A procedural quest generator for Conan Exiles: Extended Summary António Santos Ferreira Machado Universidade de Lisboa, Instituto Superior Técnico Av. Rovisco Pais 1, 1049-001 Lisboa, Portugal
[email protected] ABSTRACT well as intricate story-lines and side-quests [3]. The process The dissertation proposes a procedural quest generation of this content creation takes a considerable amount of time model as a means to generate interactive stories for Role Play- and financial resources[5]. However, it’s consumption is much ing Games that can rival human-authored ones. The system faster. After a player completes every main quest and side- uses a grammar derived from a structural analysis of the main quest, the game’s replay value drops off considerably. quests in the acclaimed RPG game, The Witcher 3 - The Wild Consequently, RPGs are perfect candidates for the applica- Hunt. From a theory vantage point, our system extends pre- tion of Procedural Content Generation (PCG), which is the use vious work on MMORPG quests by other academics. The of computer algorithms for creating content that meets a set modifications introduced enable grammars capable of repre- of evaluation criteria [3][7]. This becomes quite useful when senting more complex quests. trying to produce content for an industry that is becoming The model is implemented in a quest system for the sur- increasingly demanding [4]. According to Hartsook[3] there vival sandbox game Conan Exiles, which currently lacks a are two broad uses of PCG in games: content creation and quest system. We also conducted test with human players. adaptation of game-play.