Finally! Quests!

Ahem.

Ways that this can rock:

Jon listed requiring the player to bring items with drawbacks. He didn't seem sure about it, but I'd totally call that valid.

How about a two-character party instead of three? We'd wondered "is three the maximum size, or the only possible size?" before, so a two-character challenge could be good in a world with a mandated three.

How about, I dunno, requiring "deal a minimum of X damage per turn or you lose"? It would enforce even faster gameplay. Or "half of all your cards must deal damage," in a variation on the "bring drawback cards" requirement.

I'm just tossing stuff out, here. How about you?

 

The only ones I can think of off the top of my head are the somewhat uncreative No Wizards/No Warriors/No Clerics quests.
A more complicated way of going about doing it would be "None of the race/class combinations you used the first time around"
but that would require keeping track of a whole other bunch of statistics.

 

Haven't listened to the podcast (yet! I will, honest!), so I've no idea if any of this has already been mentioned.

You could require that the individual scenarios be beaten in a specific number of turns (or else additional monsters spawn / arrive as reinforcements, rather than a regular failure state, is how I would handle that).

Along Sir Knight's idea of character number limits, there could be a quest that re-opens an adventure for higher-level characters, but limits you to only one character.

Dilapidated Quests that replay an adventure with random (or perhaps not so random) terrain modifiers. Drastically increased amounts of difficult terrain, default mud / acid / lava / what have you tiles, additional blocking terrain or crumbled sections of walls that is no longer blocking terrain... just muck up the map, make movement more difficult and add dangers and whatnot.

Penultimate Minion Quests, which replace one or more of the monsters in each battle with significantly more powerful mini-bosses.

I... I'll just stop here and let other people chime in if they so choose. Don't want to take all of the good ideas.

 

huh ? I'd tot quests would be similar to those in board games. Kill a certain monster, retrieve a certain treasure etc. This would make it possible for random drops and random mobs, increasing the playability without making it tedium. Or it could be list based and party tagged, ie, pick X monsters from lvl range and complete all kills within a time limit. This would allow the player to re-do cps to get some mobs. eg: kill 4 x lizardman warrior, 3 x orc taskmasters, 1 x skeleton and 2 x raging boars in 2 hrs...

I see tons of ways quests could be implemented...

 

No, that's what the entire adventure/module/dungeon is in the first place. Go in, kill Greenfang, retrieve The Goldleaf Blade.

But we'd been told over here (looking at this map) about "quests," which were apparently something different. Now we know what "quests" are.

 

oh, I think there's smthg fundamentally different from quests and campaigns than what I envisioned. Greenfang is a campaign to me, a series of linear battles to a finale. Quests would be more of a single battle scenario, meant to be relatively short. hmm..

 

Yes, it is a matter of terminology.

Often, people define a "campaign" as "a series of individual quests" (in D&D, for instance). But from playing videogames, I'm sure you're aware of the phrase "single-player campaign," referring to "literally everything you do in single-player mode."

Then, Blue Manchu has seemed ambiguous on how they label the single-player campaign subdivisions. We've seen modules (see also), we've seen dungeons, and we've seen adventures, and apparently the three are synonymous. Then, each of these adventure/module/dungeons is defined as "a series of individual battles."

So THEN, Blue Manchu told us that they're reserving the word "quest" for something ELSE. Apparently what I've posted as the thread-starter.

Indeed, it is a matter of terminology.

 

Judging by the recent podcast, I'd say that the team is still struggling a bit to find the terminology that they want to use regarding each concept of the game. Personally, I think that "Quest" isn't really the best term for the concept they discussed - adding replay value to the individual battles/modules. I'm not sure "Challenges" is really the best word either, but I think it's a closer fit.

Regarding the actual concept, the way I see it there are three major ways to modify a battle. The first is to modify the way the player plays the game - time clocks and character/deck constraints are the two obvious ones. The second is to modify the victory point goals, in this case monsters and victory squares. This can range anywhere from simple buffs to monsters (x2 life, +2 to all moves) to addition/removal of victory conditions (increase/decrease VP needed to win, must kill monsters with terrain, only gain VP for squares). The third is to modify the maps themselves, and this has some overlap with the first two modifications. Examples of this might be "rising" lava moving from one end of the map to the other, or a sort of "fog of war" where each character can only see a number of squares away (I'm thinking torches in a dark dungeon here). This last group presumably requires the most work to add into the game, and some could be tailored to the individual battle/module.

 

In that case, it would be better to officially label them as 'achievements' and provide some incentive for players to want to unlock these achievement. Eg, a warrior dealing 10 damage in 1 attack would unlock a damage achievement. A wizard dealing a ranged attack that forks to 2 mobs unlock a multiple target achievement. This would expand your design space by allowing for multi-tracked achievements...and also keep player curious enough to want to unlock that 'possible' 25 damage in 1 attack achievement.

Quests, on the other hand, could be designed as something different...which should belong in its own thread...hmm...

 

You keep saying "re-playing." Looking at the map, it appears we can't see quest medals the first time through. What if I like Wizards? What if I'm already playing an all Wizard party?

Edit P.S.: Maybe you just need to write a dev diary instead of answering questions piecemeal. I know you're busy and all that, but I hear there's a study out that watching cat videos at work makes you more productive the rest of the day. A little time away from that to-do list might actually get the beta ready sooner.

 

If you would not implement those quests right away, you could keep track of which cards are being used the most in each adventure/modules and then bar those "most used" to achieve the next quest?
I am very fond of "balancing the cards", so that not all players use the same card-set.

My 2 cents

 

There should be standard data capturing mechanisms that operate behind-the-scenes. Given BM's staff quality, they should have accounted for it during design stage.

 

I think you're getting hung up on terminology. Though we have had concerns about Blue Manchu's terms before (the "Talent" system being the most eyebrow-raising), here I would argue that "quest" is perfectly valid.

Consider: your suggested "achievements" . . . are nothing like the quests that Jon has described so far. Gamers, who as you say have expectations for the word "achievements," are indeed familiar with "do 25 damage in one attack" and other such actions that are, for the most part, not very time consuming when they finally happen in-game. But whatever term Blue Manchu uses here, they are using it exclusively for "replay this entire adventure"; a specific category of action and time commitment which eliminates a massive amount of "achievement space."

Calling it a "quest" immediately gets the audience to understand the commitment. And "quest" also fits with the theme of 1970's/80's gaming, which is a another thing going for it, and probably will singlehandedly keep Blue Manchu from calling it anything else.

Personally, if I were to rename it, I'd go for "challenge"; less polluted by a billion stupid online games giving you an "achievement" for walking backwards through every door while collecting twenty daisies in five minutes.

 

ehehehe, not interested in the terminology. What I merely did was make a suggestion as it will facilitate easier communications and lesser confusion. If BM's final choice is 'quests' then so be it...

Nope, have to disagree with you here. A damage achievement track is simply 1 example. Replaying an adventure with constraints merely makes it another sort of achievement, I'd call it a adventure achievement track (AAT). In this AAT, there could be stuff like 'play X campaign Y times >> get reward' or 'play A campaign without B cards >> get reward' etc. The design space is retained and in fact much wider and can cater for expansive downstream development. Get it ?

See ? What I'd label as 'achievement', you'd see as 'challenge' and BM categorizes as 'quest'. When the truth is, it prolly means the same thing. Never underestimate the power of names, ehehehe.

 

No, we don't disagree. In fact, we both said the same thing! "Achievement space," design space, categories, tracks . . . po-TAY-to, po-TAH-to.

And . . . it therefore makes it ironic to say I'm glad we're not hung up on terms.

 

I'm a little late to this thread, and I'm glad. I liked seeing the conversation between Sir Knight and Phaselock's conversation play out. Well done chaps.

I'm alright with them being called Quests so long as they are given to you by an NPC, be it Gary(2012), or one of Gary's many puppets. I'm also cool with them being called Challenges. The term Achievements on the other hand, I feel like we are mostly agreed on this, doesn't fit.

I agree. Maybe not about the cats thing, but dev diaries would clear thing sup. We might not have to rush this one in specific, but I'd like to see it eventually, so we can speculate and theory-craft quests properly.

A suggestion I have for quests though, would be get through this map without killing X, or any of the Y creatures. Or, only kill the necessary enemies. It seems sort of dull sounding, but having to avoid killing certain enemy creatures (who are still attacking you) would make things a bit tougher. Granted, this Quest could only be employed with maps where there are alternate win conditions, aside from kill all of the angry dudes trying to kill you.

 

I love this idea of quests, or as I know them from another game, 'Challenges', within Card Hunter.

Though I think depending on the way you implement them, the content or the requirement to complete the quest could become a cheap way to make people replay a quest. I hate the word 'replay'.

This system needs to be implemented very carefully, as to encourage people to try something extra during a battle. A quest or a challenge should be just that, a challenge, a test of strength, to show how skillful or versatile you are, that you're going that extra mile for greatness, and reap the rewards for it. NOT something that makes you repeat a Campaign to do something you don't actually enjoy, just to tick it off your list.

With this, first thing's first, the last thing I want to see, and I expect the vast majority of most other people who are familiar with 'quests', is the 'kill X amount of monsters' type quests. I know this might not directly translate into the way Card Hunter works, like MMOs for example. But it's this level of unoriginal and boring quests we're all fed up of. So I implore you, don't do this x_x!

To be constructive, I'll explain the form of quest I think should be implemented into Card Hunter, it's not original, but it is rare, and it would work perfectly with this game.

The point of the challenges I'm going to explain are to give people something extra to try during any given battle. The rewards will generally include a set % increase of exp gain/gold dropped/item drop chance, dependent of the difficulty of the challenge, or whatever rewards best fit the Card Hunter style. Two random challenges will be automatically selected for you at the start of every battle, it's your choice if you want to do any number of them.

Typical challenges might include killing a certain monster first, or last, for a small reward. Whereas harder challenges might require you to kill the monsters in a set order, or kill them by only using indirect damage (burning/poisons, etc). Complete the battle without taking any damage, or not letting any of your characters die. Or somehow work out how you can complete the map without actually using a move card, or never using a healing type spell, or ensuring each one of your characters gets a kill. I could go on for ages about the different type of things you could put up.

Slap on a Card Hunter twist on this form of challenge system, and I think it'll be amazing.

PS. Bonus points for anyone who knows what french game this idea originally comes from!