After playing most of the top FO3 quest mods, a couple of thoughts occurred to me that might be worth considering as we look forward to the next iteration of the Fallout series. My background includes working as a beta tester for different computer game producers and serving as a consultant in the development of a highly rated Microsoft game as well as being a computer game player since the days of CP/M and Apple ][+s. The first point is the usefulness of a story. As noted by Seth Schiesel, computer game reviewer for the N.Y. Times on 8/24/10, “Today’s top designers understand that while a game’s biomechanical action may be its most important element, that action has little resonance unless the player has been made to care about the surrounding characters and setting.” In an FO3 mod, of course, the boundaries of the story line are generally established by Fallout. Thus, a story as simple as “Go there and kill all the Raiders” will work. God knows there’s enough of that in the original FO3 quests and a lot of players clearly like settling down to a nice evening of mass slaughter. But to involve the player more, the storyline needs to make the player care about continuing (particularly when encountering the mod’s inevitable bugs). More involving than simply killing lots of Raiders might be, then, finding a dead body with a note describing an ambushed refugee convoy; seeking the convoy and the clues it provides to the whereabouts of the survivors and then finding them (and possibly killing scads of Raiders along the way) is more interesting than just killing Raiders. So, modders might consider the question, “Why would a Fallout Wanderer want to bother?” That is indeed the question, given the number of competing mods. Do not confuse an immersive storyline with complexity or size. Too many modders take on doing too much (“Think of my mod as the same as DLC” – nope, it ain’t, especially if you later write, “I haven’t been around much to finish it as school/job/my sex life as gotten in the way but I’ll probably be working on the conclusion next month.” A prototypical message that will likely be six months old and the mod still hasn’t been finished). Try this approach, commonly used by professional game producers. Diagram a short story/game: Find body and note -> Go to convoy and find note -> Go to Raider camp and rescue hostages. Pretty short and most modders could knock this game out pretty quickly. There’s your “Hostages 1.0”. Let your buddies play it and get it stable. Now draw a line off of the body and note that leads to “Second Note”. This one puts the player on a parallel track to get to the Raider camp, maybe by talking to someone who gave the information about the convoy to the Raiders. You get a chance to interrogate this person and then pick up the quest line. In other words, we add a “branching tree,” Hostages 1.1, to add detail and alternative paths to the mod, all built on the first pass which includes an ending. As we add elements, the mod always has an endpoint – the mod is never something that peters out in a cave somewhere where the designer intended to finish everything off but hasn’t gotten around to it and never will. To avoid over-reaching on a quest mod, avoid the temptation to add in extras that address things you think are wrong with FO3 – angry because you got killed when your grenades didn’t stop the Super Mutants? So you re-write frag grenades to be as powerful as mininukes. These kinds of changes ought to be in a separate “weapons mod” and they ought to be clearly announced. Uber-weapons are tempting but they kick the hell out of play balance unless you want to carefully craft everything, including potential adversaries. In any case, they are distracting in a quest mod: “I want you to figure out what is going on and, by the way, I never like the number of stimpaks in the game so I’m reducing them.” What do the stimpaks have to do with the designer’s quest? Likewise, uber-perks can have the effect of making the rest of the game too much of a cakewalk. When designing your story, remember that if you go too far out of the FO3 style, you run the risk of losing immersion with the result that your quest comes off as odd. Throughout FO3, the player is almost continuously faced with moral decisions – requiring the player to engage in behavior that is to the reverse of their Karma orientation may result in a rejection of the mod, particularly at lower levels when the player is struggling to build up the Karma in one direction or another. If the only way I can get a note needed to move the quest along is by killing an innocent NPC or break into someone’s room, I’m put into an unreasonable bind. So, if you can, try to have multiple paths in terms of Karma. This makes for greater interest: “I can pickpocket NPC Jenny to get the note I need but I might buy it from her or talk her out of it or do a mini-quest for her” provides the player with a richer environment. These choices help in another way to enrich a mod by avoiding linearity. Sometimes linearity is unavoidable but it’s almost always more interesting having more than one way to get from “A” to “B”. Watch for required feats to move a quest along. By this I mean, requiring the player to have a certain level of, for example, computer hacking skill. If the player doesn’t have that level of Science and there’s no other way to continue, the player is left frustrated. Again, multiple paths solve this issue: Maybe I can hack the computer, pick a lock, bribe someone, or get in through the back door. And that speaks to linearity as well. If you are working on a puzzle-oriented mod, which a lot of players like, make sure that you supply enough information that they know what the heck it is they are looking for. If they got a clue to go to a shack in the swamp, then give them an idea what they are supposed to do when they get there, even if it is finding the next clue. And avoid pixel-hunting: “You have to click the wall in the right place to open a door that otherwise shows no signs of being there” is a good way to set up a boring couple of hours and it’s made worse if the player doesn’t have any reason to suspect the door is there AND going through the door is necessary to continue the quest. After all, if there are other things going on around the shack (wandering ghouls, an Enclave patrol, etc.) the player may think those NPCs are what he is there to deal with to further the quest. A lot of that confusion can be avoided by letting the player know why it is important to solve the puzzles in the first place; a note that says something like, “Johnny said he dumped the supplies when the ghouls closed in but his radio transmission was garbled. We did get that he had left a shack somewhere in the north and was trying for the docks.” That gives the players a reason to solve the puzzle and clues to begin and, most importantly from an immersion standpoint, a reason “why” to go through all of this. Try to avoid “gotchas,” an industry phrase of derision that requires a player to learn of something by dying. Go through that door and you’ll die – if the only way to know that is to go through the door, then it’s a gotcha. Leave a clue, like a dead body in front of the door or, better, a door that the player can go through with dead bodies, one of which has a note about tripping a booby-trap and now slowly dying. Looking ahead, the player sees another choice of doors and uses the clue from the dead to alert him or her to the danger and then can begin to can look for and puzzle out clues about the two doors in front of him or her to try to figure out which way to go. A simple example, but path learning by dying is a pretty unimaginative approach to building a quest. Certainly good quest mods can be made that don’t go along with any of my suggestions. They usually require a great deal of thought and planning, which translates often into complexity and developer time, so go for it if you can handle that level of planning and have that amount of time – most of us don’t but I look forward to your efforts if you do. :whistling:
