Deeper Content!
First of all, I know the game is not a single player RPG so in my opinion it's totally okay for it to focus on the multiplayer experience. I love the game, but the missions follow a pretty primitive pattern which becomes rather repetitive after a couple of hours.
In this post I suggest approaches for the game developers to massively improve the quality of the tales and stories produced by their mission generator, including scalability for late game content. Please take a look at the example-story below, the sort of which I believe can be generated automatically!
Here's an example:
At first, the mysterious voodoo lady just asked me to get the "Golden Eye Patch of Captain Kiwibeard", which is said to have magic powers. She gave me a hint for its location. When I solved the riddle for its location it turns out the eye patch was stolen by Stinky Pete, the evil pirate, who resides on The Crooked Masts island. He plans to use the eye patch to summon the ghost ship of Ol' Captain Kiwibeard. As my brave crew and me tried to slay Stinky Pete, it turns out he's immortal because he ate the legendary Blue Coconut. The curse can only be lifted by finding and eating the legendary Straight Banana, which allows the consumer to defeat Stinky Pete. In the end, the voodoo lady gets her Golden Eye Patch and rewards me not only with some gold and thanks, but also with an exclusive hint for a hidden treasure (or another story?).
How can such a Story be generated? What is the common structure in such stories that can be used for mission generation?
Not a new problem, fortunately!
The basic question is: what makes a story interesting? This story-telling problem has been known even before the advent of computers, in literature, music and movies. Ancient philosophers like Aristotle thought there was a common structure to cool stories. E.g., the three-act structure suggests a basic "skeleton" for interesting stories.
Three-act structure - Wikipedia
How does this help?
The cool thing is that such models do NOT specify a lot of things, making room for creativity while providing a framework that hopefully is efficient for story telling.
Now, if all missions in Sea of Thieves were designed to fulfill such a pattern, one could switch and scale the individual parts of it. A generator could do that under restriction by some rules in order to create only plausible results (hint: this can be done using semantic graphs pretty straight forward).
Simple basic structure, complex combinations!
Let's say all missions consist of a setup depending on the Mission type, an optional plot twist and a reward (after resolution by the player). The plot twist could lead to a surprising sub-quest, thereby creating complex missions.
Scaling by complexity, not by quantity
The generated missions could be restricted to simpler patterns for small voyages and extended to more complex plot-trees for large voyages. The content should not scale up in quantity ("bring me four chests instead of two!") but rather complexity ("Bring me one chest, but wait - there's a problem!").
Systematically connecting story elements
I'm confident that with a table of possible connections between story elements, there could be wonderful combinations. If we assume that all (sub-stories) consist of three elements {setup, plot twist, reward} we require connectable story elements for each of those categories.
Basic mission types (setup):
- Item retrieval (get item at location)
- Item delivery (bring item to location)
- Antagonist confrontation (terminate antagonist)
- Evil pirate base (special type of antagonist confrontation)
- Ghost ship (special type of antagonist confrontation)
- Antagonist quests can have timeouts - if not solved, something bad happens
- Ritual (perform action with item)
- Riddle solution (find mission type, find item type, find location, etc...)
Basic problems (plot twists):
All plot twists basically lead to a new sub-quest.
- Item retrieval: Item stolen (riddle for location) or cursed (ritual for lifting curse).
- Item delivery: Item falls into the hands of an antagonist (confrontation).
- Antagonist confrontation: Antagonist hides (riddle for location), is cursed/immortal (ritual for lifting the curse), etc...
- Ritual: Item broken, additional item requried, etc.
- Riddle solution: scavenger hunt for multiple items.
- For all kinds of missions: Timeout, Bad consequences (new curse, new antagonist, new item required, ...)
Basic resolutions (rewards):
- Parent quest can proceed
- Gold
- Plausible, emotional gratitude by requester
- Listing and honouring the achievements of the player throughout the quest
- The Player is mentioned to other Players as hero during other dialogues ("once upon a time, BlackBeard64 defeated Stinky Pete! But now he is back and you have to help us!")
- Special quest (e.g. easy but high reward)
- Special item (e.g. temporal one-time buff)
These elements can be connected automatically to a complex story, because the plot twists lead to sub-quests, essentially.
Suspend and resume voyages!
It would be cool if a Party (or the captain) could freeze the current state of a more complex quest in order to continue it the next day. Otherwise it will be hard to tell a good story, if everything must be done in a short amount of time. Optimally, the experience would be similar to a book: You don't read everything in two hours, but you can pause and resume.
