Key and Door

[h0rsel0ver]

There are a lot of different paths to take when you're designing a game, and a developer's personal philosophies affect their perception of the work they do. Concepts like "gameplay" and "challenge" become subjective terms relative to a group or individual's vision for a game. I'd like to talk about (and peaceably debate) different design philosophies using Skyrim as a kind of topical touchstone, as I feel it combines a wide variety of design elements, and the quality of their implementation varies as much.

 

I'll start the topic off with my interpretation. I came to this concept while trying to analyze "questing" in various RPGs, and progression based gameplay in general. I wanted to find a common ground or unifying principal.

 

Key and Door philosophy:

Essentially, any task can be broken down into several simple components; prominent ones being journey, obstacle, and goal. For all intents and purposes, both the journey and the goal are aesthetic; they merely define the terms of the experience - they give it flavor and style, and their qualities are dictated by the game's world and law.

So, the meat of any quest is the obstacle itself. The obstacle is the challenge, the meter-stick you measure up to; "I defeated x with y. Before x>y, and I could not win. Now that I have won, y>x!". When I attempted to break down the concept of an "obstacle", I derived two components: the Key and the Door. These are principles, and their meaning is rarely literal. The Door is the nature of the obstacle, and the Key is the method by which you overcome it. An example: "Hero must retrieve item a for their king. Item a is guarded by villain b, who is weak to c. Hero uses a weapon imbued with c on villain b, and acquires a. You can see that the villain is the Door, and the magical weapon is the Key that opens it.

So far, every quest or challenge I've thought of conforms to this pattern. Sometimes the Keys and Doors are well disguised in dialogue trees or are artfully chained into distracting narratives. Sometimes they are literal keys and doors. In rare and delightful occasions they draw from outside of the game, like a puzzle that must be solved externally (in the players mind) - here you have a superposition of Keys and Doors: the puzzle is a Door, the player's mind is the Key; to manually solve the puzzle while or after it's solved mentally, the player must unlock many little Doors (eg: hitting switches in the right order).

 

So, if you've burdened yourself with my thoughts this far, you might be thinking: "What the does this have to do with Skyrim, you boring autist!". Well, I was reading the Those "What have I done?" moments thread in spoilers, and noticed a theme of discontent about the linearity of options in quests and enemy areas, a common criticism of the game. If you're turning the same Key in the same Door over and over again, it doesn't matter how beautiful the journey is, and often, the goal is something incredibly dull; either a MacGuffin for some jerk, or a poorly enchanted piece of gear rarely worth resale.

How do you solve this problem of tedium? You make it hard for the player to notice the underlying mechanics of questing. When Skyrim gets it right, it's engrossing; with great visuals and writing. When it's wrong, it's another boring fetch quest killing samey enemies in samey places.

I think a good quest would have multiple Keys and Doors. The more ways you can solve a problem the more interesting the problem becomes, and it can even raise the difficulty. You define a difficulty rating system based on the leveling mechanics and skill rolls, and you assign quests a difficulty rating. Then you adjust the difficulty of different Doors according to the theme of the quest.

Lets take an infiltration mission for instance -

Thematically it's a stealthy mission, so the primary Door (a lockpick challenge) is leveled to your character. If you've been focusing on stealth tree skills, it's an average challenge. Now you devise several alternate Doors: a hidden path you need to use speechcraft or dumb luck to find, a key you can only retrieve with telekinesis, and direct combat to a lever that opens a gate. These secondary Doors begin to deviate from theme, and so they are leveled higher.

I feel this kind of design breathes life into quest and goes a long way to disguising the repetition inherent in Key and Lock design. It also makes most or all of the world accessible to a character by providing them with different methods of solving. Good writing would give most if not all characters a different reason to perform the quest as well.

 

I want to read your examples of good and bad quests in Skyrim, criticism on my theory, alternate design philosophies and theories, alternate solutions to the problem of tedium, and whatever else you feel is on topic

 

For taking the time to read my thread I award you a Steel War Hammer of Embers (I just know you'll find a use for it)

Edited December 8, 2012 by h0rsel0ver