Quest Types

The Quest Type Taxonomy

Tim identifies the following core quest types found in RPGs:

• Murder — Kill a specific, named (or uniquely identified) person. "Go kill the bandit leader down by the river." Killing that particular person advances the quest.
• Kill — Kill N generic things. "Go kill five alligators" or "kill 10 dragons." Any instance of the creature counts toward your counter.
• Fetch — Retrieve a specific, unique item. "Go get the Rod of Necromancy." May involve combat, stealth, or other obstacles to reach it.
• Collect — Gather N of a generic item. "I need five alligator skins." Combined with kill quests when items drop from enemies — leading to the classic frustration of killing 30 alligators for 5 skins while your friend got all 5 from their first 5 kills.
• Delivery — You're given an item and told to take it to a particular place or person.
• Escort — You're given a person and told to take them to a particular place or person. Tim dedicated an entire previous video to this type.
• Talk — Go convince an NPC to do something. Can be pure ("convince the king not to declare war") or a modifier on other quest types (talking to a boss beforehand to get a one-on-one fight instead of fighting guards).
• Puzzle — Solve a puzzle in the world — slide stones, place gems, etc. Can be pure or a modifier (a fetch quest where reaching the item requires solving a puzzle).
• Timed — Usually a modifier on any of the above. "You have one day to kill five alligators." Occasionally pure, like a race.

Pure vs. Modifier

Tim makes an important distinction: quest types can be pure (the entire quest is that type) or act as modifiers on other types. Puzzles and timers are frequently modifiers. Talk quests often modify kill or fetch quests by providing alternative approaches. This combinatorial nature is what creates richness — and complexity.

The Pros: Variety and Player Agency

Having many quest types provides two key benefits:

• Variety and pacing — Mixing quest types prevents monotony. Players don't feel like they're grinding through an endless sequence of identical kill-and-collect loops.
• Player agency — This is the bigger reason. When a quest can be solved multiple ways (kill the bad guy for the item, pickpocket it, or bribe him), you need multiple quest types working together. Quest type variety directly serves the design pillar of player agency.

The Cons: Every Type Has a Cost

Every quest type Tim listed requires:

1. Specific design for that type
2. Lots of code to support it
3. Lots of debugging — and the more types you add, the more they interact with each other, creating exponential complexity

The Escort Quest Example

When Tim made his escort quest video, commenters suggested making escort companions "special" — they don't fight, don't take damage, aren't affected by most spells, can still be healed but can't be paralyzed, don't set off traps but need a way out if they walk into a trap area. Each "fix" creates more special cases, more code, more bugs.

The Quest Item Problem

Early RPGs let quest items sit in your regular inventory. Players would accidentally sell or drop them — or worse, drop them in lava or sell them to merchants who clear inventory overnight, making the quest permanently unsolvable. The solution: quest items became a special category — different visual frame, can't be sold, can't be dropped. But this creates its own bugs: if you pick up a quest item for Bob, then kill Bob, you're stuck with an undeletable item forever. Which is why quest items often have zero weight and don't count against encumbrance — though they may still occupy an inventory slot.

The Budget Reality

Tim emphasizes the point that game players never think about but every developer must: if your budget is fixed (99.99999% of budgets), more of one thing means less of another. Supporting all quest types with their additional design, code, art, QA, and debugging needs means less of something else — fewer creature varieties, fewer biomes, fewer props, less AI variety.

Tim references Troika Games: "At Troika, we kept adding features and never told ourselves no. Most of our publishers not only didn't tell us no, but sometimes encouraged us to add features — but we didn't get more time to fix anything, so our games shipped buggy." The tradeoff was explicit: lots of features over bug fixing. Players won't necessarily grant leeway for crashing bugs and save corruption just because a game has many features.

Focusing on One Type

If you focus your entire game on one quest type, you can make it exceptional. Tim cites:

• Thief — Built entirely around stealth/stealing. No escorting, minimal killing. The singular focus made it great.
• The Last of Us — The entire game is essentially one long escort quest (escorting Ellie), and because the whole game is designed around it, it works beautifully.
• BioShock Infinite — Similarly built around having a special companion throughout.

The tradeoff: everything else becomes secondary to that one type.

Quest Types Can Block Builds

A critical consideration: if a main story quest (one every player must complete) is locked to a particular quest type, you may exclude entire player builds:

• A mandatory kill/murder quest removes pacifist playthroughs
• A main quest requiring magic to collect an item or solve a puzzle removes non-magic builds

This directly impacts the player agency that quest type variety is supposed to support.

Converting Quest Types

Tim notes a pattern from his escort quest video comments: people's "fixes" often just convert one quest type into another. Put the escorted person in your inventory? You've converted an escort quest into a delivery quest. Add a timer to prevent players from dragging the escort everywhere? You've modified it with a timed element — and many players dislike timed quests.

Tim's Advice

• If you don't like a particular quest type, don't include it — you don't need all of them
• More variety makes your game richer but more expensive
• More variety supports more player agency
• Choose quest types that support your design pillars
• Be consciously aware that supporting quest types costs time and money
• You may choose a buggy game with tons of features — that's your choice, but players may not forgive the bugs just because of the features