Esterhaze
Augur
- Joined
- Jan 15, 2012
- Messages
- 123
The Codex gold standard for the RPG Quest seems to be the branching double-double-crossing skillcheck-heavy investigation with a plenitude of ambiguous choices and horrifying consequences. But I can’t actually think of very many particularly interesting small-scale examples of the above. There may have been a few in Prelude to Darkness. You could probably say “the whole Fallout find the water chip quest” and be technically right. This might mostly be a problem of my poor memory and my almost excusive jump to strategy games in recent years, so help me out here. What are some really great memorable quests? Particularly well written? Ones with satisfying branching? Interesting premises?
I find it a little hard to consider quests in isolation because so much of what makes a memorable quest is usually not in some self contained elegance but in how it fits to the greater context of the game. Like how it works with the games mechanics, how much it allows you to feel like you have some agency in advancing a broader goal, how it updates the gameworld to some new state of affairs.
Like that arms deal in Fallout 2 you are supposed to broker for the Salvatores with some big shots, who turn out to be the fuckin Enclave! (whose name you may not know at this point). Apparently you could even stow aboard their copter and get taken to their base. There wasn’t a whole lot going on in the quest, and I don’t even know how viable a path to the Enclave it ended up being. But that really stuck with me, that I was taking a break from what I thought was the main trail to do some big pimping in Reno and all of a sudden here are the assholes I’m looking for. Some high level faction quest providing another door toward the main goal is a really appealing idea, and in an investigative/strategic sense has its own sort of logic: follow the power to the top.
From an action perspective, infiltration/escape type quests tend to be pretty good if the mechanics of the game can support a little creativity. Another really memorable quest was the break in to save that priest woman from the Ministry of Truth in Morrowind. Maybe because for like the first or second time in the main quest instead of clearing a dungeon and then having some task giver tell you some more of the story, what you were doing actually was the story for once. I guess the key here was that just fighting your way in was pretty hard at non-high levels and would pretty disastrous for your relationship with the Ordinators, and so was a pretty dumb approach. And Morrowind actually had the mechanics to make breaking in interesting (various stealth/magic/Temple faction ranking/items like keys etc could all come into play).
Anyway I should probably play AoD at some point
I find it a little hard to consider quests in isolation because so much of what makes a memorable quest is usually not in some self contained elegance but in how it fits to the greater context of the game. Like how it works with the games mechanics, how much it allows you to feel like you have some agency in advancing a broader goal, how it updates the gameworld to some new state of affairs.
Like that arms deal in Fallout 2 you are supposed to broker for the Salvatores with some big shots, who turn out to be the fuckin Enclave! (whose name you may not know at this point). Apparently you could even stow aboard their copter and get taken to their base. There wasn’t a whole lot going on in the quest, and I don’t even know how viable a path to the Enclave it ended up being. But that really stuck with me, that I was taking a break from what I thought was the main trail to do some big pimping in Reno and all of a sudden here are the assholes I’m looking for. Some high level faction quest providing another door toward the main goal is a really appealing idea, and in an investigative/strategic sense has its own sort of logic: follow the power to the top.
From an action perspective, infiltration/escape type quests tend to be pretty good if the mechanics of the game can support a little creativity. Another really memorable quest was the break in to save that priest woman from the Ministry of Truth in Morrowind. Maybe because for like the first or second time in the main quest instead of clearing a dungeon and then having some task giver tell you some more of the story, what you were doing actually was the story for once. I guess the key here was that just fighting your way in was pretty hard at non-high levels and would pretty disastrous for your relationship with the Ordinators, and so was a pretty dumb approach. And Morrowind actually had the mechanics to make breaking in interesting (various stealth/magic/Temple faction ranking/items like keys etc could all come into play).
Anyway I should probably play AoD at some point
