Campaign Quests

My primary responsibility for this release was the main campaign quests – namely Renegades and The Territory War Begins. This feature required heavy collaboration with the narrative team, and underwent lots of revision but, at the end of the day, it was pretty cool to be able to work on the story for our Star Wars collaboration. Also, the narrative folks were all great to work with.

Initially, the hope for this questline was to have the narrative be a bit more open-ended, and provide players with some agency in how they progressed through the story. Earlier on, we had toyed with the idea of allowing the player to choose the order that they were introduced to each syndicates. As part of these introductions the hope was to have the player assist each syndicate in setting up an illegitimate business in Tharsis Outpost, which would have subsequently rolled out some of our seasonal gameplay features. Due to assorted constraints, we did need to revert to a more linear flow, though I do feel that it ultimately provided for a much stronger story.

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When it came to the actual design of these quests, I tried to adhere to the following set of guidelines as much as possible, though, concessions do sometimes need to be made –

• Avoid excessive vectoring

  • Nobody loves running back and forth between NPCs, especially if it’s just to receive a few blocks of text. It’s even worse if you require a player to load onto a planet, just to talk to a single NPC, and then have them leave again. This is one of those areas where just sitting down and playing through your own content can expose some of the pain points, and narrative tweaks might be required, for the sake of the player experience

• Break up narrative-heavy moments

  • This is another area where playtesting can help to easily expose potential points of friction. This could technically account for excessive vectoring, above, but is more focused on avoiding long stretches of inactivity. Cinematics, radio message, vendor performances – these are all things that require players to more passively engage with the game and, if chained together, can lead to long periods of inactivity, resulting in the player losing interest.

• Avoid busywork

  • It can be nice to break up some of the more dialogue or audio-heavy moments with a bit of gameplay, but if the task at hand feels like more of uninteresting chore, it can actually end up hurting the experience a bit more than helping. If you are going to rely on more menial tasks, see if you can at least associate some sort of benefit - touring a space, meeting particular NPCs, introducing new interactions, etc.

• Don't pad playtime with activites

  • With Renegades, Lawless Frontier jobs were only required when their corresponding locations were first introduced to the player. Beyond that, all activity time was constrained to the more narrative-focused missions. Players are going to be running seasonal activities a lot, post-campaign, and slowing down that journey by requiring more of the same tends to not feel great. Also, depending on the amount of repetition, it can sometimes also just blatantly read as trying to pad playtime, which is very often met with negative sentiment.​

And probably worth calling out – while the narrative was certainly the biggest driver, in terms of shaping/reshaping the structure of these quests, it was not the only one. Additional considerations also need to be made for how we roll new seasonal features out to the player. In the case of the Renegades release, things like the Syndicates, Renegade Abilities, Lawless Frontier, and Contracts all required coordination with the respective feature owners, as well a bit of creativity for how they might make sense with the narrative. at the times that we wanted to introduce them.