The trial of the radishes is meant as a guided, self-learning tutorial without step-by-step instructions. Instead it focuses on exploratory learning by actively using the tools to solve increasingly challenging tasks.

See forum post for more information about the trials.

Trial 8 - Objectives

At this point you should be familiar with all of the most important aspects required to create new quests: layers, journals, communities, interactive scenes, custom entities and a good set of the involved tools. so it's time to tie everything together and make a full fledged, playable quest!

Your task is to:

• create a quest with at least two different outcomes (the world state at the end should be different (e.g. layers, communities, ..))
• there should be some communities with interactions, that is attached dialog scenes (e.g. quest giver?)
• there should be some "cinematic" scene, meaning no interactive dialog but presenting some questspecific progress
• quest should have some special character that will be described in the character journal with multiple entries and an image
• there should be also a new bestiary entry
• monster or animal communities should be more complex (e.g. guard areas, conditioned respawns, ...)
• quest should have multiple tasks that are logged in the quest journal depending on success/failure
• some interactive entities (clues, animated containers) and player comments should be used
• a special reward item should be given to the player on quest success
• the quest should tie everything together with a somewhat coherent "story" (may be simple but not "task 1", "task 2", etc. - think of these trial's task as your small showcase quest, so be creative :)
• you should use subsegments in the questgraph to structure your quest better
• post a video of your quest
• "publish" your quest as a playable mod here for others to testplay :)

Some background Information

In trial 2 a very basic quest was created. Over the course of the trials, various elements of quests were discussed. With this knowledge you’re properly armed, but there are still some design principles, radish features and tips you might find interesting to use: quest patterns, noticeboards, rewards…

(Interactive) Storytelling

One aspect praised in The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt and its extensions are its memorable side quests, contributing to the feeling of the world being filled with meaningful instead of repetitive content. While this article cannot teach you to make quests on CDPR level, it can give some hints on what could be sub-goals and tricks leading towards that.

To begin with, one way to avoid your quest being seen as a simple “fetch-quest” is to give it a strong story context. Having a visually interesting scene, a surprising plot twist or a tragic character will distract the player from an underlying pattern that may have been used hundreds of times before.

Designing and implementing an interesting story is an art on its own, thus - like in the trial 6 article - we will only scratch the surface with the following tips, most of which are more or less directly taken from Phillip Weber (CD Project Red) – Killing Monsters and Creating Worlds.

In general, it will help to approach quest creation as if you were actually creating for a real audience which wants to enjoy great stories from the Witcher universe. CDPR is often talking about a “mature storyline”: Part of what makes a great story is that it speaks to something deeply human and manage to let your audience feel something.

Characters

Characters are an important part of stories, since they are able to act human-like and are thus able to take an active role in the plot. A good character should have underlying motivations for their deeds and maybe shifting motivations/views as the story progresses and they learn something new. In a small plot like a side quest, a NPC might have an agenda which sets up some secret to be revealed later.
 

Character motivations can be hinted at with visual storytelling, that is, animations, their model (the entity customization techniques from trial 5) or communities, which can tell something about an NPC’s life and current plans. The more unique a character, the more interesting they are.

Choices

The morally grey world is one of the key features in the Witcher series: in many quests one finds ambiguous decisions at some point. A good choice creates a dilemma and is not “good” or “bad” and entails consequences in each path.
 

Consequences can be different community states, how someone reacts in a scene or whether an NPC is still alive or not.A consequence should be telegraphed to the player in some way, for instance by a camera framing in a later scene, if it is unlikely that they stumble upon it by themselves. A consequence gains impact, if it is delayed: if the player feels what they caused only at some later point, they need to live with their decisions.

Plot

An interesting plot is often based on attachment or/and suspense and surprise. Audiences like to empathise with people in which they see themselves or who do things they wish they could. This can be sufficient to make people want to know more and thus continue watching/playing/etc.
Suspense and surprise are about secrets or tensions, whose (possible) solutions are repeatedly hinted at (foreshadowed), and, at best, released in a big plot twist/finale.

Pacing is how the content intensity of a plot runs over time. In general, TW3 has three types of content: fights, exploration/travel and scenes. To avoid monotony, every type should appear now and then and varied intensities occur over the course of the plot.

A plot often has a theme, a recurring topic, which in the case of open-world video game quests is derived from the game’s main topics. TW3 is a lot about family, small people’s fates, dark magic and mediaeval brutality.

Design Techniques for Quests

Even for the littlest quest some design work before implementation can be useful. For design work in general and quest design in concrete there are some techniques.

Idea-Generation

In design theory, ideation is the phase of the crafting process where the designer generates and selects ideas. For a Witcher 3 quest you could look for inspiration in the following sources:

Witcher-lore and history. This is the most obvious source. You can’t really do anything wrong if you try to just tell a story with characters/locations/themes/etc. from the lore.

Old legends or fairy tales from eastern-middle europe. The base game draws a lot from the Witcher books, which themselves are heavily based on such material. In the game also other fairy tales were worked in, take for example the fairytale realm from Blood and Wine!
 

Real-life issues and problems. Both games and the books before them use real-life issues such as racism or religious fanaticism in their stories, making the works dark fantasy. If you want to do this as well, take care to handle the element you chose properly.

Gameplay features. Some quests can be built around a gameplay feature such as the crossbow, or some interesting combination of mechanics. For example you could make a quest that requires Whale and sends the player on a quest entirely underwater in the middle of the Skellige ocean!

Other quest(s) in the game(s). Maybe after finishing that once quest in Witcher 2 you always thought “would be cool to learn about the fate of character X”. Now here’s your chance to continue their story! For a Witcher 3 quest there’s a possibility that CDPR has set some facts in the fact database you might use.

Documentation

To get a better grasp of what you’re trying to achieve, some basic documentation methods can help.

A character sheet can help find what a character (existing or newly created) is about. Such a sheet typically is a table with a lot of suggestions for bibliographical information, their psychology, narrative integration etc.

A pacing graph helps visualise the intensity curve of a plot. It could look like this:
 

Here’s a talk from a Witcher 3 quest designer talking about how CDPR was using pacing to enhance their quests: Paweł Sasko: Life, Love and Quest Design. Anatomy of Quests in The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt.

If you’re convinced of doing some quest design for your quest, you might want to set up a Quest Design Document to keep all information in one place. This template (QDD Template) contains some suggestions how such a document could be structured, in part inspired by answers CDPR developers have given on the topic.

Design Patterns

Some elements of Witcher 3 quest design are recurring. Knowing these patterns can help make your quest feel more fitting into the game! This article can’t provide an exhaustive list, but the list that is there is meant to inspire you and maybe find other patterns to add and use.

Pattern #1: Endless talk-exit loop
If there are optional dialogue options after a main conversation is finished, then there is a white marked “exit” option. If the player selects it, they can talk to the NPC again and find themselves in the same options.
 

Pattern #2: Scene start by area enter vs. interaction
If the player “stumbles into a situation”, start the scene when they enter an area around the scene. Otherwise, use the regular interaction.

Pattern #3: Almost every NPC always has a oneliner.
NPCs usually always have a oneliner that they’re saying when interacted with without a scene playing.

Advanced Quest Features

TBD

Balancing

Balancing is a general problem for all new quest mods that want to embed seamlessly into the game areas. A first idea would be to decide based on two things: at what point in the vanilla game you want to enable players to start the quest (<- use levels from quests in that vanilla game progression) and/or in what area you want to have those quests take place (<- use levels from enemies/quests in this area).

For orientation you can use the vast documentation done by the Witcher Wiki, where not only quest rewards and suggested levels can be inspected, but also item stats.

Localization

TBD

Tips Storytelling

• make every shot in a scene count, if it doesn't add anything to the narrative, it probably can be skipped
• let players participate, don't make an interactive film - also avoid bland quests, walk from point a to point b, fight
• careful obstacles, they should fit into the world, may provide hooks to other side quests
• sometimes give only clues and not full explanations, humans can interpolate details. depending on their personal experience their explanations will vary but that is a good thing, it makes it more personal

Tips Organization

• this trial is an excellent opportunity to collaborate if you want - for example someone could care for the writing, storyboarding, design, help with scene implementation…
• it is possible to use multiple files for multiple communities/layers/entities/…
• you can add external: true to a sub segment definition, if you want it to be encoded as a separate .w2phase
• there is an auto-layout feature in quest editor :)

Tips Release

• make sure to “secure” your quest - there shouldn’t be any possibility of being locked in some weird state or have incorrect journal entries etc.
• let someone else test your quest. they WILL find something you overlooked
• remove comment for SET RELEASE_VERSION=YES in _settings_.bat
• in Nexus, use the category “Quests and Adventures” :)
• add some images/screenshots & introductory description on your Nexus page, A Night to Remember is a good example