I continue my efforts to understand how story has been realized in other games, today by looking at The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. I note that it has a structure quite different from the ones I've looked at earlier, with a single “quest” being equivalent to what I have up to now thought of as a “quest chain”, instead having each quest divided into “stages”—equivalent to individual “quests” in my current notes. Confusing? Yes, but it's mostly an issue of terminology and nothing fundamentally different.

I'm growing unsure of whether my concept of “quest archetypes” is useful or not. I still believe they are an accurate representation of the mechanics I have observed in actual games... but I'm wondering whether I'm simply just recopying the quests directly from their sources, with no particular useful group system being derived from it. Perhaps it's just the use of the word “archetype” that's throwing this off; they may be more specific than that.

Now, the upshot of this is that they may distract me from the true goal of the project, which is to generate missions and storylines. I would like to avoid “patternism”, where the result is just a series of templates shoddily sewn together, but these archetypes are typical templates and I fear that using them outright would be counter-productive. Of course, this raises the question: then what should I be doing instead?

I'm not quite willing to give up on it yet though. At the very least it's good analysis of what has already been done, and a solid background is vital to doing new things, and I still have good feelings about the more mechanistic quest objectives I've found; perhaps because they are on such a level that they will be ubiquitous no matter what you do while at the same time being so basic that few people would question their inclusion. It's just the basic “stuff you do”, and the interesting parts are sort of above or around that. In other words, it's what we make with the objectives we have at hand that makes the greatest difference here, not identifying lots and lots of alternative and less genericized objectives.

Following this train of thought, it's become obvious that our main challenge is to figure out ways to combine objectives to create quests that are consistent (they make internal sense), relevant (they make external sense), believable (it's possible for the player to believe the story is authentic to some degree) and entertaining (they are fun to play through). This is certainly going to be easier said than done... I think I could use some more ideas and guidance here. Hmm.