Love it!

This is a really intriguing idea, and one I think could have real merit. In general, adding personal quests to heroes would in fact add character to your heroes as well as draw the player deeper into the evolving in each game. However, there are several key things about adding heroes quests that need to be considered beyond simply throwing in more quests. Currently, most players seem to cast many quests and quest locations aside towards the middle of a game, as these tend to take the player out of the way of their other goals. The quests player do accomplish tend to be done via multiple parties or simply as a small side to their larger movements. Thus, the single largest problem with hero quests would be making them confined enough to be completed by a single party containing the hero ( as it is assumed that each leg of these quests would require the target hero to be present) while also being interesting enough both in story and reward to justify the excursion.

My thought is that heroes should each have multiple quests with various triggers. While many would simply say "yes please, more quests=better", the idea would be to not simply give each hero a whole host of quests to be completed in a single game. The idea would be to give each hero a set of quests which have specific game related triggers so that the quest is not simply a bit of lore thrown into the game, but is a natural extension of the game you are playing. For Instance, say you have a hero name Artemis who is an adventure. Artemis might have 4 unique quests, but lets examine on in hypothetical quest in particular. Say that you recently went to war with Umber, this might trigger an Artemis quest such that you find out that she was one imprisoned in an Umber prison in city X ( X being some random city in Umber ) and she comes to you telling of old companions still locked in the dungeons of X. You might have some limited amount of turns to get to city X and save these poor souls from their fate. Thus, now the player is not only at war, but has an optional goal to fulfill for both an additional reward and a great sense of story for the war. These types of goal based quests would allow Elemental to not only create a deeper RPG experience, but also reward players for undertaking additional tasks as well as intertwine the 4x and RPG experiences in a way that the current quest system does not. Also, by making multiple such quest for each hero which are trigger probabilistically, the events of each game would be more random and would keep this aspect of the sandbox game from becoming overly stale.

Thanks so much for the thoughts and the karma. I really appreciate, and am glad to see that this idea is so attractive to you all. Now if only Team Stardock would stumble upon this thread...

First off, thanks for the thought out post, Kenata. Regarding the importance of hero quests in gameplay, I would hope that hero quests would be implemented alongside an overhaul of the quest mechanic. Quests ought to be more immersive and more important to the larger game of Elemental. The mid and late-game blob of low-level quests ought to be trimmed down, and the quests that do appear should scale better with the growth of one’s heroes and kingdom. Hopefully, the renovations to the quest system would open up room for hero quests. Also, hero quests should only appear with heroes that you’ve invested significant time/resources in, so hero quests should not themselves add significantly to the quest blob. But you’re right: it would be important to make sure that these quests remain important to the main game even as they deepen the immersion and role-playing features of Elemental.

This could work, and would certainly achieve the goals you’ve outlined. I definitely appreciate the focus of making quests flow naturally from the individual game being played. There are two challenges with this idea, though, that we would have to keep in mind. First is the sheer workload. The idea here is that each recruitable hero has their own individual, personalized quest. For one hundred heroes, that’s one hundred new quests that have to be written and implemented. If we expand that to four possible quests, that’s four hundred different quests to write up. I’m neither modder nor developer, but that sounds like quite the workload, even if some are different only in flavor text. Second, I think it is important to make sure that the quests remain tied into the character’s backstory, or at least the character’s personality as revealed in said backstory. Now, if Artemis’ backstory says that she is “cold and reclusive after some tragic encounter with the Fallen, which she won’t provide the details to,” and then we later figure out, due to declaring war on X Fallen faction, that she was imprisoned by X Fallen Faction in Y city, then that’s very cool. But if there is no connection between backstory and character, and Artemis' revelation (or any random hero's revelation) seems to just come out of left field, then it seems like we’re moving away from personalized hero quests and into game events simply generating quests (which is very cool, mind you, but not really a personalized hero quest). But I agree with you that the hero quests should definitely be a “natural extension of the main game.”

Thanks again for the awesome thoughts.

i agree with kenata here. as game progresses right now in the current state of the game one does tend to stop the random quests which deter from the goals of the game ( ie eliminate the enemy). i do think the OP is a good idea i think that hero quests with how kenata sugests not only keep a player involved but ur still moving in the direction that all 4x games go (seek out and destroy ur rivals).

In my mind, these types of tags would be similiar to the current history or ability systems. Thus, one would create a pool of such backgrounds which could be used to tie a quest and a hero. There are two ways one could implement the connection, either via adding a background tag to the quest and the hero, similarly to how items or abilities are linked, or by create something similar to a spell book, where all the quests of a particular background are specified. Either way, modders would be able to create new backgrounds and associated quests to support any number of new or modded heroes. So in your Luke Skywalker mod, you could create a background called "Evil Estranged Father", and like your "Darth Vader Fight" quest to that background. Then, you would simply say that Luke Skywalker has a backstory of "Evil Estranged Father" and it would be a quest possibility under the correct trigger event.

Just happy to give me two cents. The truth is that the quest system has a wealth of untapped potential, in some way greater than any other system in Elemental. Every quest is an opportunity to inject a narrative into the characters and events moving around the game world. In this thread, we have been discussing quests as a means of filling in the backstory of the various NPCs, yet this same type of quest could be used to create narratives based on previous game events. For instance, let's take our hero Artemis again. Artemis has joined with the sovereign and is now leading one of the armies. While travelling with the Army, Artemis and her army encounter a shrill which casts some foul spell on our hero. This spell will confer a backstory upon Artemis called "Residual Effect from X". Later down the road, Artemis hits level 7, which triggers the quest associated with this background. Thus, the current narrative concering Artemis reminds the player of this old fight with a shrill years earlier, drawing the player deeper into the life and times of each hero. Even in this example, we have only begun to scratch the surface of this idea, and have yet to even discuss the idea of applying it to the sov, cities, or the faction itself. In fact, these quests could be made to use the current game to fill in the blanks, thus allowing one to seamlessly integrate this new content with each game to keep the quest topical and part of the nature evolution of the game forming from the player.

While this could become too outrageous, a new option could also be created to tone down the trigger chances. Thus, one could say they want heavy, medium, light, or no quests for a particular game, and would not be force to sit through a lot of story when they simply want to play the war game experience.