Idea: A Community-Based Quest (Using Passwords!)

[HeroOfFire]

While I already have many ideas for future quests, one was just too interesting to not share.

Most quests work like this: download, play, post threads asking about help, compliments, criticisms, or bug reports, play more, finish the quest, maybe post about your success, done. What I want to see is a quest that inspires more interaction within the community. As the title says, a community-based quest.

How would this work? I've narrowed the requirements down to a few simple design ideas.

1. The quest randomly generates exclusive content when first started. The content could be just about anything, but the point is some content is made available in place of other content, and what is available is random (and not necessarily "You get A or B but not both."). I suppose having Take Only One rooms with exclusive items could work, but it's not what I'm looking for.

2. The quest has a place to get passwords that somehow relate to the random content.

3. The quest has another place to input these passwords that make other random content available.

That is all that would be needed for a community-based quest. How complex the content-passwords system is and what said content is could be anything, but the result would be threads where players request and share/trade passwords to get more content in their respective versions of the quest.

I've already thought about some parts of this idea through, including ways to minimize password abuse and require accquiring passwords from more than one source to obtain all the exclusive content. What I am interested in is what this exclusive content could be. Do the passwords unlock items? Add to the overworld? I want to hear your ideas for what would be interesting exclusive content that is shared between players using passwords. The more unique (and higher quantitiy of) the content, the better.

[DarkFlameWolf]

Sort of like Oracle of Seasons/Ages.

[King Aquamentus]

Having multiple quests interact with each other sounds like a bit much. A better idea (and one I could more readily get behind) is a quest created by a large team. a community effort.

[HeroOfFire]

While the passwords are similar to the Ages/Seasons gimmick, I do need to point out that I'm suggesting a single quest that uses the passwords to interact with itself. The idea of the passwords is to promote community interactivity while playing the quest long after development has been finished.

I've been trying to avoid giving examples, since I am interested in what others think would be interesting content shared by the passwords, but I suppose giving an example would help clarify the idea a bit.

Lets assume the content is a shop that sells major items. One player may find a shop that sells the Hookshot, while a different player playing the same quest instead has the shop selling the Wand. Somewhere in the quest, each player can generate a password for their respective unique items, post the passwords on a thread, and use the other players' password to get the item that wasn't buyable in their quest. Depending on how the quest is approached, some effects of the passwords may including "giving up" a major item to get another item from a password, in a kind of trade fashion (for example, player A has to give up their hookshot when inputting the password for the Wand, but luckily they can buy another Hookshot).

Obviously, this example has a major flaw where different items have vastly diffferent effects on a quest. Giving one player a Red Candle as their unique item would be very unfair when another player can get the Hammer as a unique item. The point of the content sharing is this: If the content is required to complete the quest, I don't want the content to have wildly diffenent values in regards to how they impact the quest as a whole. If the content is optional, then the balance issue can be lightened a bit, but still preffered.

Also, I would have more than just one unique item/content in the quest, and randomly chosen seperately, so the quest has a large number of different combinations of available content without requiring a large variety of content.

I've given some thought to the idea, but I want other opinions on what would be interesting content to have shared with passwords. The weapon example above might work better with optional "ultimate" weapons, but the content could be a bit more varied, such as collectables, overworld generation, or scripted weaponry such as that seen in my other quest ZCB. If the content is open enough to have a large amount of variety, I would have no qualms with having the community pitch in to create additional content.