Quests are the bread and butter of an MMORPG, it’s one of the main reasons players engage with games: experiencing hundreds of adventures in a unique world.
Designing quests made me aware of the elements that can impact the experience: game feel, narrative design, storyboarding, level design, gameplay design, UX, among many others.
Creating stong and memorable quests with different gameplay can be a tricky challenge. Specially in a game that’s been online for over 15 years.
This one is a piece of content that I believe still stands as a very unique quest:
Designging a Boss fight
The player character in SSO doesn’t have access to any kind of attacks. There’s no swords, guns or fighting. The game only had a single boss encounter, made several years before I joined, when we started this production.
I challenged myself to create one, as I was very interested in enemy and encounter design at the time: How can I create a boss fight that makes sense in this game?
One of the most important parts was to make sure the encounter fit into the game. The players were not used to content like this, so I decided that the best approach was to make it quite simple.
We had some cool ideas to make the encounter challenging. We made prototypes, but we decided early to cut them and make the encounter easier.
The encounter consists on 3 rounds.
It's a widely used convention in games. I believed it would help players understand the length, as the enemy didn’t have an HP bar.
Each round has 3 steps: removing the defenses, casting magic to distract the enemy and charging into them.
From the narrative side we wanted the companion NPC to contribute to the encounter in some way.
The NPC is charging up her magic, that she can only cast when the player removes the enemy's defenses.
I believe we stroke a good balance between fun gameplay and keeping an interesting narrative.
The feedback we received after the content was released was very positive.
Players appeciated the encounter and found it very engaging.
We also received some comments saying that it was a bit hard to understand what they had to do. I agree that we could have made things easier to understand, as it was a very new type of content.
Result
In the video you can see the final gameplay that was released.