Anatomy of a Quest Arc

Anatomy of a Quest Arc

One of our goals for The Lord of the Rings Online is to inject a healthy dose of story into the MMO experience. Turbine has a solid history of providing strong story content for our games, but for LOTRO, we're going a step beyond. In addition to building an epic story that spans much of a character's lifespan, as well as one-off quests that respond to our overall story context, we are including a fair number of quest arcs: series of quests that tell smaller, self-contained stories with a beginning, middle, and end... often concluding with an exciting, instanced encounter.

In this dev diary, I'll chronicle the birth (and life) of our first official quest arc: the human newbie experience. If you've ever wondered how designers come up with our stories, this is the dev diary for you...

Start With a Setting

It begins as such things often do: with a shout across the LOTRO design pit.

"Hey! What are we doing for the human starter zone?"

This prompts a search of the relevant Tolkien lore. We already know that human players will start the game in Bree-land—the area surrounding the town of Bree, famous for the Prancing Pony Inn and its bumbling proprietor, Barliman Butterbur.

But we don't want to start players in Bree proper. Bree is going to be one of our main social centers, and dropping a new player into a bustling online "city" might be overwhelming. We want to provide new players with a focused newbie experience, so we'll start them in one of the smaller, surrounding villages: Archet.

Archet receives only a couple brief mentions in the books, giving us a lot of creative freedom. But what's there to do in Archet? Again, we consult the lore. According to Tolkien, Bree-land experienced a rise of banditry around the time of the books.

Aha! We've found our villains. Archet will be plagued by a gang of vicious brigands.

But how will we draw players into the story? In my opinion, it's best to drop players right into the middle of things, so I decide that human players will start the game as prisoners of the brigands. That makes the conflict personal, and therefore more interesting. The tutorial mission will be a jailbreak, where the player breaks out of the brigands' camp, with the help of a Ranger and a hobbit girl. After escaping, the player ends up in Archet and learns that the village is under threat from the same group of brigands. So the first quest arc will follow players as they help fortify the town, spy on the brigands, learn of an impending attack on Archet, and attempt to thwart a brigand raid.

Designer Mat Imregi adds our first major NPC. Archet will be defended by a hard-nosed militia commander whose methods may not be entirely appreciated by Archet's townsfolk. Worldbuilder Ryan Bednar and I flesh out some of the region's geography: Archet will be a walled enclosure in the northwest of the area. We'll also have a hunting lodge in the northeast, inhabited by some free-spirited woodsmen who are aligned with Archet. In the far southeast, the brigands will be encamped amongst some ancient ruins.

Next, Add a Theme

Middle-earth is more than a collection of exotic locations and nasty foes. Tolkien's work is multi-layered, and it encompasses a variety of important themes. In building our content, we are trying to address many of the same themes in an effort to make our world feel as much as possible like the one Tolkien imagined.

Tolkien's major races each embodied a theme; for Men, this theme was mortality, so lineage was very important to his human characters. For the human newbie story, we decide to focus on the idea of lineage. Our military commander will have a son, and there will be tension between them.

Now, I need to decide how this will play out in the game. When players arrive in Archet, they will be introduced to our military commander, Captain Brackenbrook. He's a tough old veteran, a former mercenary who's decided to make good and help defend the hapless village of Archet from the brigand threat. But his methods are those of a soldier; he's building a small army and fortifying the town, making him popular with some villagers, and unpopular with others.

I know that players will get their first missions from Captain Brackenbrook, helping his subordinates gather supplies for the army, secure the road into town, and interrogate a brigand spy. After that, I want to send players to the hunting lodge for their second series of missions. The simplest way to set up a tension between father and son is to put the Captain's son, Jon, in charge of the lodge. The Captain will be forced to send players to the lodge because Jon's hunters are the best scouts in the area, and he needs to find out what the brigands are up to.

Conflict Reveals Character

Jon is our untested youth; young and idealistic, he despises his father's heavy-handed methods. But his values are those of a child. Unlike his father, he has never seen battle, and he's never known true hardship. Thanks to the player, Jon is about to undergo his first real test of character...

I won't reveal the rest of the quest arc, but suffice to say that the player unearths an unpleasant surprise, leading to a climactic battle for Archet. Each of our NPCs will react to these events in characteristic ways. Tolkien's characters—Frodo, Sam, Boromir—often showed very different sides of their personalities when faced with adversity, and many of our characters will be similarly transformed. An NPC may seem to be a certain kind of person when you first meet him, but later events reveal a very different side of his personality (sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse).

Details, Details, Details

Creating story and setting in a game requires more than quests and NPC dialogue. As in a good film, every detail in an area should reinforce the story we are trying to tell, as designers.

According to our story, Archet is a town under siege, and the Captain is fortifying the town and training a small, private army. So I work with Worldbuilder Ryan ("Tens") Bednar to ensure that Archet feels like a garrison town. We give the village a palisade wall, and place weapon racks, tents, archery targets, and training dummies. Animator John Lindemuth creates "training" animations for our guard NPCs, so Brackenbrook's soldiers can practice their archery and swordsmanship. I write color text for the soldiers, townsfolk, and refugees from the surrounding countryside. They voice their opinions of the Captain, the brigands, and the activities of other NPCs.

We also work to create interesting personalities for our minor NPCs. Kate Henseed is the local do-gooder, but she's got a soft spot for bad boys. Sergeant Redroot is a cynic who suffers from chronic bad luck. Constable Thistlewool is modeled on a proper English bobby. He supports the Captain for the good of the town, but when the brigand threat is ended, his position may change.

In most cases, we try to reuse these NPCs so that they, too, can react and change as events unfold. Observant players will notice that many of our minor characters have strong beliefs and personalities of their own. Their opinions of each other, and of the player, will shift as the story continues.

All this is made possible by an amazing suite of development tools. Our quest tool, built by programmer Mat Monas, allows us to quickly and easily create NPCs, write their dialogue, build their quests, and make quick changes as needed. With a little upfront planning, we're able to build seemingly complex interactions among NPCs and quests in a very short time.

The Road Goes Ever On...

With the battle for Archet won, the player receives a mysterious letter from the village of Combe. The writer claims to be a Ranger named Toradan, and he seeks aid from the 'hero of Archet.' Players will find that their victory in Archet has afforded them a measure of fame, and more NPCs will seek the aid of the local hero.

Players can remain in Archet for a time, helping the surviving townsfolk to recover from the battle, or they may hurry on to Combe to meet with Toradan. Our newbie quests will soon lead players to the first pieces of LOTRO's epic story, which will deal with Tolkien's themes and characters on a larger, grander scale.

But that's a subject for another day...