Behind the Scenes: Alternate Drama Sequences

I’d like to take the opportunity with Quest Notes to occasionally pull back the curtain and let you see what goes on behind the scenes with the development of quests in LOTRO. Today I’d like to illustrate one of the new features we’re incorporating into several of the quests in Book 1: Alternate Drama Sequences!

A Drama Sequence is a series of actions that we as quest designers can make an NPC perform. Whenever you see an NPC performing an action or saying some text above his head, he is engaging in Drama. When we string these together to form a scene or tell a particular story, we’ve created a Drama Sequence.

We use these quite often, especially during instances and over the course of the Epic Story. We have a whole laundry list of things we can have an NPC do while in Drama: display some text, play a particular animation, convert the NPC into a monster so he can fight, send information invisibly to other NPCs, wait for certain conditions to happen . . . the sky is very nearly the limit, as you can tell by the sheer variety of things we can use Drama to accomplish.

Now that we are three Volumes into the Epic Story of LOTRO, and there are hundreds and hundreds of quests out there, the history of every individual character has become quite an intricate web. Your character may have done quests that my character has not done, and a third character may have done some of the same quests but also some completely different ones. What should the bestower of one of those quests say to each of our characters during a Drama scene? She’s met one of the characters, but not any of the others!

Awkward!

In order to resolve this troubling social situation, and to allow us to custom tailor events to your character’s unique history, we’ve devised Alternate Drama Sequences. These allow us to change the Drama Sequence on the fly, both in significant or in more subtle ways. In order to demonstrate this, let’s put on some Developer Goggles and take a peek at what the world looks like through them.

Oh my! We won’t talk about all of these at the moment (perhaps in a future edition of Quest Notes!), but for now focus your attention on the stack of two green boxes labeled ‘TW Scriptlink.’ These two boxes are ‘Tripwires,’ and behave as the name suggests: when the player satisfies certain conditions, a Tripwire ‘trips’ and sends a message somewhere. In this case, the Tripwires send a message to the floating blue shape, which is a Drama Director. The Drama Director stores all the information needed to run a Drama Sequence.

Each of these Tripwires have a different condition for which they are waiting. The top one is waiting for the player to have completed a particular quest, and the bottom one is waiting for the player to have NOT completed that same quest. What this means is that when the player reaches this point in the quest, one of the two Tripwires is guaranteed to be tripped, and then one of the two Drama Sequences stored in the Drama Director will play. We can therefore tailor the way the scene plays out based on your character’s personal history, which is pretty cool.