Quest Clutter

The final finishing touches have been placed on the V636 quest, and I am satisfied with what I have.  I can always tweak and adjust the quest on subsequent updates.

Working on this quest, plus some recent comments on the Sentinel, has put my brain into a creative overload. I've been jotting notes on loose scraps of paper and now this collection looks like some sort of a crime scene involving a piñata.  I now have a better idea of how long it takes to develop a quest, implement it and tune it.  I would like to think it possible to get three simple quests in per update, or maybe one involved quest.  This is assuming that the quest is the only project on which I work, which, between you, I and the fence post, is an unrealistic assumption.

Suppose for a moment that I manage to introduce that many quests per update.  Then what?  What happens after a quest is introduced and everyone has completed it?  I foresee an issue of quest overload followed by quest clutter and quest apathy.  The real challenge is making each new quest refreshing and exciting from the previous quests.  It would be easy enough to add a Scavenger Hunt-type quest that involves collecting X number of item Y, but does changing the values of X and Y make the quest any more interesting?

Perhaps one approach is to have temporary quests, where a new quest is only available for the duration of the current Chaos Storm, after which time it becomes history.  Some players may complete the quest, others may just hear of it after the fact.  Once-per-update quests could be a vehicle for introducing new test items: players who complete the special Darshak story-quest, for example, receive a Honed Cutlass as a reward item.

Based on the ideas flowing from the Sentinel, suggestions by numerous players, and plus my own zany ideas, I predict that Clan Lord will one day have more quests than it has players.  I have mixed feelings on working towards that goal.

(And I think that it's time that I add a "Quests" label to this blog.  I discuss them a lot.)