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Quest Design of Towers of Aghasba

Towers of Aghasba is an open-world multiplayer RPG with city-building and ecosystem elements set in a vast, narrative-rich fantasy open world. The quests in the game are intended to give players opportunities to interact with the various sandbox systems while uncovering the lore and narrative of the game.

Core responsibilities as lead quest designer

As the sole designer in charge of not only the quest system, but also designing and implementing every single quest in the game, I was responsible for every quest in the game from conceptualization to final implementation, which involved:

  • Designing the quest system, including ways to accept, track, communicate, and complete quests.
  • Ensure every necessary game system is linked to the quest system to be utilized in quests.
  • Work with other designers and narrative to plan out quests.
  • Establish pipelines for planning and implementing quests from conceptualization to final implementation.
  • Map out the intended quest flow not only for each individual quest, but also for the flow of quests throughout the game.
  • Conceptualize the best way to leverage existing game systems to be utilized in quests.
  • Convert narrative ideas and storylines into playable quests by integrating them with game systems.
  • Work with engineering teams to implement custom quest events.
  • Work with art, sound, and animation teams to create custom assets to be utilized in quests.
  • Implement every single quest in the game from a prototyping stage to final polish quality.
  • Setup custom functionality and quest events using Unreal Blueprints when required.
  • Modified the space composition and level design of the open world to best suit certain quests based on the desired player experience.
  • Balanced combat encounters in quests to best fit the desired challenge and difficulty of quests.
  • Collect feedback on quests and iterate on design.

Example of Quest Flow Planning

Role of Quests in Towers of Aghasba

Quests are a convenient way to communicate essential information, provide goals, and unlock content for players. Thus, quests in Towers of Aghasba are used to:

  1. Teach/ Introduce a gameplay system
  2. Explore various narratives and storylines.
  3. Gate and modulate the progression of the game, its systems, and its content.
  4. Provide various extrinsic motivations for the player to work towards from early game to end game.

Rules for the Quest Design

To ensure that the quests are robust, scalable, and consistent, a general set of ground rules for the quest design were established.

  • All quests should be completable by all players present in a world in co-op. A client completing a quest in another world will not affect their quest state in their own world.
  • Initial quests would be more linear with granular quest steps/ objectives introduce gameplay system and essential narrative.
  • As the game progresses, the quests would open up with broader objectives that could be completed in more non-linear methods.
  • Main Quests are quests that every player is expected to complete to progress through the game.
  • Side Quests are quests that are optional for players to accept or complete.
  • To satisfy the core-pillar of freedom in the game, the player is never forced to focus on only a single quest at a time, and can easily switch their focus between any of the quests in-progress.

Quest Design Process

Due to being a small team with limited scope, budget, and bandwidth, I established a pipeline that allowed us to quickly plan, prototype, implement, and test quests efficiently.

The first step was to establish whether the priority was to have players interact with gameplay system or to experience a narrative.

Interact w/ gameplay systems

This is the desired process for planning quests when the core focus of the quest is for the player to interact with a game system more:

  1. Highlight the gameplay system(s) we intend the player to interact with.
  2. Flesh out all the quest steps/ player actions needed to interact with the necessary game system(s).
  3. Plan out the auxiliary quest details like
    1. When should this quest be available?
    2. What NPCs should be involved in this quest?
    3. What locations in the world will be involved in the quests?
    4. What are the other gameplay/ progression/ quest dependencies on this quest being accepted or completed?
    5. What should be the challenge/ difficulty involved with the quest?
  4. Check if Quest System is capable of implementing the planned quest.
    1. If no, work with engineering to see if extending the quest system to implement the quest is within scope.
    2. If out of scope, revisit quest steps to work with existing quest system functionality.
  5. Work with narrative to find existing lore or develop narrative to wrap the quest around.
  6. Implement first pass of the quest for testing (with placeholder assets if necessary).
  7. Receive feedback on quest and iterate on design and balancing.
  8. Finalize quest details:
    1. Work with narrative team on final writing and text.
    2. Work with art to get final art, animation, and VFX implemented (if necessary).

This approach is primarily used for quests when:

  • we are introducing the player to a new system, or
  • ensuring that the player has reached a certain level of progression in the game.
  • Giving player a broad, extrinsic goal to work towards.

Experience a Narrative

This is the desired process for planning quests when the core focus of the quest is having players experience or uncover a part of the narrative or lore:

  1. Flesh out the general lore/ narrative that we intend the player to experience with the narrative team.
  2. Plan out the auxiliary narrative elements:
    1. What NPCs are involved with this storyline/ narrative?
    2. What locations in the game world need to be used?
    3. The connection of this narrative with other narratives and quests.
  3. Integrate narrative moments with appropriate available gameplay systems to form quest steps/ player actions.
  4. Check if Quest System is capable of implementing the planned quest.
    1. If no, work with engineering to see if extending the quest system to implement the quest is within scope.
    2. If out of scope, revisit quest steps to work with existing quest system functionality.
  5. Integrate this quest into the overall quest flow based on narrative and player progression.
  6. Implement first pass of the quest for testing (with placeholder assets if necessary).
  7. Receive feedback on quest and iterate on design and balancing.
  8. Finalize quest details:
    1. Work with narrative team on final writing and text.
    2. Work with art to get final art, animation, and VFX implemented (if necessary).

This approach is primarily used when:

  • There is a specific narrative/ storyline for the player to experience or uncover.

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