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A Prototype Quest Generator Based on a Structural Analysis of Quests from Four Mmorpgs

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A Prototype Quest Generator Based on a Structural Analysis of Quests from Four Mmorpgs Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Procedural Content Generation in Games, pp. 1-8, Bordeaux, France, 2011. A Prototype Quest Generator Based on a Structural Analysis of Quests from Four MMORPGs Jonathon Doran Ian Parberry Dept. of Computer Science & Engineering Dept. of Computer Science & Engineering University of North Texas University of North Texas [email protected] [email protected] ABSTRACT An analysis of over 750 quests from four popular RPGs (Eve Online, World of Warcraft, Everquest, and Vanguard: Saga of Heroes) reveals that RPG quests appear to share a com- mon structure. We propose a classification of RPG quests based on this structure, and describe a prototype quest gen- erator based on that classification. Our aim is to procedu- rally generate quests that are complex, multi-leveled, and plausible to players of RPGs. We analyze a nontrivial quest from Everquest and one from our prototype quest generator for comparison. Categories and Subject Descriptors I.2.8 [Artificial Intelligence]: Problem solving, control methods, and search|Plan execution, formation, and gen- eration; I.6.8 [Simulation and Modelling]: Type of Sim- ulation|Gaming General Terms Algorithms, Experimentation Keywords Quest, role-playing game, RPG, MMORPG, NPC, procedu- ral content generation, planning, intractability, Java, Prolog, BNF. Figure 1: Roadmap for the rest of this paper. 1. INTRODUCTION A quest is a player task commonly found within role play- quest. While authors seek exposition and players seek enter- ing games where the player is challenged to complete goals tainment, these goals are not necessarily mutually exclusive. in return for some reward. From an author's point of view, Procedural quest generation clearly has the potential to the quest provides many of the challenging elements of game increase the variability and replayability of games. This in play, and provide players with concrete goals [14]. From a turn can lead to an increase in player interest in these games, player's point of view, the quest is a narrative element that as there never comes a point where the player has seen ev- informs them about the world and allows the player to gain erything or done everything in the game. The seemingly knowledge and power. Dramatic events may be portrayed limitless quests that might be generated could cause one to through the dialog and actions of characters involved with a dismiss quest generation as an intractable problem. How- ever, an analysis of over 750 human-authored quests for Eve Online, World of Warcraft, Everquest, and Vanguard: Saga of Heroes shows these quests to have significantly less struc- Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for tural variety than one might expect. Without any artificial personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are restrictions on quest structure, human authors nonetheless not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies create works with shared structure, changing details such bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, to as setting, but preserving the relationship between actions. republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific We have been able to exploit this common structure and permission and/or a fee. PCGames ’11, June 28, 2011, Bordeaux, France demonstrate a prototype system that procedurally generates Copyright 2011 ACM 978-1-4503-0804-5/11/06 ...$10.00. random quests appropriate for use in RPGs. 1 The main part of this paper is divided into five short sec- Motivation Quests Percent tions. In Section 2 we consider related work. In Section 3 Everquest 266 35% we describe the results our structural analysis of quests from Vanguard 137 18% four MMORPGs (see Figure 1(i)), a preliminary version of World of Warcraft 205 27% which appeared in [11]. In Section 4 we give an example Eve Online 145 19% of the structural analysis of a quest from Everquest (see Figure 1(ii)). In Section 5 we describe a prototype quest generator (available online at [10]) based on the structural Table 1: Distribution of quest origins. analysis (see Figure 1(iii)). In Section 6 we analyze a quest from our quest generator (see Figure 1(iv)). Motivation Description Knowledge Information known to a character 2. RELATED WORK Comfort Physical comfort Reputation How others perceive a character Previous research on RPG quest analysis falls into two Serenity Peace of mind categories: structural and functional. Autonomous genera- Protection Security against threats tion of quests involves not only a suitable form for a quest, Conquest Desire to prevail over enemies but a means for the generator to know when to generate a Wealth Economic power quest and the ability to ensure that the quest makes sense Ability Character skills in the current game state. Equipment Usable assets Some classification studies have been performed [6, 12, 13], but these do not necessarily have the goal of autonomous generation of quests. Sullivan has also classified player ac- Table 2: NPC motivations. tions, and has came to similar conclusions [13]. Ashmore and Nitsche [7] propose procedural quest generation using key- lock structure quests, rather than NPC interactions. This Figure 1(i)), we examined over 750 quests from Everquest, structure has potential for autonomous generation, but lacks World of Warcraft, Vanguard: Saga of Heroes, and Eve On- the sense of purpose found in quests derived from NPC goals. line to determine whether common structures were present. Jill Walker [15] classifies World of Warcraft quests into ex- Table 1 gives the distribution of quests from the four games. ploration and combat quests, which is significant as it is Quest descriptions were obtained from Allakhazam [1],the an early attempt to classify quests. We believe our classi- MMODB Quest Database [2], Silky Venom [3], Thottbot [4], fication is more general, in that it can express additional and the Eve Info Mission Database [5]. Each quest descrip- types of quests. Dickey [9] provided a classification sys- tion consists of NPC dialog, an explanation of the actions tem which appears suitable for autonomous generation, but players are required to perform, and the reward for complet- does not claim to provide complete coverage for RPG quests ing the quest. nor does it address how quests could be generated based on We observed the following patterns. Quests fall into a this system. Our decomposition is closely related to world set of 9 distinct underlying motivations best described by state, which makes it fairly straightforward to select a quest the following list of nouns: Knowledge, Comfort, Reputa- type which modifies some piece of state. Aarsath discussed tion, Serenity, Protection, Conquest, Wealth, Ability, and quests in general, although using a somewhat liberal defini- Equipment (see Table 2). Our use of motivations is novel, tion which could be applied to first-person shooters [6]. and we believe essential for ensuring that quests appear in- Quest generation is a special case of planning, as one may tentional and appropriate rather than randomly generated. consider a quest to consist of an initial state, a goal, and a An NPC's motivation is a statement of the most important set of actions players must perform to reach the goal. Plan- concern the NPC has, and the quest is intended to address ning in general is NP-complete, as a planning problem may this concern. We assume that as game events unfold a par- be restated as a boolean satisfiability problem (whether an ticular NPC's motivations will change, especially if players action is present at a particular stage of a viable plan) [8]. successfully complete quests for this NPC. The distribution As a result, exhaustive search may be required to determine of motivations observed was not uniform (see Table 3); we even if a plan exists. assume that the designer could in principle change the dis- The search space for non-trivial domains also grows very tribution of motivations over time to affect the flavor of the quickly, as planning is PSPACE-hard. Therefore while gen- eral planning algorithms are the most capable technique for generating quest plans, they are impractical. We avoid this Motivation Quests Percent limitation by abandoning the general planning problem in Knowledge 138 18.3% favor of one with restrictions. We are able to do this without Comfort 12 1.6% loss of generality as our analysis of human generated quests Reputation 49 6.5% showed these quests to have structural patterns which oc- Serenity 103 13.7% curred in predictable situations. Each of these patterns has Protection 137 18.2% an implicit precondition and postcondition, and as long as Conquest 152 20.2% these conditions are not violated a generator is free to elab- Wealth 15 2.0% orate or introduce new subquests. Ability 8 1.1% Equipment 139 18.5% 3. STRUCTURAL ANALYSIS For our structural analysis of RPG quests (refer back to Table 3: Distribution of observed NPC motivations. 2 game by preferring one form of quest motivation over an- other. The NPC delivering the quest to the player does so using from 2-7 specific strategies specific to its motivation. Each strategy can be described by a verb-noun pair, for example, \kill pests",\steal supplies", or \rescue NPC". The full list of strategies with their corresponding motivations from Table 2 is given in Table 4. For each strategy there is a sequence of from 1 to 6 actions that the player must undertake in sequence to implement the strategy. Each action can be either a simple atomic Figure 2: Key to Figures 3 and 5. action that be achieved by the player (see Table 5, or can be expressed recursively as a sequence of other actions or action variants (see able 6).
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