Hello everyone,

I hope your weekend was fantastic. Let's jump right in with this week's question -

“We have received lots of new questions this week, and one we would like to answer this time is Commi3's question about what types of quests will be available in Earthrise. Quests will be significant portion of the PvE gameplay in our game and several separate systems will be present to make sure the player has a lot to do if he is not ready or interested to dive deeper in the PvP and economic gameplay. While Earthrise is a more complex type of game where cooperation between players is highly encouraged on many levels, we want to retain one of the important features of casual game design - we want to allow players to solo in a multiplayer environment and advance their characters without requiring them to find a group to play with. The best way to do this is through extensive amount of quests for players to toy with.

The most common and well recognized type of quests to any MMO player are the standard storyline made of main and side quests, ranging from simple FedEx or Kill Foozie tasks to complex challenges made of multiple tasks. While most of the gameplay resolve around a sandbox model where players actions are paramount, Earthrise will provide players with a complex setting and environment, along with compelling storyline where players can invest time if they desire to. These quests will develop around the conflict between Continoma and Noir and many of them will have multiple solutions in order to allow players to choose their side - or change it. While some quests will always be available for players to look back and change what they have done, most of these quests will not be repeatable.

At any time players can leave the main storyline aside to invest as much time as they want in the game generated random quests. These randomly generated quests using wide variety of templates are given out by the many smaller organizations on the island of Enterra through centralized mercenary system which players can access easily in many places rather than forcing the player to walk dozens of miles to hunt down citizens in distress. Each of these random quests is provided by one of the organizations in the game that the person in distress is associated to. Each time the player completes such a quest, his reputation to several organizations change. It's not a simple "do this and we'll all love you" proposition. While your reputation to one organization and to a small degree all friendly organizations will certainly grow, all neutral and to a larger extent all enemy organizations reputation will be lowered. Players won't have a chance to be at a good standing with all organizations in the game - they'll have to make choices and put a lot of work if they want to amend those choices later. Having a good standing towards one organization allows players to ask Favors from this organization - such as access to technology and designs the faction has monopoly on, and other great things we have in store.

We are also working on other types of quests we can't reveal at this time due to early stage of development, but when the time is right, we'll get back to the subject.”

Thank you to our devs for taking time out to answer this intriguing question, and to commi3 for such a cool topic. Please feel free to discuss the questions below in this thread, and post any questions you have on our QOTW thread here. We read every question, just so you know.

See you next week!
~ M.

Ahh, thanks for clearing that up!
It's kind of hard to imagine an MMO without quests to me, specially ones that help guide the character through a part of their story, and help them feel like they did something.
There's probably going to be a few people who dont like the idea of quests, but it's imperative for those who wish to play, but cannot devote the time to do larger things such as PvP. I'll honestly try to work on PvP in the game, but it's great to know that when PvP fails, I can always rely on quests to help!

I doubt theyd make questing necessary to get high end items. Sure there will most likely be rewards, but it'll come from favors asked of the related faction, not some instant "yay free blue" like in some of WoW's quests.
I think you are thinking a lil too deeply into WoW's gameplay in terms of this. There might be raids where the players need to team up to beat it down, but they are wanting to make it a pvp intensive game, not some quest-grinding solo multiplayer with forced groupings in the end.

Probably the gear that you will loot from humanoid NPCs will be dwarfed by your friendly neighbourhood player's crafted gear (excuse the fantasy pun ). The things you'll loot from monsters will be stuff like pearls, spider silk, bones, fangs etc. that may help improve your weapons and armour (don't think anything has come close to the strenght of a spider's silk thread when compared to how much it weighs).

My question would be how big the main storyline quests will be? I'd like to see a questline where the whole community bands together to defeat something, ala the Village from SWG (for all it's evil intetions, the phase 4 of the village was very fun) or the big spider sister assault on C-net (although that was set up by community reps).

randomized quests will be awesome, I always ask why other games don't do it.

The rewards for questing will/should not, at least I hope, be better than player made stuff or else you ruin the player run economy. I don't mind xp boost or something along those lines or extra money for completeing the quest. They could also give schematics and/or small amounts of materials for crafting. I just see loot weapons that are better than player made weapons making the crafting professions worthless then the price for stuff goes through the roof.

Random quests are great. Specialy for the devs, instead of spending every waking moment making up new quests. They can put forth effort into other more important things, witch is very good. Though the quests should not interfer with the freedom that we would all like. But having Main story quests is just as important.And every now and then i like side quests just as much, theres nothing wrong with FedExing something as long as there aren't hundreds of them, and i can come and go as i please for the most part..... But i think putting it all together is something worthwill. And as long as all the quest items are not better than the player econ items then i think everybody will be happy. I know i will 




...NGK...

So far, this sounds good.  I tend to play about 50% solo, and it's nice to see that there will be plenty of quests.  I think that quest rewards should run the gamut from money to supplies and, occasionally, good gear.