SplitShifts

I just wanted to talk about one of the things we've been working on for a while here and that thing is Procedural Questing.
It's something that we think is going to create a lot of replay-ability and in general make the experience pretty enjoyable. What are we talking about? We are talking about a game that designs quests for you on the fly. We've found that a lot of games have a main story arc that rocks and side quests that just, for example, send you some place nearby to kill 5 bad guys. Side Quest over. While it's enjoyable at first it quickly becomes highly repetitive. Especially when it comes to replaying the game. A lot of effort is put in to the main Quest but the side quests can just seem tedious and boring on a secondly play through. "Oh yeah, this one again..".
So what we're doing is creating a rather large quest tree (something of similar shape anyway). We start off with quest types and break them down in to pieces. Each piece has multiple out comes and other pieces it can attach to and possibly link into another quest type. Maybe it's more like a web. What we end up with is side quests that are unique and rarely have similar outcomes and if the outcome is the same how you got there will have been different. For example, You're on a manhunt tracking down a murderer. Upon picking up the quest the game doesn't know his final location. You could start off with a bar that his gang frequents. He could be there, Epic Duel Quest over! OR! He might not be and this starts a whole new branch of the quest. Eventually you track him down to a cave and find he's been murdered and the object he held that you came to find was taken by another or again, Epic Duel Item received. There will be thousands possible outcomes and ways to arrive there.
Another thing were going to do is hold on to a few of these procedural generated characters. Quest givers, Villains etc. to perhaps use later on. We want these quests to feel like they have an impact on the world. Quests will be conditional in many ways, ie. certain quest types will be opened up to you depending on where you are in the world.
I don't want to give away too much but we're very excited to show off this feature in the future and thought it might be of interest to others.
The Main Quest will be scripted though, we still have a story to tell after all.
Cheers!