Difference between revisions of "Quest"

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[[Image:Q-little-girl-ghost.jpg|thumb|300px|right|A [[Wizard]] completes the [[Little Girl Lost]] quest.]]
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'''Quests''' lead the story and progression of Diablo 3.  
'''Quest''' is a game term for most RPGs to describe how a character progresses through the story or accomplishes tasks. Quests are missions with varying levels of complicated objectives, normally giving the player [[experience]], [[gold]], [[item]]s or other rewards when completed.
 
  
Quests in [[Diablo III]] will be made more in line with the story, and less obtrusive than traditional action RPGs.
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==What Are Quests?==
  
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Quests are the meat of Diablo's plot, story, and progression. They must be followed to progress.
  
==Diablo III Quests==
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==How Quests Work==
The [[D3 Team]] wants to improve on how quests were handled in [[Diablo II]]. They want the major quests to be interesting, important, and plot-driven. Many of these quests will be character-specific; your character won't (always) just be an errand boy and the quest won't just be something minor; it will advance the [[story]].
 
  
Each act has numerous major, plot-related quests, all of which have various related minor quests related to them. Blizzard has released very little information about the game's plot, so the only quests known thus far were the ones seen in the playable demos at Blizzcon 2008 and 2009.
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Quests are triggered and continued by following the instructions below the minimap on the side of the screen. When completed, they provide experiance and gold (only), which is a big change from how the Diablo II quest system worked. In addition, all quests ''must'' be completed, one after another in the order they are given. There is no way to fail a quest in Diablo III. It is possible to have a high level character "carry" you through content, until you reach level caps. It is even possible to [[powerlevel]] through the content.
  
In addition to the official quests, there are numerous smaller "Adventures" which play like mini-quests. See the section further down this page for more details on them.
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[[Waypoints]] and [[Checkpoints]] are unlocked based on quest progress.
  
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==Quest Interface==
  
==Known Quests==
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[[Image:Q-the-skeleton-king1.jpg|thumb|125px|Blizzcon 2008 display.]]
[[Image:Follower_interaction.jpg|thumb|200px|[[Barbarian]] helping [[followers]] on the [[Escort Mission]] quest.]]
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[[File:Quest-window2.jpg|left|thumb|150px|Blizzcon 2009 display.]]
All known quests were researched in the Blizzcon 2008 and 2009 playable demos. Details of these quests may change in the final game.
 
  
Click the quest names below to read full articles on each quest with many more details and screenshots.
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The final quest interface was modified from the blizzcon versions. The final version consists of a small description of the task to accomplish, and a journel entry for whatever class the player is using. A very easy way to check what is needed to be done on a quest is to look to the right of the screen, which has the instructions on how to progress in the quest.
  
===Blizzcon 2008 Quests===
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==List of Quests==
All these quests were located in [[Tristram]] or the dungeons below the ruined town. The base camp at Tristram was quite small and inhabited by only two [[NPCs]], neither of whom were merchants. It's expected that the full town of Tristram will be quite a bit larger. (Or this base camp might be where new characters begin the game, and they only reach the full Tristram after completing these introductory quests.)
 
  
* [[Little Girl Lost]]
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Below are all the quests in [[Diablo III]].
* [[Escort Mission]]
 
* [[The Skeleton King]]
 
  
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===Events===
  
===Blizzcon 2009 Quests===
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[[Events]] are mini quests that build off, but are not directly connected to (usually) the main quests.
  
All of these quests were located in the deserts of Act 2, somewhere in the mid-section of the act. Characters started out just beyond the walls of [[Caldeum]], and could not return to the city. The designers revealed that this was a special fix just for the demo, since players would have seen a great deal of the game story in Caldeum, and the didn't want to reveal that much of it yet.
 
  
* [[Find Alcarnus]]
 
* [[Blood Money]]
 
* [[Stranded]]
 
* [[The Lost Girl]]
 
* [[Alesar’s Pendant]]
 
* [[The Collapsing Tomb]]
 
* [[The Lost Wagon]]
 
* [[The Necromancer's Book]]
 
* [[A Miner's Gold]]
 
* [[The Idol of Rygnar]]
 
  
Quest names are tentative, and may change in the final game.
 
  
  
==Quest Design and Theory==
 
  
[[Leonard Boyarsky]] is the main story guy on the [[D3 Team]] and while he isn't the only person who makes up quests, he heads up that department in the development of Diablo 3. Leonard was asked how quests are designed in an October 2009 interview. [http://hellforge.gameriot.com/blogs/Hellforge/Diablo-III-The-Lore-of-the-World-An-Interview-with-Leonard-Boyarsky/page1]
 
  
::'''''Hellforge:''' How do you come up with ideas for the creation of quests in Diablo III. Do you start with simple quest concepts and build around them with storyline elements or...?
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===Act I Quests===
::'''Leonard Boyarsky: '''It goes both ways. What we do, the way we start off, is that we first create the storyline of the game and then we kind of iterate on that a lot as well as once we start building the game and putting quests in we refine those. Our artists, our level designers, everybody might have ideas about quests that would be more like simple adventure concepts or simple quest concepts that you’re talking about. And then we’ll put lore into them. Sometimes, we just have lore and we say to the level guys or some the gameplay guys, “Hey, how best do you think we can show this?” So it really goes both ways, any which way.
 
  
::There’s been times when we really wanted to hit certain points and it wasn’t really working because you know, it was too complex for the way the game is working or the way the story is rolling out so you know it’s really just an iterative process like the other stuff we do.
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[[Act I]] has 10 quests.
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The following quests are in Act I:
  
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* [[The Fallen Star]]
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* [[The Legacy of Cain]]
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* [[A Shattered Crown]]
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* [[Reign of the Black King]]
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* [[Sword of the Stranger]]
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* [[The Broken Blade]]
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* [[The Doom in Wortham]]
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* [[Trailing the Coven]]
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* [[Imprisoned Angel]]
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* [[Return to New Tristram]]
  
===Randomization?===
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The [[Return to New Tristram]] is manditory for doing the [[Infernal Machine]] event.
  
While the main quests in each act will not be random, most of the smaller quests will be. Diablo 3 quests will not be totally random; there is writing and design involved in creating them; but most areas of the game will have more quests than can occur each game. There may be 6 quests that can possibly appear in one section, of which 3 or 4 will appear each game. In this way players will see different combinations of events each time they play through the game.
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===Act II Quests===
  
There may also be rarer quests, ones that appear very seldom, giving a special surprise to players who luck into them. [[Leonard Boyarsky]] elaborated on how random quests will be integrated in an October 2009 interview. [http://hellforge.gameriot.com/blogs/Hellforge/Diablo-III-The-Lore-of-the-World-An-Interview-with-Leonard-Boyarsky/page1]
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[[Act II]] has 10 quests.
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The folling quest are in Act II:
  
:: We’re doing -– there’s a main storyline that is, parts of it might be randomized depending on the area, depending on what the quests are, depending on what the actual objective is. But apart from the main quest, most of our other content is randomized, so from game to game it will be completely different. I can’t give you any kind of percentage because we’re still playing with those numbers, but that’s really the way we built this game is so that we can have a lot of randomized content, including story elements and including quests.
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* [[Shadows in the Desert]]
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* [[The Road to Alcarnus]]
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* [[City of Blood]]
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* [[A Royal Audience]]
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* [[Unexpected Allies]]
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* [[Betrayer of the Horodrim]]
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* [[Blood and Sand]]
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* [[The Black Soulstone]]
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* [[The Scouring of Caldeum]]
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* [[The Lord of Lies]]
  
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===Act III Quests===
  
===High Level Quests===
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[[Act III]] has less quests than the other acts, with only 7.
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The following quests are in Act III:
  
The Diablo 3 team has brought up quests as one way to solve the [[end game]] problems, where characters wind up just "running" the same bosses over and over again.  The team hopes to allow/require more variety in gameplay by offering a variety of quests in the late game, giving players more viable activities to engage in. Julian Love addressed this question in an October 2009 interview. [http://www.diablo-source.com/index.php?cmd=article&sec=news&act=view&id=354]
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* [[The Siege of Bastion's Keep]]
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* [[Turning the Tide]]
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* [[The Breached Keep]]
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* [[Tremors in the Stone]]
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* [[Machines of War]]
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* [[Siegebreaker]]
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* [[Heart of Sin]]
  
::'''''DS:''' I think Jay hinted during Blizzcon that there might be updated quests to keep higher level content exciting to keep people coming back and playing again.
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===Act IV Quests===
::'''Julian Love:''' It's not so much actually high level versus low level. I think we have a plan that facilitates high level content. What I think you're really getting at there is replayability, and what that gets down to is the way we're exercising randomness within the game. We've put a lot of focus towards what kinds of randomness are really beneficial in supporting replayability and what things are just, heh, not all that important or not all that awesome. One of the things that we have in the system that we have is something that we call - well, we have a really technical name for it -- [[sub-scenes]].
 
  
::What it comes down to is we can sort of like create a hole in the world that's like a socket that we can fill with just about anything that we want. It could be empty ground with a bunch of monsters on it, it could be a giant canyon that a really elaborate scripted event happens, it could turn into a caravan walking across the desert that you have an escort quest on. The point being is that this hole in the earth can randomly, at any time become something totally different. It could even be a doorway to a whole new dungeon that you've never seen before. So, the fact that the world is able to change things up and actually deliver different events, stories and quests is what's really going to make the game a lot more replayable at the both the low and high ends.
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[[Act IV]], like [[diablo II]]'s {{iw|Act_IV Act 4}}, is the smallest act in Diablo III, with a grand total of 4 quests.  
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The following quests are in Act IV:
  
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* [[Fall of the High Heavens]]
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* [[The Light of Hope]]
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* [[Beneath the Spire]]
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* [[The Prime Evil]]
  
===How Many Quests?===
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==Events==
  
The team has not given any absolute number for how many quests will be in the game. It's probably an unanswerable question, since they'll be adding more all during the development process, and even then it's debatable what exactly is a quest. Many of the mini-missions and [[sub-scenes]] are quest-like events, but might not actually have an entry in the quest menu.
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[[Events]] are small sub-quests that have a random chance to spawn in an area. They can appear accross every act besides [[Act IV]]. Typically, they consist of completing a task for an npc, such as the [[Matriarch's Bones]] event or the [[Forged in Battle]] event.
  
Julian Love was asked about this at Blizzcon 2009. [http://www.gameplanet.co.nz/pc/games/156898.Diablo-III/features/133759.20090831.BlizzCon-Diablo-III-devs-discuss-design-decisions-direction-depth-drops/]
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==Quest Development==
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[[Image:Q-the-skeleton-king1.jpg|thumb|125px|Blizzcon 2008 display.]]
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[[File:Quest-window2.jpg|left|thumb|150px|Blizzcon 2009 display.]]
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<blue><font color="#FFFFFF"><b>Atomic Gamer:</b> Is there anything specifically from Diablo II that the team felt needed improvement and wanted to tweak for Diablo III?</font><br>
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<b>Kevin Martens: </b>The questing and story. I think we’ve added way more quests, more variety of quests. We’ve randomized the quests, and have these sort of quests that are self contained. For example, if you enter a dungeon in Diablo III, there might be somebody standing at the entrance, like a treasure hunter, saying, “Hey, I heard stories about The Idol of Rygnar is hidden somewhere in this dungeon. Help me find it and you can share in the reward.” Then you go through the dungeon and protect this guy. Then you’ll find the idol and you’ll get the reward.
  
::'''''GamePlanet:''' Will there be a maximum nubmer of quests?
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People will turn on you…you’re never quite sure what is going to happen. We’re adding all those random elements all over the world. There is way more quest content overall than Diablo II, period. Also, I think we wanted to do a much better job on the storytelling aspects, not just the cinematics, which are fantastic, but also in the storytelling itself, like more twists and turns, more interesting quests, more variety of experiences. That’s what we spent a lot of time on, and making the co-op nature of it better as well.</blue>
::'''Julian Love:''' Probably, but it's undetermined at this point. I think in the demo that we have here, there's just over 30 different things that can happen in all the spots. Whether that's too high or too low will be partly based on what feedback we're going to see from the people that actually got a chance to play it here, and based on what we feel like. We know how we feel about it right now but we want to compare that to what the players who have a chance to play feel, and then we're going to try to look at that again. So this is one big area, what a smaller area or one that's more linear has is also yet to be determined. But certainly way more things will happen in one playing area than happened in Diablo II.
 
  
==Quest Interface==
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This was one of the first statements blizzard made on behalf of quests in diablo III. As you can see, blizzard was origionally intending to make quests diverse, interesting, and much improved to diablo 2.
[[Image:Q-the-skeleton-king1.jpg|left|thumb|Blizzcon 2008 display.]]
 
[[File:Quest-window2.jpg|thumb|Blizzcon 2009 display.]]
 
The quest interface remains under development, as evidenced by how much it changed between Blizzcon 2008 and 2009. The 2008 version was more ornate and stylized, and filled up much more of the visible screen. In 2009 the interface was far simpler, and looked like a scaled back version of {{iw|quests Diablo 2's quest}} window. It's expected that the final game version will be fancier than the no-frills 2009 version, and it's possible that the very plain 2009 version was something put together just for the Blizzcon demo, since it didn't seem able to expand to hold more than just the few quests available in that demo build.
 
  
In the 2009 build, the main quest was to find [[Alcarnus]], and that quest always showed on top of the pyramid of potential quests. Below the Alcarnus quest were two two other quests, which were different each game. There seemed to be 4 or 5 possible quests for those two slots. Below those two were four other quests, which were related to/contained within them. This third row of quests were generally the most simple, "Fed-Ex" style of quests. Players had to five stranded NPC soldiers and fight off the [[Lacuni]] that were attacking them, or locate an abandoned wagon and retrieve the treasure. These were simple, but at least there were none of the dreaded, "Go fetch me 8 skins of the desert monster" type quests that RPGs such as [[WoW]] have made so infamous.
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===Blizzcons===
  
When a character performed an action that changed the state of a quest, such as receiving a clue from an NPC, finding a quest item, or finishing a quest entirely, a little ! icon popped up over the belt interface. That let the plaeyr know to open the quest window, where new info about the quest would display. That image is seen below.
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At [[Blizzcon 2008]], a couple of quests were playable. They were:
  
(All of these images were taken from cell phone camera recordings of the game screens, mostly from the PAX convention, hence their low quality.)
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* [[Little Girl Lost]]
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* [[Escort Mission]] (not actual name, the real one was never stated)
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* [[The Skeleton King]]
  
[[File:Quest-prompt1.jpg|center|thumb|400px|Quest notification activated.]]
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All were featured in Tristram/ nearby dungeons. Quest rewards were small items (random boots and the like). Only the skeleton king quest appeared in the final game.
  
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At [[Blizzcon 2009]], many more quests than the last year were avaible, based in the deserts in [[Act 2]]. They were:
  
==Quests as Story==
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* [[Find Alcarnus]]*
[[Image:Wizard_vs_King_Leoric.jpg|right|150px|thumb|The [[Wizard]] meets [[King Leoric]].]]
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* [[Blood Money]]
The [[D3 Team]] is trying to make Diablo III much more [[story]]-driven. They want the characters to be individuals and to be important figures in the world; not just interchangeable errand boys, as they usually were in Diablo II. [[Leonard Boyarsky]] talked about this in an interview in September, 2008.[http://www.gamebanshee.com/interviews/diabloiii2.php]
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* [[Stranded]]
 
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* [[The Lost Girl]]
::The areas of story and character development will now be in focus, and the team wants the players to feel like they are having an effect on the world, which can also affect the character. They don't want the game to be ''either'' action or RPG, the two can mix. The story elements just need to be more engaging "without interfering with the hack-and-slash gameplay". It's possible for players to opt out if they don't care about it, "but if you do care about it, the story will bring a whole extra level of involvement to the game experience," Boyarsky said. As few as possible quests will be mandatory, and instead having a lots of voluntary quests and random quests if you want to.
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* [[Alesar's Pendant]]
 
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* [[The Collapsing Tomb]]*
The team is also "doing a lot with scripted sequences and books that you can read in the game, but once again, you can completely avoid these things if they don't interest you."
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* [[The Lost Wagon]]
 
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* [[The Necromancer's Book]]
Specifics about quests related to the lore/story of the game have not yet been revealed but it was discussed in the [[WWI_2008:_D3_Lore_and_Environmental_Art_Panel|WWI 2008 Lore and Environmental Art Panel]], when a fan asked if there would be quests to obtain special items, such as the [[Horadric Cube]]. The team at the panel said they "look into the story and lore and we want that to drive the gameplay and quests."
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* [[A Miner's Gold]]*
 
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* [[The Idol of Rygnar]]*
 
 
==Scripted Events==
 
[[Image:Mon-thousand-summon2.jpg|thumb|right|250px|[[Thousand Pounder]] being summoned.]]
 
[[Jay Wilson]] talked about some of the scripted events seen in the BlizzCon demo in an interview in December, 2008.[http://www.1up.com/do/previewPage?pager.offset=2&cId=3172030&p=]
 
 
 
::We had a lot of [scripted events] in our BlizzCon build. [In one of them, there was] a series of ghosts at an altar who were seeking an object that you'd get to prove your worth. If you did get it, then they would test you by having big powerful monsters attack you -- and if you passed, you got a nice reward. Another one was coming across some fellow adventurers stranded in a dungeon who'd need your help to get out.
 
 
 
Several of these scripted events will be used in Diablo III. Both as the mandatory quests as well as the optional, random and encounter/adventure type quests.
 
 
 
There were even more potential events, quests, and adventures in the 2009 demo build, as [[Julian Love]] revealed in an interview from the show. [http://www.gameplanet.co.nz/pc/games/156898.Diablo-III/features/133759.20090831.BlizzCon-Diablo-III-devs-discuss-design-decisions-direction-depth-drops/]
 
  
::I think in the demo that we have here, there’s just over 30 different things that can happen in all the spots. Whether that’s too high or too low will be partly based on what feedback we’re going to see from the people that actually got a chance to play it here, and based on what we feel like. We know how we feel about it right now but we want to compare that to what the players who have a chance to play feel, and then we’re going to try to look at that again. So this is one big area, what a smaller area or one that’s more linear has is also yet to be determined. But certainly way more things will happen in one playing area than happened in Diablo II.
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Some of these quests appeared in some form or another in the final game (*'s). Rewards were items and experiance.
  
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A couple small quests appeared at [[Blizzcon 2010]]. They were:
  
==Adventures==
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* [[The Torture Chambers of the Mad King]]  
[[Image:NPCs in danger.jpg|right|thumb|200px|[[NPC]]s in need of rescuing from [[Zombie]]s.]]
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* [[Escort the Weapon Maker]]
Adventures are mini-quests, scripted events or semi-random occurrences that aren't necessarily tied to the overall plot. Adventures tend to be small and self-contained, but they're well worth completing, since they are fun, and often pack valuable rewards. The [[D3 Team]] first described them in the [[WWI_2008:_D3_Design_Fundamentals_Panel|WWI 2008 Design Fundamentals Panel]].
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* [[Queen Alyssa's Servants]]
  
::Jay Wilson: Yyou could come across a particular area in the outdoor world with a variety of possible elements in it. One game it could be a old abandoned house to explore. Maybe it's infested with crazy [[undead]] guys, and as you clean it out you learn the story of the family who lived there. Another game that same area might instead have a clearing where a cult is performing a summoning ritual. Another game might feature a caravan that needs protection from marauding monsters, or escort to the nearest town. Another game you might find a boss monster there. Or you might just get random monsters."
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All 3 of these quests appeared in the final game, although the first mention was expanded upon as the [[Imprisoned Angel]] quest.
  
This concept was seen in action in the Act 2 desert at Blizzcon 2009, when some fans had a chance to play through the same area in multiple games. One time a desert region would be empty, the next it would have a ruined building with a horde of monsters inside of it, and another it would have a mini-quest to find a ruined wagon. The concept is to add randomization even within the randomized dungeons, and to change up the play style. [http://www.1up.com/do/previewPage?pager.offset=2&cId=3172030&p=1]
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===Early Stances===
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<blue><font color="#FFFFFF">I think Jay hinted during Blizzcon that there might be updated quests to keep higher level content exciting to keep people coming back and playing again. </font><br>
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Julian Love: It's not so much actually high level versus low level. I think we have a plan that facilitates high level content. What I think you're really getting at there is replayability, and what that gets down to is the way we're exercising randomness within the game. We've put a lot of focus towards what kinds of randomness are really beneficial in supporting replayability and what things are just, heh, not all that important or not all that awesome. One of the things that we have in the system that we have is something that we call - well, we have a really technical name for it -- sub-scenes.
  
::The biggest goal we have with these is that we want to change what the player is doing. Whenever you can basically take the core game and make the player play it in a slightly different way, it makes the game a lot more interesting and keeps it from being tedious. You go from "I'm killing monsters aimlessly" to "I'm now killing monsters to protect this thing." That's easily a more interesting scenario, because it's different than what you were doing, and that's our main goal with that.''
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What it comes down to is we can sort of like create a hole in the world that's like a socket that we can fill with just about anything that we want. It could be empty ground with a bunch of monsters on it, it could be a giant canyon that a really elaborate scripted event happens, it could turn into a caravan walking across the desert that you have an escort quest on. The point being is that this hole in the earth can randomly, at any time become something totally different. It could even be a doorway to a whole new dungeon that you've never seen before. So, the fact that the world is able to change things up and actually deliver different events, stories and quests is what's really going to make the game a lot more replayable at the both the low and high ends.</font></blue>
  
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This was somewhat implamented in the final game, but not to a great extent.
  
==Class-Specific Quests==
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<blue>We’re doing -– there’s a main storyline that is, parts of it might be randomized depending on the area, depending on what the quests are, depending on what the actual objective is. But apart from the main quest, most of our other content is randomized, so from game to game it will be completely different. I can’t give you any kind of percentage because we’re still playing with those numbers, but that’s really the way we built this game is so that we can have a lot of randomized content, including story elements and including quests.</blue>
During the game reveal in mid-2008, the D3 Team talked about class-specific quests at the [[WWI_2008:_Denizens_of_Diablo_Panel|Denizens of Diablo panel]].
 
  
::We'll also have various class quests that will be very interesting. Each class will have different views of the story that will play out through conversations. Bottom line beyond all this is it gives us a way to put the hero at the center of the story. Your hero can drive the story as opposed to being errand boy. You can decide best thing to do. Villages can be cowardly, you can suggest we need to go do this, not just me. I can take control because no one else will. Puts you at centre of the action. Makes char have more of a hero feel.
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This did appear in the final game in the form of events. However, the main story is completely static.
  
This was taken to mean class-specific quests at the time, but in retrospect it seems like nothing more than some class-specific NPC dialogues. Those are known to be in the game; [[Captain Rumford]] showed them with his different remarks to the Barbarian, Wizard, and Witch Doctor at the start of the 2008 Blizzcon demo.
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====Randomized Quests====
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<blue><font color="#FFFFFF">DF: Will there be class specific quests in the game? If so, can you explain how they would work?</font><br>
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Jay Wilson: We are still discussing whether or not we would like to include class-specific quests in the game mainly because of the simple fact that it may not really fit in with the fast-paced play-style known to the Diablo series. While this is definitely something we would like to consider, we just haven't agreed on how just yet.  
  
Like Rumford, all the important NPCs have different dialogues for and reactions to the different characters, and these are planned to be impactful; they're not just {{iw|Gheed Gheed}} sounding worried when he first speaks to a Necromancer, before proceeding to treat that class exactly like anyone else.
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However, we would like to do something in regards to character specificity. We are looking into having different dialogues and experiences for the same quest or interaction for each of the classes. Each character will react differently and have different responses for different scenarios. For example, the Barbarian may do or say one thing in response to what an NPC has to say, whereas a Witch Doctor will treat the encounter in a complete opposite manner.</blue>
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<blue><font color="#FFFFFF">Can you tell us anymore about the class-specific quest system in the game?</font><br>
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Jay Wilson: Not a a lot but I can tell you we do intend to do some class quests and mostly what we want to do is give [[story]] arcs to the characters. We don't want them to be kind of nameless...I think we've reached a point where we are trying to build a universe and a universe is filled with characters. And so a lot of what we want to do with the class quests is support that idea to build characters.
  
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<font color="#FFFFFF">: So when you start the game will the different classes begin in the same  place or will you start at some sort of origin level to setup your character?</font><br>
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Jay Wilson: Originally we wanted to do an origin - we wanted to actually have the characters start in their own location but it was a monumental cost for us to do it so we decided that we would have everyone start in the same place. We do try to set the characters up though. We have a little event early on that's going to try to setup where the characters come from and what their mindset is.</blue>
  
==How Many Quests?==
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Blizzard has not yet added class specific quests in Diablo III.
The [[D3 Team]] has said that D3 will be about the same size as D2, but that it will have many more quests. This total presumably includes the smaller adventures, as well as main plot-driving quests. Jay Wilson commented on this in an August 2008 interview. [http://www.diii.net/n/687810/jay-wilson-from-leipzig-6]
 
  
::We believe Diablo 2 was a very good size, even with the number of quests. In any case, more than in Diablo 2, Diablo 3 will have more quests and many of them have a much stronger tie to the game. Compare this to Diablo 2, where quests generally came in 6 per Act, but in Diablo 3 we have no quest limit. So we can continue to insert as many quests as we like, until we feel that we've got a good amount and there aren't too many. We want to concentrate on quests that are really fun and contribute to the game. If I have to come up with a number, I'd say there's probably twice as many quests, but I wouldn't nail it down like that. It could still be more or less at this point.
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===Summary===
  
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Long story short, blizzard appears to have had goals for making quests more interesting but ended up scrapping most of it, and now we have what we do today.
  
==Quest Conversations==
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===Quests in the Expansion===
[[Image:Injured_villager_talks_to_Wizard.jpg|right|thumb|150px|[[Wizard]] talks to [[Injured Villager]], who starts [[The Skeleton King]] quest.]]
 
[[NPC]] conversations in Diablo III are shown in the normal game screen. The camera merely zooms in a bit. The conversation is ended and the screen returns to normal if you click anywhere outside of the dialogue tree, or press the space bar or Esc key.
 
  
When the game debuted at the [[WWI 2008|WWI event]] in June 2008, NPC conversations were portrayed in a special pop up window display which you can see below. This approach was abandoned between the June premiere and [[BlizzCon 2008|BlizzCon]] in October, since the D3 Team felt that it took players out of the flow of the game.  
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No changes to quests have been made so far in the expansion [[Reaper of Souls]].
  
[[Image:Npc-interaction.jpg|center|thumb|600px|Early concept for NPC dialogue; now removed. The [[Barbarian]] speaks with [[Deckard Cain]].]]
 
  
  
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[[category:quests]]
 
[[category:quests]]
 
[[category:basics]]
 
[[category:basics]]
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[[Category:Featured articles]]
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[[stub:it requires pictures of the modern quest interface]]

Revision as of 04:18, 19 December 2013

Quests lead the story and progression of Diablo 3.

What Are Quests?

Quests are the meat of Diablo's plot, story, and progression. They must be followed to progress.

How Quests Work

Quests are triggered and continued by following the instructions below the minimap on the side of the screen. When completed, they provide experiance and gold (only), which is a big change from how the Diablo II quest system worked. In addition, all quests must be completed, one after another in the order they are given. There is no way to fail a quest in Diablo III. It is possible to have a high level character "carry" you through content, until you reach level caps. It is even possible to powerlevel through the content.

Waypoints and Checkpoints are unlocked based on quest progress.

Quest Interface

Blizzcon 2008 display.
Blizzcon 2009 display.

The final quest interface was modified from the blizzcon versions. The final version consists of a small description of the task to accomplish, and a journel entry for whatever class the player is using. A very easy way to check what is needed to be done on a quest is to look to the right of the screen, which has the instructions on how to progress in the quest.

List of Quests

Below are all the quests in Diablo III.

Events

Events are mini quests that build off, but are not directly connected to (usually) the main quests.




Act I Quests

Act I has 10 quests. The following quests are in Act I:

The Return to New Tristram is manditory for doing the Infernal Machine event.

Act II Quests

Act II has 10 quests. The folling quest are in Act II:

Act III Quests

Act III has less quests than the other acts, with only 7. The following quests are in Act III:

Act IV Quests

Act IV, like diablo II's Act 4, is the smallest act in Diablo III, with a grand total of 4 quests. The following quests are in Act IV:

Events

Events are small sub-quests that have a random chance to spawn in an area. They can appear accross every act besides Act IV. Typically, they consist of completing a task for an npc, such as the Matriarch's Bones event or the Forged in Battle event.

Quest Development

Blizzcon 2008 display.
Blizzcon 2009 display.
Atomic Gamer: Is there anything specifically from Diablo II that the team felt needed improvement and wanted to tweak for Diablo III?

Kevin Martens: The questing and story. I think we’ve added way more quests, more variety of quests. We’ve randomized the quests, and have these sort of quests that are self contained. For example, if you enter a dungeon in Diablo III, there might be somebody standing at the entrance, like a treasure hunter, saying, “Hey, I heard stories about The Idol of Rygnar is hidden somewhere in this dungeon. Help me find it and you can share in the reward.” Then you go through the dungeon and protect this guy. Then you’ll find the idol and you’ll get the reward.

People will turn on you…you’re never quite sure what is going to happen. We’re adding all those random elements all over the world. There is way more quest content overall than Diablo II, period. Also, I think we wanted to do a much better job on the storytelling aspects, not just the cinematics, which are fantastic, but also in the storytelling itself, like more twists and turns, more interesting quests, more variety of experiences. That’s what we spent a lot of time on, and making the co-op nature of it better as well.

This was one of the first statements blizzard made on behalf of quests in diablo III. As you can see, blizzard was origionally intending to make quests diverse, interesting, and much improved to diablo 2.

Blizzcons

At Blizzcon 2008, a couple of quests were playable. They were:

All were featured in Tristram/ nearby dungeons. Quest rewards were small items (random boots and the like). Only the skeleton king quest appeared in the final game.

At Blizzcon 2009, many more quests than the last year were avaible, based in the deserts in Act 2. They were:

Some of these quests appeared in some form or another in the final game (*'s). Rewards were items and experiance.

A couple small quests appeared at Blizzcon 2010. They were:

All 3 of these quests appeared in the final game, although the first mention was expanded upon as the Imprisoned Angel quest.

Early Stances

I think Jay hinted during Blizzcon that there might be updated quests to keep higher level content exciting to keep people coming back and playing again.

Julian Love: It's not so much actually high level versus low level. I think we have a plan that facilitates high level content. What I think you're really getting at there is replayability, and what that gets down to is the way we're exercising randomness within the game. We've put a lot of focus towards what kinds of randomness are really beneficial in supporting replayability and what things are just, heh, not all that important or not all that awesome. One of the things that we have in the system that we have is something that we call - well, we have a really technical name for it -- sub-scenes.

What it comes down to is we can sort of like create a hole in the world that's like a socket that we can fill with just about anything that we want. It could be empty ground with a bunch of monsters on it, it could be a giant canyon that a really elaborate scripted event happens, it could turn into a caravan walking across the desert that you have an escort quest on. The point being is that this hole in the earth can randomly, at any time become something totally different. It could even be a doorway to a whole new dungeon that you've never seen before. So, the fact that the world is able to change things up and actually deliver different events, stories and quests is what's really going to make the game a lot more replayable at the both the low and high ends.

This was somewhat implamented in the final game, but not to a great extent.

We’re doing -– there’s a main storyline that is, parts of it might be randomized depending on the area, depending on what the quests are, depending on what the actual objective is. But apart from the main quest, most of our other content is randomized, so from game to game it will be completely different. I can’t give you any kind of percentage because we’re still playing with those numbers, but that’s really the way we built this game is so that we can have a lot of randomized content, including story elements and including quests.

This did appear in the final game in the form of events. However, the main story is completely static.

Randomized Quests

DF: Will there be class specific quests in the game? If so, can you explain how they would work?

Jay Wilson: We are still discussing whether or not we would like to include class-specific quests in the game mainly because of the simple fact that it may not really fit in with the fast-paced play-style known to the Diablo series. While this is definitely something we would like to consider, we just haven't agreed on how just yet.

However, we would like to do something in regards to character specificity. We are looking into having different dialogues and experiences for the same quest or interaction for each of the classes. Each character will react differently and have different responses for different scenarios. For example, the Barbarian may do or say one thing in response to what an NPC has to say, whereas a Witch Doctor will treat the encounter in a complete opposite manner.
Can you tell us anymore about the class-specific quest system in the game?

Jay Wilson: Not a a lot but I can tell you we do intend to do some class quests and mostly what we want to do is give [[story]] arcs to the characters. We don't want them to be kind of nameless...I think we've reached a point where we are trying to build a universe and a universe is filled with characters. And so a lot of what we want to do with the class quests is support that idea to build characters.

: So when you start the game will the different classes begin in the same place or will you start at some sort of origin level to setup your character?

Jay Wilson: Originally we wanted to do an origin - we wanted to actually have the characters start in their own location but it was a monumental cost for us to do it so we decided that we would have everyone start in the same place. We do try to set the characters up though. We have a little event early on that's going to try to setup where the characters come from and what their mindset is.

Blizzard has not yet added class specific quests in Diablo III.

Summary

Long story short, blizzard appears to have had goals for making quests more interesting but ended up scrapping most of it, and now we have what we do today.

Quests in the Expansion

No changes to quests have been made so far in the expansion Reaper of Souls.


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