Cultivating Your MMO Ideas - Wizards and Warriors: Massively Multiplayer Online Game Creation - page 65

Creating Your Basic Quest Lists
Earlier in this chapter, you learned about NPC characters and how to give them
a basic background story/description and detail their job titles. You can see these
details in Figures 3.5, 3.6, and 3.7. Now you can start to build up some basic
quests. Some basic reasons why someone might do a quest are as follows:

n Collect: A common quest in MMOs is to collect a number of a particular
item, such as a flower, bug, body part, or other miscellaneous item.
n Deliver: Take an item or items to a person or place.
n Defeat: The player is sent to defeat a number of enemies, either in an
area that the player already knows, or as a way of opening new areas for
the player to explore.
n Investigate: These types of quests are used to expand on the story, allow-
ing the player to visit new locations.
n Rescue and help: This is used as a story mechanic; the player must
rescue someone either from a difficult situation or from a particular
enemy.
n Travel: The player must visit a particular NPC or travel to a particular
town. These types of quests are usually meant to get the player to move
to a new area once most of the quests are completed in the area that
they are currently in.
n Manufacture: You will need to manufacture some items. This could also
involve the collect quest, where you have to go to a particular area and
collect items to be able to build the specified object.

Now that you have a basic set of quest templates, you can begin to think about
how you will generate your quests. The best way to do this is to use a program
such as Excel to generate a spreadsheet of the quests. You may find that you
have a lot of quests, so you can use Excel ' s tabs (which allows you to separate

data on different pages).

Some of the things that you should consider putting in your quest list are as
follows:

n Quest giver: The name of the person who provides the quest.