Ideas for additional quest types

geengaween

geengaween

Refugee
Since A19 the game is apparently a lot more modular which should open up opportunities for more different types of quests than "fetch", "kill", and "dig".

Some basic types could be:

Courier - take an item to a location and drop it there

Survive - stay at a location and fight off waves

Assassinate - go kill the leader of an NPC gang of bandits

Investigate - go to a survivor's outpost to find out why they're not answering the radio (spoiler: they're all dead)

Climb - travel to a radio tower and climb to the top

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These are all I could think of but they're kind of basic and boring, anyone got any creative ideas? Any side missions from your favorite RPG that sticks in your mind?

 
I always hoped for a quest to find something where you are not told exactly where it is but just given hints

Some players have posted ideas for crafting and building oriented quests to for example rebuild or fix the trader compound or workstations.

 
If they ever do Investigation type quest I would like to a lot of different  outcomes and variations.

For example like you said Investigate why a outpost isn't answering. 

The radio could just be down. Which opens up a optional objective to give scrap parts etc if you have them.

The outpost could be overran by bandits with everyone dead.  

The quest could just end there or again it could maybe 30% of time have optional objective if you explore the location.

Like bandits could still be at the destroyed outpost. You can have the optional to kill them all. They might have captives 50% of time that you can rescue. 

Or you can find a note at the destroyed outpost or survivor that points to where the bandits have gone which would link into the standard destroy this bandit base quest, assasinate bandit leader quest or rescue captives. 

Other variations. Are maybe the base could be overran by zombies. Everyone could be dead or there could be survivors trapped that need rescuing 

 
Some of this is possible now.  I've done a fair amount of modding quests, and learned a lot about what is possible.

Investigate is trivial.  It's a Fetch quest with a custom Quest Item (say, a notebook that describes the impending attack by bandits).  Its easy to add a custom quest item into quests.xml and use it.

Assassinate.  I have something similar to this in my Mutations mod.  Its a random goto point (or POI) that spawns a specific custom creature(s) when you arrive, and step 2 requires killing one (or more) of that creature.  Creating the custom enemy is harder than creating the quest.

Courier.  I made this just a few days ago. Unfortunately, its a bust.  What I did was copy the trader goto line from the Opening Trade Routes quest, and made it a stand-alone quest where you simply deliver a shipment to another trader.  However, the game tracks which traders have been used so you don't get a repeat trader in the Opening the Trade Route quest, and once you've exhausted the list, the quest errors out with No Trader and is uncompleteable.  A flag to allow random instead of next-in-line would make this possible, but we'll have to ask for it.

Survive.  Can't really do waves, only wave.  That's essentially what the Challenge quests are.  One wave, which you can make as big and/or random as you like, but that's it.  I have an idea to test about multiple waves using multiple phases, but not sure it'll work.  You can even point that to a POI to start the quest, and force you to stay in the boundary of the POI.  Problem is you have very little (tier only) control of what POI is picked.  You might get an empty patch of farmland, or a building thats actually defensible.

Climb would be pretty difficult to do.  If you had a custom POI, and could point to that specific custom POI (you can't, unless you make it Tier 6, currently unused, and will break eventually) you could put the "start" point exclamation at the top of the POI, and starting it leads to phase 2 which is just return to trader.  It would be difficult to do, client-side mod, with a custom POI at gen-time.  Also, b/c of how reset would work, if you climbed up using a ladder/frames, they'd all go away while you were at the top hitting the exclamation point.

 
Ok, I'm back.  Holy cow, I'm surprised it worked.  Given limitations with the GoTo and Rally Points, I was surprised it allows multiple spawning of wave within a single quest.

Here's a proof of concept, no localization or anything.  Use creative to summon the quest challenge sheet.  type "stample" or "easy" and it'll pop up.  It is basically ManEater then Ladykiller then Starving Tourists back-to-back at a random T1 POI.

View attachment StamplesSurviveQuests.zip

One thing you can't really control well, though.  Each quest is summoning 2 of each zombie, but passing the stage requires killing less of each type.  This helps in case you don't get credit for all kills, especially if its spawning a random number of them rather than fixed.  What this means is, once you kill the requisite number for the wave, the next wave spawns, even if you still have remaining zeds coming at you.  Not a big deal for normals, but when you get to glowies, you'll want to pay attention to what you're killing in what order so you don't get overwhelmed.  I kinda love it.

I'm going to work this into a full set of quests over the next few days, ranging from Easy (all normals) to Hard (all glowies) to Insane (glowies + cops + puking birds + demolishers). @geengaween you get credit for the idea in my mod.  Thanks for inspiring me to try this.

 
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I'll get you a link once they are up.  It'll be on my github.

Getting a weird index out of bounds error at the moment, and having trouble tracking down why.

 
So I hit a few snags, and its gonna be a little more complicated that I expected.

First off, the UI only allows for 10 quest objectives in the window.  If you have several waves, on top of needing a "Stay Within" for each wave, and a Go To POI and Activate Rally Point, you hit that limit in about 2 waves, 3 if you're careful.  Its not a big deal once I tracked it down; just had to extend the UI rows and allow it to run over.  It doesn't look pretty, but it prevents you from getting IndexOutOfBounds errors.

Second, because Tier of the POI is tied to Tier of the quest, and I really, really want these to come from the trader's daily quests, I had to do some silliness to be able to control the POI tier.  Doing waves in the parking lot of a Shamway factory wouldn't be fun.  So I'm tying them to T1 and T2 POIs by having an intermediate crafting step in the main quest to build a radio signal receiver that grants a subquest to go to find a safe-house that's under attack, of whatever POI Tier I want to specify.  Both quests have to have a step to kill a specific mob so that you can't activate the sub-quest, cancel it and just turn in the main quest.

Well, that means now I need a custom Boss zombie, but really one for each tier of difficulty, that can only be spawned and killed in the last wave of the quest.  It also means I need a different receiver built for each tier so its granting the appropriate quest to end in the right boss.  Otherwise you could do the T1 quest and kill the boss there to satisfy the parent T5 quest step.

As you can see, it spiraled out of control pretty quickly...

But I've got everything hammered out now, the T1 works perfectly, and I'm down to copy-and-paste the higher tiers, then do localization, and it'll be done.

The overarching story will be a trader asking for help to defend their safehouse/rally point/supply store/whatever from an impending attack, and you'll need to listen for the distress call on a homemade radio receiver.  Turns out the waves of zombies are controlled by a mummy that was brought to life by zombie virus, creating a large and powerful zombie.  Kill the mummy, end the attack, get paid!

 
Ok, done for first pass.  It'll probably take some more tuning to feel like the right level of difficulty on the later quests, but its good enough for first release.  T5 is especially short for a T5 quest.  I think it needs more, smaller waves, rather than the bigger ones it has now.

https://github.com/stamplesmods/7d2dmodlets

You want StamplesDefenseQuests

I'm hoping I can have a friend of mine help me make friendly NPCs to spawn and "help" defend, but there are some issues to work out.  Such as anything spawned in a quest auto-aggros on you, so they'll attack you over zombies until you pass the first stage.  Anyway, hopefully that'll be in a future release.  I think it'll add some good atmosphere if you have friendlies that'll die if you aren't careful.

 
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If they added a lasso/rope to the game which you could use to wrangle npc’s and other players like in Reign of King’s, then you could have a “Capture the bandit leader, bring him back alive” quest. I loved the entertaining rope dragging physics of reign of kings. I’ll think of more ideas.

i like the above mentioned idea of zombie waves quest. I think this shouldn’t be a quest that you receive from traders, but rather one that you come across and is triggered when you enter a given area.

For example, there could be survivors behind some crappy barricades shooting at zombies and when you get close you are given the quest to defend them. If you leave the area you fail or if they die. That way there’s a choice involved: help these people even if it’s an inconvenience or go on your way and do what you were doing

 
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Maxley said:
i like the above mentioned idea of zombie waves quest. I think this shouldn’t be a quest that you receive from traders, but rather one that you come across and is triggered when you enter a given area.
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That would be really cool, but the existing quest system won't support that the way it works today.  I would absolutely love global events happening randomly in the world.  Maybe in A20 or post-Gold they'll do an overhaul of the quest system.

 
stample said:
That would be really cool, but the existing quest system won't support that the way it works today.  I would absolutely love global events happening randomly in the world.  Maybe in A20 or post-Gold they'll do an overhaul of the quest system.
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Mad mole did mention adding in the event manager system which would allow them to somehow predict where the player is heading and then place events ahead of them. This would make it so the world would feel more full and alive without having to add a ton of zombies wandering around eating up performance continually

 
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