Upgrading an Existing Quest: Tumerok Overlord Quest
Related topics: Overlord's Sword Quest
Original Link (now dead) - http://acdm.turbinegames.com/featuredarticles/?action=view&article_id=211
Upgrading an Existing Quest: Tumerok Overlord Quest
By Alicia Brown
Asheron's Call is a dynamic, ever-changing game where quests, hunting grounds, the very landscape of the land of Dereth itself adapts to the changes of time. It is both teeming with life and full of adventures. In times past, we've explored the implementation of quests, but for a change now we wanted to give you an "inside peek" into what it takes to upgrade and "tweak" an existing quest, as opposed to building a new one from scratch. Some of these nuances require more extensive work than starting from a blank piece of paper (or blank screen, in these technology driven times).In the March 2003 Event, A Perfect Paradox, the Tumerok Overlord quest was updated. We questioned srand about it, since this was her project, as well as Gbro, who created the new art introduced with the upgrade.
So why was this particular quest chosen to be updated and, perhaps more to the point, why now?
It was a good candidate for several reasons: it was old, well-known and well-loved by some of AC's longest-term players; it involved Tumeroks (which were being rebalanced and rebuffed during the month) and it spanned several landscape areas that had lately seen a lot of changes, so it fit in well with the previous month's redistribution changes.
Working with such a very out-of-date quest also meant there were lots of places where obvious and noticeable improvements could be made. The timing worked well with the Tumerok changes in place, providing srand with plenty of new creatures to work with, so she wouldn't have to (as she put it) "change it into, say, the Olthoi Overlord quest or some such thing." Plus, in fixing up this quest to fit into the area, srand was able to provide more mid- to high-level content.
In short, it was a fairly well-known, fairly large, fairly easy-to-improve quest. It was perfect for updating.
To start with, srand found out everything she could about the original quest, which in itself was no easy feat. The original design document was hiding in an old "dungeon" area of the team's file system, simply called Tumerok Quest. It had not been revised since July 1999, hardly a modern document by the team's current design-document standards, but there was enough there to facilitate srand's write up of a preliminary walk-through for her new design document.
Then her research began in earnest: searching, reading, compiling information of the quest on the web to get the players' perspective - and playing the quest herself, many times, for first-hand experience. She noted all the discrepancies, all the especially fun bits and all the annoyances, and from this was able to lay out the flow of the revised quest - which, as it turned out, was an improvement on but not all that much different from the original.
Her first objective was to make it easier for players to discover the quest - so she placed a rumor "with" several barkeepers. This may or may not be the most interactive way to help players find quests - but it is one of the best in the game engine, so she elected to take advantage of what was readily and easily accessible. Then, since most of the player walk-throughs she'd read about had never discovered (or at least never bothered to mention) the alternate beginnings of the original quest, srand streamlined them all into one cohesive beginning.
Her next objective was to eliminate major annoyances, such as finding the exact location for each of the various parts of the quest. To alleviate some of this tediousness, she added approximate coordinates to the description of each key, which would be a definite help to anyone who might wander into the middle of the quest by accident to continue forward from that point.
Another annoyance was requiring "lockpick" to complete the quest. Now, this doesn't mean the value of having lockpick was eliminated or lost - to the contrary, those with a talented lockpicker would need to visit fewer locations, and the better the lockpick skill, the fewer areas they would need to pass through in order to get the Overlord Sword. "A very talented lockpicker doesn't need to collect any of the keys at all - well, except for the final key that's found on the corpse of the Overlord himself," srand explains. Regarding the intricacies of the lockpick skill within this quest, she adds: "I was hoping lockpickers might adopt this quest as a way to measure their skill level. You know: 'I can only pick the Tumerok Mine door reliably but my friend can pick the Fortress door. He's uber!'"
The biggest difference to be seen in the quest as it exists now is in the difficulty. All of the monsters got harder - sometimes much harder - and the rewards increased commensurately. Each location was planned around one or two types of Tumeroks, with the difficulty increasing as the player progresses through the quest. And the loot profile of the Overlord's Hoard was increased. "It started as one of the best sources of loot in the game, but had fallen sadly behind in the past few years," srand said. And of course, she also upgraded the Overlord's Sword.
Since the overall quest is aimed at non-optimized high-level characters, the new Overlord Sword has a wield requirement of 325 sword skill. The max damage is higher than any loot sword out there and it comes with maximum attack and defense modifiers, plus an almost full set of level 6 item spells. It is, however, missing Swift Killer 6; the Overlord's Sword has traditionally done big damage, but at the same time has been very slow. It also casts Sword Mastery 6 on its wielder. The Overlord's Sword is a great example of the team's philosophy with regard to quest rewards: It's a solid, very usable sword - until you find (or create) something better.
Once all the changes were planned out, it was just a matter of implementing them. Sometimes this can be fun but nearly as often it's just tedious. In this case, effecting these revisions meant spending many hours with WorldBuilder, swapping out monsters and fiddling with generators, then processing the changes and testing, testing, testing. In the end, srand updated 26 landblocks (including three dungeons) - and then moved on to updating the creatures! (Each key-dropping Tumerok is a special data file, based on a normal Tumerok, and she was changing which type of Tumerok each key-dropper was based on!) She also had to update all the keys, all the doors, several chests plus the Overlord Sword itself.
But it was the landblock changes that were the most exhausting: "By the time I was done, I was commenting to everyone who would listen: 'I am so sick of Tumeroks!'," srand reflects dryly.
The final change was getting some cool new artwork for the updated Overlord Sword. When Gbro asked srand what it should look like, however, all he got by way of reply was, "It's the biggest, baddest sword in the game!"
"That's okay with me," Gbro says with a laugh, "because this is more detail than I'm used to!" Then, in all seriousness, he adds, "I like it when requests are made in this way, because it gives me free reign to make the object in question look however I want. One of the many things I really like about being on the AC Live Team is the creative freedom we have with most of the projects, and the fact that the designers normally chuck in their ideas but then grant us the freedom to create what we want from their input."