Many people perceive video games as stories, and especially these days, probably more people perceive stories as video games. Part of this is simply that video games are a more immersive medium than others – it’s easier to feel connected to a character who you are controlling than to sit in a movie theater and just watch. However, there is also the widespread realization that the story flows better in a video game than in any other medium. In a novel, the author controls the order of events (the reader can reread the book, read the end first, or make a guess, but they are on an honor system to not do so). In a movie, the director controls the temporal order of events. However, in a video game it is the player who controls the time order. This yields better pacing, and presumably better storytelling, than any other medium.
1.1. Purpose and Scope of the Review
Purpose and Scope of the Review: The review proposed in this study is the primary tool that game designers have for telling a story to players. As previously mentioned, the narrative that the main quest offers is the one that keeps players engaged in playing the game because it is through it that players realize the level of game completion, receive feedback to continue playing, and feel immersed in the game. So to better understand the history of video games, we proposed this systematic literature review to help describe what is motivating players to play a specific game, i.e., to understand the narrative’s quality of gaming and its greater commitment. This systematic review was focused both on evaluating the characteristics of the main missions and on understanding what and how side missions were built. Through it, game developers can create ace conditions and more detailed and interesting missions, and increase the magic and intensity of their games.
In recent years, there has been a growing interest in the study of video games. These studies analyze video games from different scientific perspectives and from different disciplines, using varied methodological approaches. Although much progress has been made with regard to the different disciplines, researchers have fallen short of studying – with the academic rigor that it deserves – this area of video game research. From the immediacy and popularity of it (the video game industry continues to grow and the number of players is in constant increase), we believe it is increasingly necessary to provide a scientific basis for the study of this area of game development. We believe the fact that the video game involves game design and interactive narrative should increase the interest in the study of video games.
2. Main Quests
2.1. Main Quest 1: Title and Summary
2.2. Main Quest 2: Title and Summary
2.3. Main Quest 3: Title and Summary
3. Side Quests
While some may rely upon friendships and preexisting groups, others can look to strangers within their communities for help by using community infrastructure that mediates interpersonal relationships.
In addition to other in-world strategies, players may rely heavily upon reviews and other player commentary posted on message boards, fan sites, and other websites designed to support or extend the game’s experience. This is something that is being referred to as «trust relationships» among players. However, players do not have to know each other; larger-scale social structures and group descriptions, as well as community norm maintenance, encourage prosocial behavior and collaborative group project implementation. Using publicly available reviews can also help in the quest prioritization process. However, verifiability, validity, and give-and-take issues that accompany this information sourcing process may make these services less useful.
While walking through quest hubs or through new portions of the game, players often stop to overhear snippets of conversations to acquire information about side quests. Another way players decide on whether to undertake a certain quest is to talk to quest givers and receive detailed information about what the quests entail, including information on rewards and requirements. Players also inspect the contents of loot treasure chests, after completing a quest objective, to determine whether or not the included item is of significant worth.
Side quest promises of treasures can sometimes be misleading, since the resources and time invested in fulfilling a quest can exceed the benefits. Additionally, opportunity costs exist since time is spent completing side quests that could otherwise be used to make progress on the main quest. As a result, players try to figure out whether a side quest is worthwhile before starting on it.
When not to do a side quest
3.1. Side Quest 1: Title and Summary
In seed-based models, every time step is conditioned on a ‘seed’, which is, for example, a state description and an ordered set of actions (title of the main quest and descriptions of side quests in our implemented dataset) that are required to be represented in the generated story in a textual form. In this scenario, where every generated text is required to contain an excerpt, we see that despite the use of those short descriptions to be related to what has been generated, the seed-based models are not able to naturally connect them well with the actual text. The adjective ‘similar’ in this case implies that the determination of the specific word is not as easy, but randomness plays a lower value since the vocabulary is already defined. Our loss function has the unique quest/seed compatibility and rewards the encouraged words with higher probabilities.
In this paper, we propose an approach to improve machine learning (ML) models for procedural narrative generation through a gradient-based algorithm. We design a loss function and adapt it into a gradient-based approach that allows us to modify an ML model to be adapted, not only to a given sequence label, but also to the sequence of related probability distributions preceding the occurrence of a specific label. The effectiveness of this method is demonstrated in two proactive usage scenarios by applying it to two seed-based models of different nature, yielding different collaborative texts and offering the possibility of adapting the desired granularity of the story.
3.2. Side Quest 2: Title and Summary
The Story of the Game: A Review of Main Quests and Side Quests In every player’s life, the completion of some crucial objectives prevents the undertaking of minor quests. There are new bosses to be defeated, other players to be saved from tricky situations, or worlds to be explored in the longed-for search for remaining additional content. However, the most important goal – the computer game that is the player’s real world – is not as attractive to the player as it is to the game runner. Indeed, the objectives of the game runner are fundamentally different from those of the player.
Side quest 2 takes audiences 5 minutes to finish and consists of 3 levels: 1) listen to the player’s preoccupation; 2) offer advice that may or may not solve the player’s problem; and 3) praise the player for vanquishing the problem. Since side quests do not hinder the completion of the main goal, playing both instances will add a mere 10 minutes to the total run time of the main quest. As there is no distinction between male player preoccupations and female player preoccupations in the quest, any player will be able to access side quest 2. In this side quest, a non-playable white whale asks the player for an audience. As the whale got stuck in a critically important place and is unable to continue on its quest, it is up to the player to give the poor mammal its freedom back.
3.3. Side Quest 3: Title and Summary
A game that has a side quest should be able to launch the player into a new discovery tour where the curiosity for the plot’s secret must systematically be increased since these secrets, in general, hold fragments of the history of the main quest, associated with new narrative threads that end up forming a causal network of more complete stories for certain characters and the very environment, resulting that this information contributes to nourishing the temporal and spatial layer. Consequently, the side quest should end up introducing new forms of interaction and clashes so that the little stories that help the deeper layer are enriched. However, more than purely informative, side quests are usually designed to extend the duration of these games since it ends up functioning as motivation for the user when the cunning of history is exhausted by generating a plot that endowing the game with an existential depth wishes the player to participate. The problem is that these clues are usually scarce, incomplete, and only useful once the correct chronology of the player’s main most main ones has been followed.
Some games are offered with many secondary objectives that compose the entire plot of the game, called side quests. As in the case of the main quests, in the case of side quests, in general, there are more stories that function as incentives not to put aside the story of certain characters, that flashback, telling a bit more about a particular character and his circumstances and that, depending on the player’s answer at the end of the dialog in the interaction layer, the player can acquire different types of rewards and even new side quests, so that its decision that word generated some type of consequence, situation not very usual in this type of game. This fact creates experience that fiction is interactively generated by the player who will be able to determine its course according to its answers at the end of the dialog box questioning the character about its narrative thunder. Furthermore, who knows, the decision has a potential for creating a situation that was not foreseen by the programmer, creating depths of fiction, emotional context, and immersion effects for the user of the interaction layer of greater magnitude since this would enable the generation of conflicts among characters considering actions that were not anticipated during the narrative production.
4. Comparative Analysis of Main and Side Quests
Table 2 provides a comparison of important main quest details, including information about numerous well-established games. The table shows that most games are open world and action RPGs, and gives information about the number of main and side quests. Some games have more main quests than others, and the games differ in terms of the number of quests of each type.
This section provides a description of some of the game details that we have collected. Game details can be categorized into two groups, based on their relative importance: main quests and side quests. Main quests are the storyline-related quests that must be accomplished to successfully complete a game, while side quests are optional quests that are not necessary to complete the game. Main quests are therefore of greater importance than side quests. In this paper, we define main quests as those which are necessary to complete to successfully finish a game. As for the importance of a main quest relative to other main quests, we quantify the relative importance of the task by determining the order of the quests. If there are N main quests in a game, we group the main quests into N – 1 pairs. The tasks in the first pair must be completed before all other tasks in the game to be successfully completed, and the last main quest pair consists of the two tasks which are the last ones necessary to complete the game. We use these groupings to define the ordinal of the task in the game.
5. Impact of Quests on Player Experience
This paper pays special attention to the impact of the different types of quests on the player experience, as a measure of the diversity of objectives it can offer the players. The analysis is based on the work on video game experience. They theorize the possibility of equating the experience of playing a video game to the experience of consuming a narrative object, which can be dissected into five dimensions: spatial experience, ethical experience, evaluative experience, participatory experience, and mental experience. In our article, this division is used in a playful context, where the term «narrative» refers to the tasks proposed by the main quests, secondary quests, and the different activities in the form of entertaining micro-stories. This symbology is proposed as such, playing a passive/active role by simulating several facts, that is to say, sending several comments to us, communicating with us while we play the game. The role of the other communicator will be taken by our sensor, who will allow us to perceive the changes incurred to progress in the game. After a few seconds, the sensor will not react to the second-communicant-machine interaction, forcing the machine to adopt the double active role of asking questions and providing answers.
6. Narrative and Lore Development
There is an inherent danger in giving the narrative true scale and grandeur. It’s easy to grant a greater aura to the lore than it supports. From a theoretical standpoint, we play games because we want entertainment. And while enjoyment may come from nuance and plot, it mostly comes from pleasure principle. If the lore interferes with the fun of play, it is possible that the substance of the narrative is so overbearing that the game becomes a chore. Considered purely as a formal system, the rules cannot be subservient to the narrative but must help convey the narrative.
A game’s narrative sets the stage for its story. It tells us where we are, what we are doing, and why we are doing it. And as we move through the game, its lore tells us more about this place we are exploring and the people we are helping or killing. Every action or inaction the player can perform, every conversation the player can have, every interaction with the world is an opportunity to expand the lore of this world. This is arguably the core essence of role-playing: taking part in events that shape the world. Each action and conversation has an impact and directly involves the player. Acting out the story is its own reward.
7. Character Development and Interactions
The Final Fantasy universe allows for late character recruitment and the generation of optional missions especially aimed at adapting the characters to the main storyline, thus making it virtually impossible for the player to make a selection error and render one’s teammates too weak. If by some chance this happens, the player can complete some related tasks that are always available and recover the missing experience, allowing them to catch up with the real stars of the game. However, it is arguable that 100% completion or the experience with optional characters destroy the theory of character complementarity that gives the Final Fantasy IV storyline coherence and equilibrium.
As we have already stated, the level of character development offered by the game varies greatly from one title to another. Final Fantasy IV conceives the advancement of the scenario chronologically as the development of the protagonists that carry out the missions at key moments, as if it were a recurring set of epic functions among different characters. When a character does not take on a certain role, we can make a choice and change that character for another, while in a game like Body Harvest, when we change characters, we actually bring the third one into play, derailing the continuity of the main character, Adam Drake’s, construction of actions contemplated in the main plot.
8. Gameplay Mechanics and Quest Design
In most video games, the story of the game and the principal strokes of the game design are represented through quests. Quests extend the storyline of a game, articulate its plot, create in-game goals for the player, and help immerse the player into the game’s world. Through its quests, a game gives the player guidance and some freedom of choice, and combines the rich and complex world factors into an engaging experience.
The section presents an analysis of gameplay mechanics and their placement within the storyline of main quests and side quests. The review was carried out in three phases. The first phase involved the structuralist analysis of game quests found in the academic literature on video game analysis. The second phase consisted of a content analysis of data concerning quests from forum databases and in the process of playing games. The third and final phase involved examining quests for several games identified within the final list of the analyzed games. The examination was conducted through the detailed study of game scripts and the compilation of a list of individual gameplay mechanics. The study identified the most characteristic mechanics with direct and indirect relevance for various missions.
9. Quest Completion and Rewards
There are some general recommendations on how to deal with the concept of the reward for quest completion and acceptance stimuli helpful when the requirements and the solutions come without much or any certification points, i.e., especially when the manifestations of cognitive dissonance are insubstantial. We provide several groups of strategies which are 1) embodying cumulative earnings; 2) incorporating game elements; 3) running time shift; 4) adjusting the perception of others; 5) influencing motivation and expected utility consequent diminishing. After the introduction of the quest completion aspect, we address the relationship between quest completion and numerous teachings. The user narratives of the descriptive campus-course management system are the most effective guardians of virtue and refereeing when transaction costs cannot be avoided at reasonable amounts of pros occurred, which is the commonly used escalating cost structure that can make its appearance as Nash equilibrium subject to the revealed preferences of the game players.
The reward for quest completion is, naturally, elusive and it depends on how the player values as well as processes the game. One could try to model the player enjoyment from quest completion within the bounds of the theory of rational choice, but clearly this was not one’s objective. Self-interest is replaced by the subjective motives and gaming pleasure is measured by the fun coefficient (dictated by different places of the game itself as well as circumstances of play) which scales to different on arbitrary (game-dependent and context-specific) woody, marshy or asphalting (and with paying and countable reed types of). This leads to the conclusion that developers could interest the game players in different ways of participation in the game environment for the sake of quest completion, providing noticeable back in any chosen domain.
10. Community and Player Engagement
As players advance, they are also able to research and develop their gaming skills more thoroughly using content available outside the game, i.e., using walk-through guides. Experts have grown up in communities that freely exchange knowledge and experiences and then post these findings on the internet. By taking this approach, the community grows, engendering devotion to the game, increasing the chances of playing again or maintaining a subscription, even when interest in the game itself may have waned.
Community and player engagement both refer to the idea that players do not experience the game in isolation. They are part of a larger community that is the players that surround them, both within and without the game. The concept of community is invoked in more traditional game systems as players share the same server; they can communicate with others and are subject to similar and changing conditions within their virtual game environment. The longevity of the game rests on the continuing interest of its players, and this is dependent on the player’s engagement with the environment.
11. Conclusion and Future Directions
We have also suggested that RPGs can improve by adopting more «jarring» formal strategies which can test the attention of the player and prevent him/her from falling into a series of mechanical actions while also making an ethical point. On the other hand, we pointed out how the gamer community should perhaps diversify its audience, to include categories of people who bring with them a different attentional, ethical and aesthetic predisposition. And submitting to the aesthetic strategies of genres and games that are in a certain sense «minor» represents just such a divergence and an independence from the prejudices of the majority. In sum, treating «games» as «game» is a simplistic gesture that does not square with our increasingly penetrating experience of the world.
In this paper, we have argued that the time may have come to reassess the way in which stories are normally told in RPGs, and to move not only towards more transparent narrative spaces as argued by Eskelinen, but also RPGs that recognize the two most important forms of textuality, represented respectively by the Main Quest and the Side Quests. The rejection of the mythological and the acceptance of the «bobbled» nature of real life runs the risk of being seen as defeatism, or worse, irresponsibility. But the concealment of such doubts seems to us morally unjustifiable and artistically morbid. Gamers, who are so open to these kinds of difficulties in the very rules and structures of games and yet have no problem seeing games as forms of art, demand that games reflect, there is no better term, the problems of being human. And this means encapsulating in snippets what is left of the great mythical codices: little mysteries. If we play responsibly, discontent is a great virtue.