Today I want to tell you about one not quite familiar profession in the industry - quest-technician. My path to it was long and winding. Soon I will be 32 years old, and I found the game from the very beginning, when there was no Internet, CD-ROM and color monitors. I have played them since the last century. Some things seemed wrong, I wanted to change them - but I came to the profession after long throwings and wanderings. Institute, army, family. I radically changed my profession and went into game design. A suitable vacancy - quest technician - was in the project "Legend". Responsibilities included maintaining the project, developing quests and game events. I liked it then, and I still like it.

At the time of black and white monitors were not only text games. At the same time, the action genre developed. Today, the world of games is increasingly turning out. For example, in recent years not a single game has been released, where there would be an input line for the user. That is, all the answers you need to choose, and not enter yourself. There is a series of RPG-games Might and Magic , just do not confuse with Heroes. The first and second parts were black and white, the third was 16 colors, and the sixth was already with pseudo-3D. There were interesting quests, and it was necessary to look for the word, finding the letter, to enter different phrases, to which it was necessary to guess. Now you will not find the input window anywhere. And the younger generation of players is no longer aware of the interesting story finds in the old games, they are again perceived quite positively. Therefore, the old techniques are eternal, they can be used time after time, just in the new functionality.

The history of the development of quests went from difficult to simple. There used to be an input line in which the answers were entered in free form. And then there were just lists of ready-made answers. Now, when the market of browser games is gradually fading away, and mobile games are developing at a frantic pace, the quests have been transformed into so-called activity - when you enter the game every day, you do something, and for this you are given a reward. No need to take NPC to your team, or at least go to them for tasks. The concept of a player’s location in the game world has also ceased to exist. This is the rendering of games. There are more and more casual games, and fewer hardcore games. But casual players do not need quests, they do not want to strain and look for NPC, to perform tasks. They just want to press a button and pick up the reward - that's all they can do. I do not like it, but this is the spirit of the times.
')

Legend

Now I work in a division of the IT Territory studio. The first project of the studio was the Territory game. It was made in the wake of the popularity of another project - Fight Club. Legend , a browser-based MMORPG, was the second project of the studio, it was developed based on the BC Territory, only on more modern graphics with flash-fights and other things. The game turned out quite successful, the former players of the BC and the Territory were brought up, and new ones came. The legend has repeatedly won the Runet Prize as the best game; tens of millions of users are now registered in it. This is a shareware game, that is, without a subscription fee, but in it you can buy game benefits for real money. By today's standards, this project is quite old, and it was written by more than one generation of programmers. Therefore, in the Legend there is such a functional that no one of the current admins knows about and which does not work exactly as it should.

Having become the quest technician of this project, I began to introduce elements from the old games into it. For example, in the Space Rangers there was a quest “Feeding Penchryak”, when a player is given an animal, and with the help of certain objects and food, certain characteristics must be improved, while respecting their balance. One object enhances something, the other one lowers, the third multiplies, that is, it was a kind of mathematical task, moreover in text form. After the release of the film “Guardians of the Galaxy”, I did in the NPC Legend of Little Groot. Only we have his name is Simon, but everyone understands that this is Grute, because this is a talking plant in a pot. The player gets a seed from which little Simon grows. He needed to be fed in several stages with different foods. One item increased one characteristic, the other two lowered, and it was necessary to display a certain number. The players liked it, although only a few people remembered about the Space Rangers. So it turned out a kind of hybrid of new and old. But in order to implement this on the functionality of the Legend, I had to make some edits to the admin panel.

For a long time I was tempted to somehow enter the input line into the game. But it seems to me that modern players will not appreciate this. Such a move will appeal to the units, the older players, and for the young and the younger generation this will be just wildness. Another obstacle to returning the input string is the localization problem. What is understandable in Russian can be quite different when translated. For example, in Legend there is an event where a player must collect runaway livestock: pigs, chickens, etc. When localization was done for Turkey, the pigs were forced to completely abandon. As a result, now the event looks like: "Collect pigs" - but there are no pigs. They were simply cut out for religious reasons. So, the input line, unfortunately, is in the past, and hardly anyone will return to it.

Questicate tasks

My duties as a quest technique were:

• Develop new events for the game. These are events in which it would be interesting for the players to participate, including those related to racial confrontation: in the Legend there are two races - people and magmars.
• Tuning bots. How much they should beat, how much money should fall from them, etc.
• Creating reputations. In the Legend, there are about 30 of them, each has five degrees, and new reputations are constantly appearing.
• Development quests. It looked like this: for some time you go in search of inspiration, practically you do nothing. Then you write a concept quest - approximate goals of the player and a description of his actions. Further, it is given to the writers, they give the concept a literary look, paint NP cues. Then you need to order the artists drawing quest bots. Other employees write scripts for them. Also, some quests require the work of programmers to make changes to the game mechanics. When everything is ready, you need to assemble the components together and start the quest.

All this took a lot of time, because simple quests like bring-feed-get-kill-me didn't like. I always thought of something that I myself was afraid to take after. And when you start the finished quest, it is always interesting to first go through it yourself, to feel that this all works. And the working day was never enough. Then, when everything is ready, the quest is launched, you sit and think: “Nakosyachil or not? Are there any bugs? As a rule, after launching the quest, a forum is created on the forum in which players are unsubscribed - this gives a good feedback on the results of your work. Also, the quality can be estimated by statistics: how many players took the quest, how many did, how many refused.

The important point is the quest reward. It should not be redundant, it is not necessary to give a ton of gold, enough new degrees of freedom. Therefore, it is necessary to show fiction. Sometimes it’s harder to come up with what to do for a quest than it’s when you’ve done it yourself. You can give consumables, but it is not interesting to anyone. Any artifact, even if not strong, but unique, which is given once per game, or creatures that you can call upon your side in battle, is already interesting. But to realize this, you have to spend a lot of time.

I ran quests in series of 8-12 pieces, connected with each other. The most memorable was the line of quests with vampires. I did it more than a year, but did not have time to finish, because I was transferred to another project. So, there was a complex storyline, five vampire lords, each with its own color. They had a queen who was enchanted many years ago. And there was a paladin, whom the vampires lured to their dark side. In these vampire quests there is a choice: for example, if a player received an artifact, then he could attribute it to good people or villains. Or talking to the vampire lord, and he said: “Get on my side. Give you money "or" Kill me. " In the end, all the same, the plot was reduced to some one solutions: if you attributed the artifact to the villains, then in the next quest, your task was to take it away from them. If you betrayed a paladin and took the side of the vampire lord, then in the next quest the vampire lord betrayed you. It took about a month and a half to prepare each quest series. I tried to use mechanics that were not used in the Legend before. Say, Groot feeding is a quest from this line. Or the generation of a unique nine-digit cipher for each player, as a result of which you can not complete the quest once, and the rest will use your hint.

When I first came to the project, I had to spend 15 bonuses to complete the first quest I had invented, and there were 20 goals in it. This is a kind of volume quest measure: how many bonuses are needed for it and how many goals are there in it. My last quest had already about 150 goals and demanded 500 bonuses - it was more than appeared in the Legend for 3-4 years.

Search inspiration

When searching for ideas for quests, I rarely focused on the wishes of the players themselves. There are many of them, and each has its own opinion. If you try to please everyone, in the end you will not please anyone - and they will always be unhappy. It happens, you sit, you think, nothing comes to mind. Then suddenly you sit down, and a quest is written word by word. I looked around, earned some money, polished up - you can do it. It happens, you watch a movie, a TV series or you read a book, you meet some interesting plot twist, take a note. After two or three years, you remember and realize, when you have to go to the place. We can say that writing a good quest is like writing a script. It happens that the management sets clear deadlines, for example, the next launch of the continuation of the line - in three weeks. Take out and put it down. And there is a choice: either to make it cheap and cheerful, that is, according to the principle of “take more, throw further”, or spend non-working time in order not to lose quality. I think that for quest-technicians this is not the best way to organize work.

Often inspiration comes to me when I ride a motorcycle, attention is occupied by the road, but some part of the brain remains free, and it has nothing to do. It happens, you will come, and from somewhere thoughts and answers arise to the questions that you have been looking for for weeks and months.

Reflections on the future

The future is the casual mobile gaming market. The rate will be on players who do not bother, play in the subway on the way from home to work, or simply wait for some events in the game. People spend less time on one gaming session. If before there were games that were interesting to play for hours, now the success of the latest mobile games comes down to the fact that they do not allow players to play themselves. There appeared a resource such as endurance, energy, everywhere is called differently - it is spent on the player to perform certain actions. After this resource is over, you must either wait for it to fill up over time, or buy for money. As a rule, for a game to be successful, free energy should be enough for 1-2 hours of active play per day. And the games themselves develop in such a way that the players enter them more often, but spend less time, for 5-10 minutes.

Previously, for example, on the PlayStation there was a so-called fourth wall effect - in the game you just had to insert the joystick into another port of the console, because it was the only way you could kill the boss who said that he could read all your moves. That is, the player, performing some action in the real world, influenced the game. And the fourth wall - the TV screen - collapsed. And now everyone is talking about virtual reality, about full 3D, and so on, but almost no one from the game manufacturers is trying to destroy this wall. So you can safely talk about the death of such a genre as a quest.

Perhaps in the future they will figure out how to connect computer and mobile games with quests in reality, which have now become very popular with us. It is possible that such games will occupy their own niche, but for the time being it has not gained mass distribution. Not everyone is ready to do quests in reality. And as for the financial issue, no one yet knows how to make money on it, and the task of game developers is precisely that the game gives a profit. And the ways to monetize games today are changing with cosmic speed — something that would have gone a year ago is no longer working. On the one hand, the game industry is evolving, but it is a development in breadth. Qualitative growth is absent. For example, new genres do not appear. If before there were popular quests and shooters, now the same shooters just rivet on an industrial scale.

The essence of the quest lies not only in the complexity of the actions that the player must take, but also in the originality of the goals. You can do the quest in one action, but with some interesting goal, or not so much interesting, as relevant. For example, quests-activity, which are confined to some events, holidays. That is, everything goes in the direction of simplification - both the functionality and the plot itself and the goals of the game. A vivid illustration of this thesis is the Killing Game. Here the player controls the hero who was killed, he is investigating "his" murder, that is, it is a full-fledged, fairly high-budget game. But she did not become popular. Now the quest as an independent genre practically no longer exists. He entered into a criminal relationship with other genres.

Danila Shikuts
Quest Technician IT Territory Studio, Mail.Ru Group