Story and quest generation, procedurally generated

from Stardock Forums

I had a tiny insight when I thought SPORE + ELEMENTAL when I realized that Elemental would really be over-the-top awesome if it had a great story (being a fantasy game) but one that was different each time you played.  SPORE (procedural generation) +  backstory for a fantasy strategy game = awesome in my mind.

In other words, a procedurally generated backstory and quest system for Elemental would make it stand out.  But then I had no clue how that might be done simply.  One way would be to write out tons of plots, quests, and hooks to interelate everything to make one big story net that the computer could use to randomally generate a story.  A big problem is that it might end up with some bizarre output.

 Reading another article, a simming method was suggested, and made intuitive sense to me.  Basically take a game, say Civilization 4, and populate it with AI.  Let the game run, and interpret the game as the backstory and event/quest generator for the game that the player plays.  In other words, a game-within-a-game, where the player only plays the inner game, but the progress of the outer game (which the AI 'plays') helps script the events that occur in the inner game.  For example, the AI playing Civ4 would create the story that say the player playing a role-playing game in the Civ4 world would experience.  E.g. if the player in their role-playing game is near City XYZ and that city is invaded in the Civ4 backstory game, than the player's  experiences an invasion in his/her area.  E.g. if the backstory is a war of gods, and the God of Evil AI steals a powerful magic item, then the player suddenly experiences a desperate and gloomy atmosphere in their role-playing game.

I'm thinking for Elemental, the trick is to identify major plot axis (e.g. a war between gods, a war between good and evil, a desire to have a successful royal family (with legitimate heirs), etc...) and convert each of those to a sketched conflict sim.  Have the AI play out each conflict sim in the background, and changes in those sims are then interpreted as new quests, plot changes, story elements in the player's game.

 

Some articles:

http://pcg.wikidot.com/pcg-taxonomy:procedural-puzzles-and-plot-generation

elemental
41,433 views 7 replies
Reply #1 from Elemental Forums Top

I have yet to find a procedurally generated story / quest system that 'stands out'. They tend to generate a lot of bland mediocrity. A quest may have been triggered off by this kingdom invading that empire, but if it's still the same bloody 'kill some guy, deliver a letter, harvest 20 bear hearts' stuff then it makes no difference. Unless Stardock intend to revolutionise procedural generation, I hope that they stay well away from it.

I would prefer to see a system for community designed quests, because there will be people out there with good ideas who can write and script.

Reply #2 from Elemental Forums Top

I'd think that Stardock's standards would be well above the mediocre MMORPG quest writing of "harvest x of y", and likely no one would aim for such garbage. Presumably the quest victory goal will have a decent story, given that the GalCiv series generally has had one as well. The benefit of a good procedural generation would be to take that story expertise and make it fresh from game to game.

To be accurate, most backstories in computer games are "bland mediocricity".  There's an aspect of Artificial Intelligence which requires that an 'expert' be on hand to program them. Stardock has demonstrated some expertise in their own story writing, so I'd expect they could make a procedurally generated story system work. If they tapped a professional writer to consult with, then I feel it would be even better (though maybe driving up the final retail cost out of range).

I'm curious as to what experiences you have actually had with procedurally generated stories. I don't believe I've seen them implemented in any games, other than the occasional indie game, like a rogue-like.

No doubt Elemental will benefit from in-game customizability for the community to submit quests, and that might be a priority, but wasn't why I started the thread.

Elemental: Reforged
Reply #3 from Elemental Forums Top

While I believe the theory is solid actually implementation would be difficult or impossible given the scope Elemental already has. I would prefer that Elemental divide the main quest or master quest whatever its called up into segments (lets say 5) and then come up with 2 or 3 unique events for that segment. This would give the master quest a nice degree of variability but would stop short of the daunting task of making the quest totally different and potentially one dimensional every time the game is played. I would be in favor of a dynamic or procedural quest system if it could be done in a high quality manner but I think realistically it would turn out to be a one dimensional quest that was meaninglessly different every time. 

Reply #4 from Elemental Forums Top

Well Dwarf Fortress - that manages to at least be amusing. Mount & Blade also has procedural story, but it basically amounts to doing the same few quests over and over in different places. A lot of space sims use dynamic economies to produce quests in a similar way (e.g. the X and Battlecruiser series).

Reply #5 from Elemental Forums Top

I agree that an expanisive story would be tough for this game, but I guess it would be nice.  I wouldn't mind missing it.  

I would like a dynamic quest system where you are given quests periodically that have rewards.  Similar to the Sins of a Solar empire, except maybe not directly related to AI opinion of you.   additional resources would be enough for me (maybe a rare magical item?)

Reply #6 from Elemental Forums Top

I'll be happy if there's a large variety of types of quests that are somewhat contextual. Quest objectives could be the standard (boring by now) collect X, kill Y, but they could also be to build certain things, train units, explore places, research something specific, perform some feat of magic. They could involve heroes doing something on their own, they could be to build up friendly relations with someone, declare war on somebody, defeat somebody - really any type of diplomatic interaction. I'd like to see quest chains, too, in addition to the Master quests (which I'm assuming will be chained, though I could be wrong).

Like I said before, the other important thing to me is that quests are largely contextual. I don't want to be approached by some random civ or being asking me to do some equally random task - at least not often. What I would like to see is something like the Ents of the nearby Great Forest asking me to protect their forest from the effects of the Global Heat spell that was recently cast by somebody, promising to provide me with a suitable reward (in the case of Ents, maybe they'd be willing to provide me with a supply of wood (could be static or over time), maybe they'd be willing to provide me with some special units whose number and/or power depends on the magnitude of their request). Another example is an explorer could offer to tell me the location of ancients ruins as long as I promise to split whatever treasure (could range from resources to magic items) I might find once I defeat the guardians.

Another example of the type of context I want is to avoid what drove me crazy about quests in Sins of a Solar Empire until they somewhat fixed it. The AIs offered me tons of quests that were essentially impossible to complete. Sometimes towards the beginning of a game I was asked to destroy X structures within 10 minutes, and the entire nation didn't even have that many structures to destroy! And sometimes I was asked to destroy ships or structures of an empire that I couldn't effectively reached. That should be avoided at all costs.

Also, quest rewards should be anything including resources (both one-time and over time), units, items, better relations or other diplomatic rewards, technology, magic, part of the map explored, settlements, resource nodes, and I'm sure there are other good rewards. And both the type of reward and the magnitude need to be reflected by the type and difficulty of the quest.

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Reply #7 from Elemental Forums Top

I like those ideas pigeonpigeon. Some of them sound like they could be easily written in, though what would i know ;)

Regarding generating a campaign; You could break the main campaign up into several parts, make it kind of like a "lego" campaign generator. Each campaign consists of 4-5 chapters with each chapter culminating in a major quest (you could tie in a major global event to it). Create several chapters of a story that can all be mixed and matched (like those lone wolf books: if you did xxxx turn to page 77, if you did xxxx turn to page 25).

what i mean is, each chapter would consist of a certain amount of quests (some random, some scripted) that follow a rough trajectory. You have beginning chapters, middle chapters and finishing chapters. It's the middle chapters that would be a problem as some would have to fit with beggining chapters while others would have to fit with ending chapters.

So a beginning, 2 middle and one final chapter are chosen at random. The randomised quest generator could be applied to specificly generating 'random' quests for some aspects of the chapter, while for other parts there might be a pool of conextual quests that are also randomly chosen. Unfortunately i can only see the final quest as something prescripted to really make it feel like a proper novel/campaign.

But i guess most wouldn't like this due to a certain amount of repitition once you've played through several times.

ps i'm taking it as read that most of these quests will be available in the game as solo quests (bar the final chapter pre-scripted quests)