Timed Quests

We are going to have a game clock going that events in the world take place around. However we are taking great care to make sure that it won't interfere with the completionist desire. :) 

Quoting Vaelzad, reply 1

We are going to have a game clock going that events in the world take place around. However we are taking great care to make sure that it won't interfere with the completionist desire.  

How do you plan on doing that? Wouldn't exploring eat into that clock? I would hate to miss out on contacting a race that's about to be annihilated just because I decided to explore nearby star systems.

I'm exactly the same way IBN. The Kohr-Ah death march killed all the fun for me in SC2. And I don't like keeping 8435 saves to roll back and replay the same thing over again.

Think more Arilou quasi-space portal rather than Kohr-Ah death march. 

^ Oh I'm fine with that. That was actually pretty fun to discover the first time. Also, timed events like this on the planets would be cool too.

Agreed. If the event happens repeatedly, I'm okay with it. That's not really a timed quest but a window of opportunity.

Yeah, we are planning on doing something with the planets as well. I'll get into more details about it later. 

Quoting Vaelzad, reply 7

Yeah, we are planning on doing something with the planets as well. I'll get into more details about it later. 

 

It would be great to see that planets can be "terraformed" or, say, their type and textures changed, e.g. Earhtlike planet turns into radioactive waste once some bad even happens and etc. So that the planets react to quests|events around them and involving them.

Btw. do you plan any slave shields?

Timed quests is fine.  Timed "the whole universe changes and you cannot go back" is not very fun.  I echo the 8000 saves comment.

I like the idea of planitary terraforming, mega-structures, or quests affecting the conditions on them. I know it has been stated that this is NOT a strategy game, but incorporating this element in the game if done gradually by the different races as they move out in the galaxy sound really cool, imo.

A big NO to timed quests. Quests have storylines and conclusions (possibly world-altering), being forced to do something because theres a time limit on it is annoying and ruins the fun of an open world/universe. A big YES to timed events. Events can be reoccuring combat missions, trading opportunites, wormholes to another dimension etc.

I'm fairly sure we won't see a "be here or lose the game by 8pm" type of timed quest. I do think, however, that having to make hard decisions plays well into the RPG element of StarControl 2 - and timed events can be another tool by which decisions are made. The only important thing is that the appropriate time-scale and player knowledge is available. Knowing that something will happen in 1 hour in-game time and periodically receiving the appropriate cues as the event escalates can be a fantastic vehicle to shape the adventure by.

I'm ok with timed events/quests as long as there's a way for me to get back to it. If it's supposed to be really rare / easter eggy, then perhaps just having it so it only happens every [large amount of time] still makes it feel unique and 'be here or miss it', but I can look up the next time it will happen after exploring on my own.

I like exploring on my own as much as possible, but I DO experience the anxiety that I'll miss something that might otherwise be my favorite moment in the game. I'm more happy to put a lot of extra time into one play-through than to do multiple playthroughs (like 400 hours on one game vs a couple 99 hour saves.) So I would tend to go through the game on my own until I've "seen everything" and then go to the internet and see what I missed and try to find it in my game. If I know there are things I will miss and only happen once, then I'll feel like I have to spoil it for myself just to make sure I don't miss them. 

This is, as Henri says, separate from having to make hard decisions or having the effects of losing or winning a battle actually matter. If I was in the midst of doing something and I have to make a decision in a certain amount of time, that seems fine - it's more of trying to juggle multiple world events, planning out all that, etc, where it starts to feel like my job I'm doing so I don't LOSE something (access to content I'd enjoy) instead of gaining something.  

I can already feel the anxiety of missing a timer and thinking there was a piece of the game I'll never have a chance to discover without loading an old save or starting fresh.

An element of time enhances the realism for sure, but I agree it should be in a reoccurring way.  Say, a particular artifact that can only be discovered when a set of planets or systems are lined up in a particular way.

Otherwise, I want to know I can play and not miss anything even if I decide to randomly visit planets until the heat death of the universe.

This is something I am making sure we 100% avoid in the game. We are planning on putting in recurring events, (some with a very long timer) but there won't be any event that you have to reload an old save game to accomplish. 

Good, actually I don't like timed quests as well and it will be great not the "have to" do them.
 

I had a love/hate relationship with the SC II timer. There were times I was absolutely frustrated by it, but there is something to be said in its defense. I feel that in some ways it contributed to making the game world seem alive and dynamic.

In most games the player is the only agent exerting influence and making decisions, and (at best) the world is responsive and changes accordingly, but otherwise mostly static. The world is just there, frozen and awaiting input. In that regard SC II kind of threw curveballs at you. The Pkunk were in a losing war with the Ilwrath, but the conflict refused to patiently wait at the "speed of plot" until the player did something about it, so there was a looming fail state in the form of Pkunk extinction. As a result, in most of my games the Pkunk were quite dead by the end. I hated it, but it made the world feel more impressive.

I don't know, maybe the timers could have been a bit more forgiving. They also inevitably lost much of their appeal on subsequent playthroughs because the changes they brought were always the same. But it's kind of a shame when a game world does absolutely nothing of any consequence until the player intervenes.

I think you could please everyone by including lots of options during game creation. Enable/disable timed quests, static or random galaxy, set the size, number of planets etc etc. You could make every game unique while keeping the central theme or plot static or even randomize parts of the main story.

An example would be (using SC2) that the Ilwrath-Pkunk war could be randomized so that theres a big conflict in the galaxy, but the alien opponents are random and the location could be random. Even the timing could be random, maybe you start a game and the war is nearing a conclusion, maybe it's just getting fired up or maybe there's a cold war situation going on and it goes hot while you're playing. If you haven't met/discovered the aliens involved yet you could hear news from travelers or rumours of something brewing on the other side of the galaxy.

Making the game less static would (in my opinion) vastly enhance replayability.

Agree entirely. One of the most annoying and immersion breaking things I've found in many games, especially open-world style ones, is that something which is critically important just waits for the player to do something about it.

Imagine if you will, a game where in the 'core' storyline, a location is under attack. This location will fall without your assistance (or at least that's what you're told for storyline purposes). You then proceed to go off and complete a load of side quests for the next 10 hours of gameplay time, yet when you head over to the attacked location it's in exactly the same state as if you had visited immidiately after receiving the notification of attack. This gives me a feeling that what I'm doing isn't really affecting the events as they unfold, merely watching them and interacting along a pre-defined arc. Using Dragon Age: Inquisition as an example:

"So, you need me to seal the breach in the Veil to stop the demons entering from the Fade and destroying everything we know? Ok, be with you in a bit, just got to pick herbs in the Hinterlands for the next few days... you'll be ok 'til then, right?" - The Player

Now, I'm a completionist at heart, so I would very much like everything to be completable in one playthrough... however, having this "everything is on hold until the player takes action" style of progression just feels very fake to me, and detracts from the overall experience of the game.

Perhaps a compromise between the two... every in-game event is completable without requiring reloads/replays (as I believe has been mentioned already), and the player themself will instantiate the events initially (or at least be notified that the event is taking place), however some have built in failure conditions if the player does not action them within a certain amount of time? That way, the player (once notified of the event) has the choice of playing each particular event or sitting out of them and seeing where things go from there. Also, the player has the ability to fail something through inaction, giving a sense of urgency which the "everything on hold" method utterly fails to provide.

This should stop the annoyance of having missed an event through just not being in the right place at the right time, but still keep the feeling of urgency to act which keeps the player engaged in what is happening.

Replayablility would be nice. The timers in SC2 weren't great, but they did give you some incentive to try replaying the game (only once or twice, though), to try for different outcomes at things you failed before.

In terms of very randomized scenarios and content, they work well in sandboxes, but things like that are probably difficult to implement in a very story and dialogue heavy game. Random or semi-random star placement to make the map a little bit different each time could work.

Maybe you could use timers influenced by various in-game factors to show shifts and changes in a war, but not have them tied to game ending states. So while you could see the situation in the Ilwrath-Pkunk war progressively getting worse without your intervention (say, by showing the Pkunk territory changing/shrinking), the game would wait with the issue of final defeat/resolution until the player got actively involved. In that way we could have timers making success more difficult with time (Pkunk pushed back to a single holdout world), but not putting the player out of the loop or going "You're late? Ooops, it's all over now, sorry."

Haha, yeah, all manner of news and rumors are a must. Guess no Melnorme merchants to sell them for poor abducted critters this time around, though.

Edit:

I actually like your compromise more than the one I proposed above. I don't mind fail states (I love well written fail states). However, these days doing anything that leads the player into a fail state sadly tends to be unpopular.

Now, I'm a completionist at heart,

Perhaps fail-states can be starts to new opportunities. You might not like all the consequences - but the world offers you new opportunities because of your actions (or lack thereof). Would it also be a completionist plus-point if you require three playthroughs to really experience it all?

I'm aware this is completely subjective opinion, and it does depend on the individual game's implementation, but on the whole I consider that as a minus point based on what I think you mean by "really experience". In my mind, there's a difference between 'playing a game again because I want to experience it in a different way' and 'playing a game again because I was prevented from experiencing one particular section of content'. I can use Dragon Age: Inquisition again as a good example of the latter... to view the content blocked off from one playthrough (example 1: the Templar / Mage decision in the first act), I need to either have a savegame from just before the decision (which we've already established isn't a great option!) or play through the game entirely again and pick the other mission. Admittedly, it's not a huge amount of time needed to replay to get to this stage, but for the part where I'm replaying the game and nothing is really different, I'm doing it because I have to, not because I want to. That's just not enjoyable to me, that's grinding.

In contrast, games such as Deus Ex (the original and to some extent Human Revolution... let's ignore DE:Invisible War existed) I replayed multiple times because I wanted to see how things would go differently if I made different decisions. It's not so much content I get to see which was gated the first time around, rather a different interpretation of the events, and having to use different tactics to solve the puzzles placed in front of me. In fact, thinking about DE:HR now reminds me of a timed mission which I thought was exceptionally well implemented; I'm talking about the hostage rescue mission in the manufacturing plant in Detroit near the start of the game. If you faff about exploring before even getting into the plant, the hostages are already dead by the time you arrive at the entrance, and there's no way you can save them. In a subsequent playthrough, I remembered this and headed straight there, and managed to save the hostages this time around.

DE:HR gave me everything I needed to know that things were on a timer the first time through - in the real world, it's not common for hostage situations to drag out for huge amounts of time, especially if it's because the hostage negotiator is at home pruning his roses or suchlike. But I was playing the meta, I knew it was a game and things would wait for me. When this didn't happen, that was the moment that I was fully immersed in the game, invested in the characters, because I knew that my actions (or lack thereof) would affect what was going on in a real and timely sense.

TL;DR - basically, I'd prefer to want to play through something to get a different experience, than to have to play through to get at something I literally couldn't get at the first time around.

What I hate is when something is timed, but you are never given even a notion of it. It also fails without telling you that. You only find out about it after you check your quest log and there's red mark over it... WTF happened, game? Normally, you're 5-10 saves into the game after the fail trigger too.

Or it's like, yeah I'm about to go to that place where the some critical situation unfolds, only I'll swing by this one spot to complete one little side quest which is nearly on the way to the first place and adds literally 5% extra travel time. And when I come to solve the critical situation - mission is failed... I mean, really? The bad guys got informed that I ignored them for 5 extra minutes, so they killed everybody?...

So far we've been informed that stuff like this isn't in the game.

I'm for "failing" the quests though, but it should be a valid quest completion. Basically, I want to kill the Druuge bastard and get his stuff instead of selling him my crew into slavery for couple of trinkets. And I want it to be a valid story line decision even if it means that I won't ever be able to buy from him anymore (but, I still want to be able to obtain the other stuff he had elsewhere).

Hello everyone!

I have a suggestion.

Perhaps a time-travel method could be implemented in the game similar to what happens in "Harry Potter", or in "Final Fantasy XIII-2" / "UQ Holder".

That's basically 2 techniques.

1/ Twin manifestation - In Harry Potter you have the 3 kids shadow their own selves and help themselves to return to the future at the same point in time.

2/ Singularity manifestation - You travel to your past self with your future knowledge (either alone or with your crew).

Either technique could be implemented but perhaps the Twin manifestation may be more relevant.

The player could obtain a time warping device close to the end of the game that allows localised time travel but you cannot exist in the same proximity as your past self either physically or timewise (that is, forbidden to be in the same location you past self has been in the last week) . In this way you could "go back" to any missed events and do them and then continue the timeline and have the item or have the aliens you saved contact you.

But still having a changing and evolving universe is important. All great games had changing environments. If you look at games like Dune (1 and 2). The enemy didn't just sit on their imperial/harkonnen asses while you took over territory, they fought back. Sure having all the time in the world to explore is fun. But what makes us mortal is what makes our lives interesting. In the same way 'time' brings mortality to a game. As the saying goes, "Time waits for no one"!

The aim of the time-travel is not to change the past to affect the future (because you can't without creating a possible paradox), but to do things that your past self missed. Things you can do without creating a paradox. Save a race but have them communicate with your future self to offer support their support. Find an artifact but of course it will be your future self that takes it back to the future so it would not affect any timeline. So basically you are using time-travel to be at 2 places at the same time.

I'm getting on my soapbox, and I'm bringing out the big guns.

"If there was one thing I could go back in time and change, it would be to remove any timed quest from Fallout. I just didn't like the false sense of urgency. I also felt like the player had the sense he had to rush through the game and miss fun things to do because of that stupid waterchip timer." - Tim Cain, creator of Fallout

I agree with Tim. 

One person who disagreed with Tim, though, was Chris Avellone. Here are his thoughts on timed quests. Chris worked on Fallout 2.

From a gamemaster/game designer perspective, the idea of time limits is appealing. It creates pressure, and it creates an urgency for the player that's hard to beat.

In Fallout 1, the skill system and the plot was built around the design that you only had a certain number of days to find the water chip for your vault and then defeat the mutant army or game over. If you don't recall that, then chances are you played it with the patch that removed that design element, as the mutant-hunting-your-Vault-down-time-limit was patched out of the game in 1.1 because of the outcry.

So I love time limits. In Fallout 1, it was appropriate because:

- It reinforced the urgency and pressure of saving your Vault.
- It reinforced the brutal nature of the world you were in.
- It made time-usage skills more risky for players to use. Sure, Doctor was helpful, but you had to be careful because it could consume a lot of time if used repeatedly.

Players reacted negatively because:

- The time limit was unforgiving.
- It prevented them from exploring areas at their leisure, which undermined the non-linearity of the game -- suddenly you didn't want to go everywhere and explore everything, because the clock was ticking.
- It couldn't be reset/extended beyond the time limit except in a few places in the game, and only a finite number of times.

So the question becomes - if I, as a game designer, want to introduce the same level of time pressure and instill the player with a sense of urgency, what can I do?

System Shock 2 had an elegant answer to this: It associated all the time limits with your inventory items. If you powered up an implant, it had X amount of time to function before you needed to recharge it. Here's the conditions:

- It was forgiving. When the time limit ran out, you would be inconvenienced, not fail the game.
- It could be reset. The player had some measure of control over resetting this time limit.
- Yet, it STILL created a sense of urgency while exploring the environment - the loss of item functionality was enough of an inconvenience that it made you keep an eye out for recharge stations and keep an eye on the clock for when you needed to start heading back to get recharged.

Even though Chris loved time limits, he agreed with Tim's outlook of timed quests stifling the fun and non-linearity of the game. This can actually be seen in Fallout 2 because Fallout 2 did not have a quest timer. Yet the team implemented a way to make your quest feel urgent. You received messages from the tribe's shaman to try and urge you along... but you didn't have to pay attention to it if you didn't want to.

So... Give me your repeated cries for help to stoke urgency, but let me put them on mute! Give me a timer... that I can reset! Make any timer failure be an inconvenience I can reverse! Make the game forgiving, and I will love it. But... Don't make me fly to Procyon by Stardate 2215, or you're going to ruin my whole day. I'm awful at being punctual.