameplay and quests."
Quests will be related to the lore and resonate with the main story, driving gameplay: "We don't want to have quests just to get this or that." They don't know if the Horadric Cube specifically will be in the game, but since players love it, they work on story side with game and item designers to bring gameplay aspects like the Cube in "organically." The D2 team never set out to make the Horadric Cube, it came about through the design process.
Known Quests
The first few quests to be revealed were seen in the BlizzCon demo in October 2008. They were simple, straight-forward quests that could fit neatly into the small dungeon that was enabled in that show build, but they give some idea of how quests will work in the game. Click the following links to read the individual articles about each quest.
Scripted Events
Jay Wilson talked about some of the scripted events seen in the BlizzCon demo in an interview in December, 2008.[2]
- We had a lot of [scripted events] in our BlizzCon build. [In one of them, there was] a series of ghosts at an altar who were seeking an object that you'd get to prove your worth. If you did get it, then they would test you by having big powerful monsters attack you -- and if you passed, you got a nice reward. Another one was coming across some fellow adventurers stranded in a dungeon who'd need your help to get out.
Several of these scripted events will be used in Diablo III. Both as the mandatory quests as well as the optional, random and encounter/adventure type quests.
Adventures
Adventures are mini-quests that don't tie into the overall plot. They're semi-random, and may have valuable rewards, but don't need to be completed to advance through an Act. The D3 Team described them in the WWI 2008 Design Fundamentals Panel. They will expand the randomness of Diablo 1 and Diablo 2 with intricate event almost anywhere in the game world.
Wilson said "you could come across a particular area in the outdoor world with a variety of possible elements in it. One game it could be a old abandoned house to explore. Maybe it's infested with crazy undead guys, and as you clean it out you learn the story of the family who lived there. Another game that same area might instead have a clearing where a cult is performing a summoning ritual. Another game might feature a caravan that needs protection from marauding monsters, or escort to the nearest town. Another game you might find a boss monster there. Or you might just get random monsters."
Every time you go through the game, the team want you to experience different things. Randomization will be used in a good way to make things replayable. The game will be fun to keep coming back to.
Since that early panel discussion the team has backed off of strictly defining Quests vs. Adventures. vs. Events. They seem to be using the names a bit more elastically now, as evidenced by Jay Wilson's reply to a question in a December 2008 interview with 1up.com.
- "...there are a lot of different kinds of scenarios; you'd run into people who would need to be escorted or a caravan that's been stranded. And if you stick around and protect [the caravan] for a few minutes from [an attack] that would occur, you'd get a reward. Most of these are fairly optional, where the player can decide whether he wants to do them or not, but we try to reward them well and make them pretty fun. The biggest goal we have with these is that we want to change what the player is doing. Whenever you can basically take the core game and make the player play it in a slightly different way, it makes the game a lot more interesting and keeps it from being tedious. You go from "I'm killing monsters aimlessly" to "I'm now killing monsters to protect this thing." That's easily a more interesting scenario, because it's different than what you were doing, and that's our main goal with that.
Jay also disclosed that the adventures (or events) are pre-scripted and written just for that area of the dungeon. Basically, the D3 Team writes, say, 15 possible mini-quests/adventures/events for a dungeon area, of which only a few will spawn in any given game. This makes the content semi-random; players will see different events in an area each time they play it, and will need to play a given area many times to see every possible event in it. And since the team can add in more such events during patches, the content can be perpetually refreshed. It's also possible that rare events might be incorporated; ones that would only spawn ever few hundred games, making it possible for players to get surprises months or even years after the game's release.
Class-Specific Quests
Some of the Quests (and adventures?) will be character-specific, offered only to characters of a given class, or else customized in some particular way for your character's specific class. This was covered in the WWI 2008 Denizens of Diablo panel.
- We'll also have various class quests that will be very interesting. Each class will have different views of the story that will play out through conversations. Bottom line beyond all this is it gives us a way to put the hero at the center of the story. Your hero can drive the story as opposed to being errand boy. You can decide best thing to do. Villages can be cowardly, you can suggest we need to go do this, not just me. I can take control because no one else will. Puts you at center of the action. Makes char have more of a hero feel.
How this sort of thing would work in a party game, where there were characters of different classes playing together, remains to be seen. Perhaps some quests would only appear in single player games, while others would work for mixed parties, with the goals of the quest the same and only the dialogue differing for each class.
How Many Quests?
The D3 Team has said that D3 will be about the same size as D2, but that it will have many more quests. This total presumably includes the smaller adventures, as well as main plot-driving quests. Jay Wilson commented on this in an interview with German site 4players.de.
- We believe Diablo 2 was a very good size, even with the number of quests. In any case, more than in Diablo 2, Diablo 3 will have more quests and many of them have a much stronger tie to the game. Compare this to Diablo 2, where quests generally came in 6 per Act, but in Diablo 3 we have no quest limit. So we can continue to insert as many quests as we like, until we feel that we've got a good amount and there aren't too many. We want to concentrate on quests that are really fun and contribute to the game. If I have to come up with a number, I'd say there's probably twice as many quests, but I wouldn't nail it down like that. It could still be more or less at this point.
NPC Conversations
NPC conversations in Diablo III are shown in the normal game screen. The camera merely zooms in a bit. The conversation is ended and the screen returns to normal if you click anywhere outside of the dialogue tree, or press the space bar or Esc key.
When the game debuted at the WWI event in June 2008, NPC conversations were portrayed in a special pop up window display which you can see below. This approach was abandoned between the June premiere and BlizzCon in October, since the D3 Team felt that it took players out of the flow of the game.
