Have you ever sat down and counted how many different types of quests there are in an RPG? We often hear how many total quests are in a game—Skyrim has 273—but how much variety is there really? Fallout co-creator Tim Cain explains the nine core types of missions you can be given, and, to my surprise, kill and murder are two separate categories.
If you just want to know the nine kinds of quest, then here they are: murder, kill, the infamous fetch quest, collect, delivery, the often maligned escort quest, talk, puzzle, and timed. Murder involves dispatching of a “particular person or set of people,” whereas a kill quest will involve killing a certain amount of generic enemies, like five alligators, Cain explains.
We all know what a fetch quest is—go here, get this item. A collect quest is different in the same way a kill quest is—gather a set amount of an item, like 20 nirnroot. A delivery quest is what Sam does in Death Stranding—you receive an item and take it to a destination or person. An escort quest is similar, only you need to deliver a person instead of an item, so they’re often trickier. All of The Last of Us can be considered one long escort quest.
One that sounds obvious when Cain mentions it but I didn’t think of myself is the talk quest. These typically involve you having to convince an NPC of something, like telling V’s downstairs neighbour in Cyberpunk 2077 to open up and chat to his buddies on the force. Then there’s the puzzle quest, where you’ve got to turn stone pillars or slot gems into holes or aim mirrors a certain way.
And finally, there are timed quests, which a lot of people absolutely despise. Cain says these are “frequently modifiers on all the existing” quests, where you’re given one in-game day to kill those five pesky alligators, but they can be standalone, too, if you just have a specific amount of time to get to a quest receiver.
Cain explains that the more of these quests you have in an RPG, the more player agency there typically is. In the original Fallout, for example, you have to save a woman called Tandi from a band of raiders. You can either kill all the raiders, fight the boss in unarmed combat, buy Tandi, or convince the boss you’re the ghost of his father and convince him to release her peacefully. So, a kill, murder, fetch, and talk solution, respectively.
There is a downside to having lots of quest types, though. “If your budget is fixed, which is 99.999999 percent of budgets, more of one thing means less of another,” Cain says. “If you want all these quest types in your game and you wanna support them all, with all the additional design, code, and art needs that are gonna come with them, and QA and debugging needs, you’re probably gonna have less of something else.”
So, next time you wonder why a game has a bunch of bugs, be grateful for all the quest variety. Or, if there are very few types of quest, marvel at how few bugs there are. Hopefully that’s the way it goes rather than you getting the worst of both worlds: bugs and a lack of variety.
Read the full article here
