Guild Wars 2

I posted this idea on the subreddit a long time ago, but I’ve refined it some. Thought I should post it here.

I know that ANet wants to stay away from traditional quests. The dynamic event system is indeed powerful, but I think the game still needs a form of questing. So I bring you “Tasks”.

Tasks are given out by NPCs in cities and other safe zones, much like quests. But unlike quests, they are not always active if you have not completed it and are even repeatable if you happen across the same one. They activate randomly for a certain amount of time, like dynamic events, and will be marked on the map with their own special marker that you must be within a certain range to see(like dynamic events). They are also instanced to every player like gathering nodes so everyone could click on them. The Task giver would have their own dialog explaining what they need, or what troubles they are having or whatever is relevant to the task before you are given the option to accept the task.

Upon accepting the task the game will bring up the map, much like the scouts out in the world or the in-game mail from the living story to indicate where to go for the task and to maybe give some more specific details regarding the task.

The task will be added to a “Task Tab” on your hero panel that shows all active task, and task that you have completed before. All tasks will have a description of the task, and the active ones will have a “Show me” button much like the living story mails. Any important item related to the task will show up here, much like the items in the personal story tab, instead of taking up space in your inventory.

Any active task that you have you will always be able to complete, even if the task giver has timed out and is no longer giving out the task(one exception listed below).

Task rewards will be much like completing a dynamic event. Based on difficulty and scaled to your characters level.

EXAMPLES: Just some of my ideas.
continued…

1. Step and fetch task:
I know. Boring right? Sure, but a good way to give the players a look into the world of Tyria. Imagine a human merchant in DR that needs someone to take a package to a charr merchant in BC as a sign of good faith to insure future business dealing. It could be an interesting way to show the budding peace between these two races. Speaking of budding, you could have an asura in Rata Sum who wants you to fetch some exotic plant from a Sylvari in one of the towns of Caledon forest and bring it back to him. Maybe even get a special reward like a one time use tonic. We could even have special event specific ones. For example, an asura in Rata Sum wants you to deliver a specialty fireworks launcher to LA for dragon bash, and upon completion the launcher shoots off and you get a light show on top of your task completion reward.

2. Exploration task:
“I hear tales of treasure from that insert locale here over there. If you’re the adventuring type, you may want to go check it out.” Boom. Reasons to do mini dungeons and jumping puzzles. To reiterate, these are not active at all times, guiding everyone to every secret all the time. But they could show up randomly to push players in the right direction for exploring. The trigger for completing the task could be the same trigger that gives you the achievement the first time through.

3. Hunting task:
We’ve all seen them around. Random champions out in the world without an event associated with them. How boring. So how about, if the champion has been alive for a certain length of time, the task to hunt said champion has a chance to show up in whatever nearby camp. This would of course be much harder than the 1. or 2. task and it should say as much, but it should come with increased rewards. Like a significant amount of silver. Enough to make people jump for joy when a hunting task appears on their map and then call in guildies and everyone in map chat to come join the fight. I think it should range between 30-50s for lvl 80 players to incentivize them to join a hard fight they might otherwise not have bothered with. This type of task is the exception I talked about earlier. If the champion is killed while the task giver is active and you have the task but did not take part in the fight, the task should cleared from your active task. A “task incompleted” message should show up in the top right of the screen much like event messages. This kind of limited time only feature of this task type is to balance the large reward.

4. Story task:
A weird one. I’m just going to give you a specific example I thought of earlier rather than explain the whole idea. It’s dark btw. Just a fair warning.
Let’s assume for a second that this task system was already in place and that these hints that we are going into the areas west of Brisban are legit. Imagine there’s a seraph soldier in DR. He’s sitting in a bar and he has a task. Just listen to his tale. That’s it. He tells you of an expedition he was a part of past Brisban. One day him and his squad are ambushed by bandits. Dozens of them. The seraph squad flees from the hopeless fight, but one of them falls to an arrow as they retreat. The remaining four squad members elude the bandits and wait until nightfall when they can move under the cover of darkness. But it takes a turn for the worse. As they move through the jungle area, a great beast, one that he later learns only comes out at night, attacks them. The beast slaughters his other squad members while he luckily escapes and hides until morning. As the sun comes up and the terrifying calls of the beast subsides, he comes out to find the scattered remains of bones and seraph armor. Unable to leave them like that, he gathers them up and takes them to a great tree by a waterfall and buries them there, the few bones placed randomly in the three graves with the armor as he cannot tell who they belong to. He sets up three stones at the head of the graves to act as a tombstone, then a fourth one to honor his comrade who fell to the bandits. After his grim task he wearily travels back home to Kryta.
Woo. I know. Dark. Now imagine when the new zone opens up, there actually ARE some terrible monsters that only spawn at night. The waterfall and tree from the story are ACTUALLY THERE in the game world, and underneath it’s branches there are three graves marked with plain stones and a fourth stone lined up next to them. That would be SO amazing, and there is no end to the creative things that could be done like this with very little work needed to make it happen. Just need someone to write a story for a character and a small piece of evidence of it left within the game world.

If you made it this far, thanks for reading my ideas. The more I think about it, the more I feel this game NEEDS some kind of system like this and I would like to get the community to back me up here.