Diablo III Quests: Quests in Diablo III

Quests in Diablo III

The developers of D3 strive to improve the quests compared to Diablo II. They want the main quests to be engaging, significant, and to drive the actions in the game. Many of these quests will depend on the character; your character won't just be a fetch quest boy, and the quests won't be trivial; they will be a part of the narrative. Another type of quest is called "adventures," which are semi-random and tied to locations in the game.

Quests as Narrative.

The D3 team is trying to create a much more controlled narrative in Diablo III. They want characters to be unique and become important figures in the world.

Leonard Boyarsky talked about this in his interview in September 2008. [1]:

The RPG elements we've been focusing on for a long time mainly concern the story and characters. We really want you to feel that you are influencing the world – and that the world, in turn, influences you. In the past, action-RPGs either focused on action or on RPG, but we don’t think that is the only option available. Our goal is to make the RPG elements of the story more engaging than they have previously been in the action-RPG genre. We're mainly doing this without interfering with the hack-and-slash gameplay, making you choose - if you don't care about the story or if you're replaying the game and already familiar with some plot elements, the game will still be enjoyable, but if you are really interested, the story will give you a new level of involvement with the game.

The Skeleton King quest

The main feature of this approach is that there are very few quests that are mandatory in the game, but there is a great variety of interesting side and random quests for you to pursue at your discretion. We are also working a lot with information scrolls and books that you can read in the game, but we reiterate that you can completely ignore them if they don’t interest you.

There will also be quests related to the lore/history of the game world, although they won’t provide anything exclusive. This was discussed in the WWI 2008 Lore and Environmental Art Panel, when one fan asked if there would be quests for special items like the Horadric Cube:

The situation is roughly as follows: we are looking at the story and lore and want them to govern the gameplay and quests. Even if I knew for sure, we wouldn’t reveal everything about quests just yet. There will be quests related to the lore. This is what we want from quests in this game. We don’t want quests that only grant rewards for players. We want them to interact with the main storyline. Whether there will be things like the Horadric Cube, we don’t know yet, but given that players like such things, we are working on the story with game designers and item designers to incorporate such things into the game organically. This is somewhat similar to how it was in D2, where the developers didn’t intentionally create the Cube; it came about during the game development process.

Notable Quests

Barbarian helping followers on the Escort Mission quest.

The first few quests we will discuss were noticed in the demo at BlizzCon in October 2008. These were simple, straightforward quests that could match that little dungeon available for demonstration, but they give some insight into how quests will work in the game.

• Little Girl Lost

The first quest spotted in the BlizzCon demo in October 2008.

A wizard completes the quest.

There were three components to the quest.

1. The ghost of a little girl in a well.

2. The girl's mother, who is also a wailing ghost.

3. A doll found in a chest in the center of Tristram.

The quest story is quite simple. The ghost of the little girl was unable to find peace because she could not find her doll. The player was required to find the doll. The girl would then be freed and ascend to the heavens.

The mother of the girl might not be mentioned at all, but if the player found her before starting to search for the doll, they would hear the mother’s lament (the ghost in the ruins of Tristram) regarding her daughter unable to find peace without the doll.

Reward

The reward for this quest is magical boots. The properties on the boots are random, but within the range suitable for your level. Immediately after receiving the reward, a window with stats would automatically open, freeing the player from having to open the inventory and search for the reward.

• Escort Mission

"Escort Mission" is a working title and a description of the quest.

This quest was located on the 2nd or 3rd level of Tristram Cathedral in the 2008 BlizzCon demo.

While exploring the dungeon, the player sees a crowd of skeletons attacking an NPC. After defeating the skeletons, the NPC introduces themselves and states that they were leading a patrol when they were ambushed, and they were cut off from their people. They ask the player for help in finding their squad and follow you.

After a while, you find their squad fighting skeletons and their boss, and you defeat them.

Once all of them are defeated, the NPC soldiers reunite and thank you, leaving through the City Portal. The player cannot pass through their portal and remains in the dungeon.

• The Skeleton King

The Skeleton King is a quest available in the BlizzCon 2008 demo.

To get the quest, you speak to an injured villager (after killing the zombies that were attacking him).

Then you receive the quest:

"Descend into the catacombs and kill the resurrected Skeleton King and his army of undead."

Then you go to Tristram Cathedral and kill several monsters, find a room with 4 pillars and go to the center. The ghost of the Skeleton King appears and says:

"You dare bring the warmth of life into my tomb!!?? Mortal, prepare to serve me forever!!!!"

Then he raises his arms, and blue fire ignites on the four pillars.

The player’s task is to destroy the pillars while fending off attacking skeletons.

After breaking the pillars, you continue your search for the King and find his corpse. If you take the crown from the corpse, the King appears and inhabits his body.

He lets out a loud, "HA HA HA!!!" and charges at the player, along with skeletons appearing at all corners of the room. After defeating them, the quest is complete.

Scripted Events

Jay Wilson spoke about some scripted events seen in the demo at BlizzCon in an interview in December 2008. [2]

We had a lot of [scripted scenes] in our BlizzCon build. [In one of them, there were] some ghosts at an altar looking for an object that you have to bring to prove your worth. When you bring it to them, they will unleash a horde of monsters upon you - and if you survive, you will receive a good reward. In another, you will encounter several adventurers trapped in the dungeon; they need your help to get out of it.

Quest Interface

New quest display

How quests will be presented to players is still in development, as the game is far from finished. The interface and menus seen in the BlizzCon demo in October 2008 were quite similar to Diablo 2. This was to be expected - the system worked and was functional, so why reinvent the wheel? When an NPC has a quest, an exclamation mark hovers above their head, and when a quest is received, a pop-up gives a brief summary and instructions about the quest.

Once received, quests are available in the “Quests” menu, which shows all active quests and allows the player to review quest dialogues. Standard RPG functionality.

Adventures

Adventures are mini-quests that do not affect the main story. They are semi-random and may offer valuable rewards, but they do not need to be completed to progress in the game. The D3 team described them in the WWI 2008 Design Fundamentals Panel.:

Adventures are an innovation compared to D1 and D2. They allow scripted scenes to be placed almost anywhere in the game. You can enter a special area of the world with many possible outcomes. For example, it could be an old abandoned house to explore. It might be filled with crazed undead, and as you clear it out, you uncover the history of the family that lived there. In another game, the same area might host a shrine where cultists perform a summoning ritual. In a third game, there might be a caravan needing protection from marauding monsters or an escort to the nearest town. Or you might encounter a boss monster there. Ultimately, you could just run into a horde of random monsters. The idea is that every time you play through the game, you see something new. We want to ensure randomization everywhere, making everything as replayable as possible so you can have fun each time you return to the game.

NPC needs to be saved from zombies

Since the early mentions, the developers have moved away from a strict classification of Quests/Adventures/Events. They seem to be using these terms more flexibly, as evidenced by Jay Wilson's response to a question in an interview in December 2008.

1UP: Can you tell us about some standard scripted events that you might encounter during a typical playthrough?

Jay Wilson: "... there are many different scenarios; you'll encounter people who need escorting or a lost caravan. And if you're nearby and defend [the caravan] for a few minutes from [attacks] that might happen, you'll receive a reward. Most of them are optional, and the player can choose whether they want to do something or not, but we will try to make them interesting and rewarding. The most important goal we have is that we want to intervene in what the player is doing. Every time we take the base game and try to make the player engage with it in a slightly different way, it makes the game much more interesting and keeps it from being boring. You move from, "I'm mindlessly killing monsters" - to "I'm now killing monsters to........." It makes the narrative more interesting because it's different from what you've already done, and that’s our main goal.

Jay also mentioned that these adventures (or events) are specifically written for that area of the dungeon. Usually, the D3 Team writes about 15 possible mini-quests/adventures/events for each area, and only some of them will appear in each game. This makes the content semi-random, and players will see different events each time they play the game and will have to go through the area multiple times to see all potential events. And since developers can add many such events in patches, the game content can be continually updated. It is also possible that rare events may occur once every few hundred games, allowing players to encounter something new and unexpected months or even years after the game’s release.

Class Quests

Some Quests (and adventures?) will be character-specific, presumably depending on the chosen class, or will be modified depending on your character's class. This was revealed in the WWI 2008 Denizens of Diablo panel:

We will also have various class quests that will be very interesting. Each class will have different story representations conveyed through dialogues. Because of this, we can place the hero in the center of the narrative. Your hero can drive the story, rather than just being a fetch quest boy. You can decide how and what is best to do. Villagers may be cowardly, but you can persuade them that everyone should do something, not just you. Or you might take charge because no one else will. This places you at the center of the action. It allows the character to feel like a hero.

How this will work in a team play setting, where characters of various classes are playing together, is still unknown. It’s possible that some quests will only appear if playing solo, while others will work for mixed parties, with the same objectives but different dialogues unique to each class.

How Many Quests?

The D3 team stated that D3 will be the same size as D2, but there will be many more quests. This total apparently includes minor adventures, as well as major story-driven quests.

Jay Wilson commented on this in an interview with German participants of 4players.de:

We believe that Diablo 2 was a large enough game, even with the current number of quests. In any case, Diablo 3 will have more quests, and many of them will be much more intertwined with the gameplay. Compare this to Diablo 2, where there were only 6 quests per act, while in Diablo 3 we have no limitation on quests. Thus, we can continue adding as many quests as we like until we feel we have enough. We want to focus on quests that are truly enjoyable and contribute to the game. If I had to give a number, I would say that there will likely be twice as many quests, but I can’t guarantee that. It’s also possible to have slightly more or less.

NPC Dialogues

NPC conversations in Diablo III appear in the regular game screen. The camera simply shifts the scale of the image. After the conversation ends, the screen returns to normal scale if you click anywhere outside the dialogue tree or press the spacebar or ESC key.

When the game debuted in June 2008, NPC conversations were depicted in a special window, which you can see below. This approach was changed between the June premiere and BlizzCon in October, as the D3 team decided this pulled players out of the flow of the game.

Source: diii.net

The translation is free, i.e. mine.