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Quest Archetypes

This section will look at the archetypes of quests that characters go on in games.  For the literary examination of quests, look in the Story section.

In games, quests are the short term goals that the player is given throughout the game.  At some level of abstraction all of these goals fit into four major archetypes:

• Defeating enemies - This is any task where the player must confront and defeat an enemy, either through combat or other means.  This can be very abstract, depending on the type of game, but in Asterion the player will encounter hostile men and beasts in the labyrinth which can be defeated with the weapons and items that the player finds.
• Delivering items - This is commonly called a 'FedEx' quest because this archetype resembles a mail delivery.  This type involves the player taking an in-game entity from one place and delivering it to another, where there is likely some obstacle between the starting and end points of the quest.
• Gathering items - This archetype involves gathering some kind of specific item.  Sometimes this means the player must gather enough of some generic item to pass a threshold number that is required to meet the goal.  Other times this archetype involves looking for a set of specific game items, where there is only one possible way to collect all of them.
• Escorting - This archetype requires that players protect something other than themselves.  There are many variations of this idea.  The entity which needs to be protected can be anything from another character to an inanimate object.  Similarly the threat can come from any number of factors, from enemy combatants to environmental hazards.  The key to this archetype is that this entity is doomed without the player's help and the player has the ability to safeguard it.
• Exploration - This archetype requires that the player enter into uncharted territory, either to discover a certain amount of new territory or to locate certain place(s) which the player has not found yet.

(more detail on these archetypes available here)

RPG games typically include these types of tasks, but also often will augment them my mixing and matching.  Sometimes different types of tasks can be required simultaneously or chained together before the task is considered complete.