Questing

Happy Thursday!  I've got a headache and I'm real sleepy and tomorrow is Friday so this will be short.

Carolyn got Borderlands 2, right?  It's just like the first one only it's huge and you don't know where anything is and there's slot machines and the cars are better and the multiplayer is better and the baby spiderants run away from you which is adorable.  I'm playing as Maya and Carolyn is Axton, and our action skills are highly complementary.  I finally got to add some fire damage to mine today, which is basically all I ever wanted.

Borderlands is cool because it's a little bit of everything that's great.  It's a first person shooter that's also an RPG with stats and levels and skill trees and loot and upgrades and quest objectives and exploring.  Also something that's really standing out with this sequel is that it's chock full of nerdy allusions.  Last time we had to track down some aviators and burn their volleyball net.  Today we had to deliver some pizza to the sewers and fight some mutant ninjas.  One of Maya's outfits is called "Rose Tailor."

The thing with the quest system, though, is that you have certain characters who need you to do certain things for them in order to progress the story, get from town to town, and unlock pieces of the world.  Then there are people who just want you do go burn down volleyball nets.  Sometimes you have to finish a story quest in order to unlock a character who then will give you more story quests AND more side quests.  The benefit of doing sidequests is the additional experience and money and loot and the good time it will be.

The thing is, when you get right down to it, this is the mechanism that I'm trying to capture in my own RPG hybrid game.  Like, every part of it.  The first person you meet makes not only the a Skyrim reference, but a classic Zelda one as well.  But more importantly, you as a player actually have no interaction with the in-game characters outside of the scripted quest dialogue.  There's no Dungeon Master role playing along with you.  Your input in the story basically boils down to do you want to do this mission now or later? and you are given the outcome based on your successful completion of it. 

I think this is sounding like a bad thing, but all I mean is that's how it has to be, when your quests and NPCs and general world information is necessarily constrained to text on cards delivered in a certain order.  I'm just saying I think Borderlands is my precedent for implementing this system.

That being said, maybe I should add some sort of bounty board system, where you can go and pick up side quests without having to wait for them to come to you (through random draws of an exploration deck, which is the mechanic in place at the moment). 

Where was I?  Oh yes, I was going to sleep.

-Steph