Talk Title: Level and Quest Design Collaboration from 'Skyrim' to 'Starfield'
- Joaquin De Losada
- Apr 28
- 2 min read
Effective talk: How to collaborate for level and quest design.
Year of Talk: 2024
The talk is targeted at development teams with two or more people working on level and quest design.
Quest Design:
Need some dialogue. Helps explain the mission, either through text or voiceover.
Quest scripting. Determining when certain events in the quest get triggered in-game.
Any specific AI behaviour needed for the quest.
System design if the mechanics haven't been implemented yet.
Level Design:
Design any new locations needed for the level.
Work on AI behaviour with the Quest team to determine what the AI needs to do.
Design any combat encounters that might appear in the level.
Adding environmental storytelling is important for the quest or overarching story.
Includes gameplay scripting to properly queue different systems or allow for new mechanics to become available.
Collaboration:
Level Design:
Determining where the level is located in the world.
What layout is needed for the quest?
How the combat for the NPC works.
Quest Design:
Determining story decisions.
How the narrative unfolds in the quest/level.
What the Non-combat sections of NPC do.
By having the team members work together as the level and quests are being designed, they can help find unique ways that both can connect.
Constant communication with team members in other departments can help bring fresh ideas for the quest and level design
Taking time to learn the tools from the other teams also helps smooth communications.
Having more common communication allows for speedier production of quests and levels that are more diverse for players.
Games that include multiplayer can increase the time to create and test new levels and quests.
The extra time needed to work on and test the levels caused delays in communication between teams.
Collaboration in large teams:
A challenge they had was how much Bethesda had grown over the years. During the production of Skyrim, the team had roughly 100 people in Skyrim, but in Starfield, it had reached 400 people, and another 100+ people from other studios.
This led to communication delays as the number of people who communicated with each other expanded greatly.
When certain teams' schedules were packed, it meant that it was challenging for them to collaborate with other teams, as they needed to work only on their deliverables.
When teams could spare people from their department to work on more things, it meant that other departments would step in to help out.
For example, for a quest, but there wasn't a quest designer who could help for the rest of the production. So a senior-level designer was called in to work on the quest while a more junior-level designer worked on the level layout.
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