Nine types of quests

Tim Cain, producer and lead programmer of Fallout, posted a video to his Youtube channel a few weeks ago outlining what he sees as the nine basic types of quests that are used in C.R.P.G.s. I first heard about this on an episode of Total Playtime and then yesterday Brendan Caldwell also talked about it on new games site Jank. I left a comment on that article but I want to expand on what I said here.

Rather thank type up my own summary of Cain’s list I will simply steal Caldwell’s:

• Murder: You must assassinate a specific person or persons (eg. kill King Flugwump).
• Kill: You must kill a set number of particular enemy (eg. kill 5 barn ogres).
• Fetch: You must go find a particular item, and often bring it somewhere (eg. get the rot goblet).
• Collect: You must gather a set number of particular item (eg. gather 10 dreadpigeon beaks)
• Delivery: You’re given an item and told to bring it elsewhere (eg. deliver ogre ham to Prince Dinkdonk)
• Escort: You are given a person and told to bring them somewhere, usually protecting them from danger (eg. escort Useless Joe to the tavern).
• Talk: You must simply talk to an NPC (or many NPCs in a sequence) often to convince or persuade (eg. tell Prince Dinkdonk the rebels will attack).
• Puzzle: You must solve a mechanical puzzle to proceed (eg. escape the chamber of bloodpuzzles).
• Timed: Any of the above quests, but you also have limited time.

On the podcast and in his article Caldwell takes issue with such simple categories and tries to come up with examples that blur the lines or do not fit easily into a single type, but I think that there is misunderstanding about what is being said here. Cain is a programmer. His video discusses how including more types of quests requires more time and resources to be spent coding and testing each type. “Type of quest” here should not be taken to mean a category of narrative that the player character will engage in, nor even describing the experience that the player will have, but instead the types of interactions with various gameplay systems that can be monitored in order to set an event flag.

Caldwell asks how would one categorise an Assassin’s Creed-style mission to follow someone through a crowd to learn information? Is it a fetch quest because you are “fetching” information? Wrong question. A fetch quest in this framework is not the abstract idea of getting something, it is a scenario that is advanced by checking the status of the player’s inventory to see if it contains the required item. So instead let us ask: What gameplay system is triggering the N.P.C.-tailing mission to advance? It’s the character being followed reaching a specific location. It might play some dialogue or start a cutscene when that happens but what the game is monitoring for in order to progress is a character reaching their destination safely. It’s an escort quest with the added constraints of not getting to close to or far away from the N.P.C.¹

Similarly Caldwell asks about a quest where you have to beat someone up in a brawl but not kill them. Is that a murder quest even though you don’t kill them? Probably, yeah. Often scenarios like that are done in games by putting you into combat with special constraints (maybe you can only use your fists or blunt weapons) where if the opponents health goes to zero it plays a special cutscene instead of them dying. What is advancing the scenario is still the player in combat reducing the enemy’s H.P. to zero. That’s the murder quest, regardless of the narrative framing around it.

Now, I have only made a few small game projects as a hobby and never anything as complicated as an R.P.G. with an intricate quest system, but I am still going to speak out my arse anyway and say I do think Cain’s system could do with tweaking (though keep mind this is what he outlined was in an unscripted Youtube video and not a polished thesis on game design; we are being overly critical here). Timed is a modifier and if you are going to include that it is going to open up so many different kinds of modifiers that it will explode the taxonomy. Additionally fetch and delivery to me seem like subsets of collect. Fetch is just collect with a unique item rather than a generally available one. Delivery is the same but the place where the inventory check happens is far away from the original quest-giver. Similarly murder seems like a kill quest where there is only one of the type of entity that you are meant to kill in the world. Or maybe it is easier or there is other good reason to program that as two separate types of objective! I have never had to code something like this and Cain has! He wrote the foundational code for Fallout!

And seeing as the original descriptions have caused some confusion perhaps naming them after the gameplay systems that are being interacted with rather than implicit player actions would make things clearer. So rather than nine types of quests, here are a potential alternative list of five quest progression triggers from someone who has no idea what they’re talking about:

• Combat: Defeat/kill/bring the H.P. to 0 of n creatures of a given type.
• Inventory: Obtain n items of a given type.
• Position: Entity must be brought to specific area. Escort quests. Follow quests. Platforming challenges if the entity that needs to get somewhere is the player themself.
• Dialogue: Engage in dialogue system for a specific outcome.
• Bespoke: Uniquely scripted sequences, possibly using gameplay system not present in the rest of the game. Puzzles in Cain’s description.

Any of these can have conditions on them such as “within a certain area” or “within a time limit”.

All this does assume a kind of standard template of an R.P.G. that doesn’t have its own unique mechanics that missions can be hung off instead. I am reminded of the Innuendo Studios video that attempted to define adventure games and settled on the idea of adventure games as games that don’t have “core mechanics”. They are games that rely less on standard, repeatable verbs (jump, shoot, run) but on many bespoke scenarios and systems that are highly contextual. Cain has taken the standard set of verbs of an typical R.P.G. (attack, pick up, move, talk) and described building missions around those verbs, with a catch-all “puzzle” category thrown in for everything else. If you had R.P.G.s with different or additional core systems then events can be triggered around those instead, e.g. recruit in Deltarune.