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Across the last month, we've seen Jagex introduce four new miniquests into the game.

One was temporary, for the 20th Anniversary celebration, using the Cook. It was funny and cute, and with a few touch ups could have been a great, permanent, novice tier quest. One is Foreshadowing, the first in a new series, Once Upon a Time, and was both interesting enough and long enough to easily qualify as a quest by itself. One is the Archaeology level lowering of the Vault of Shadows in Kharid-Et, which itself is basically a quest as is. Four major puzzles aren't anything to shake a stick at. This one is likely fine as a miniquest due to the way it works within Archaeology, but that's it. And then yesterday we got Tortle Combat.

Yet again, classified as and relegated to Miniquest tier, this was was super funny, really cute, and had nice rewards. Why on earth is it not a novice or even intermediate level quest? I'm just confused at this point. We get content like Chef's Assistant or Once Upon a Slime as full fledged quests, that are quests, and then we get several "miniquests" this year that are both bigger and better than those releases and they don't even get to be part of the quest cape?

What gives?

Please Jagex, make these releases the real quests they deserve to be. There's no reason to make them miniquests when they have the same level of quality and care normal small quests release get!

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almost 4 years ago - /u/JagexJack - Direct link

Originally posted by yuei2

They’ve said before the difference is pretty arbitrary. On a technical level it just means they don’t need to deal with nightmare code that is the quest point and quest journal system. But I think it’s important to realize that every developer has a different feel for what is and isn’t a mini-quest.

Take Chef’s assistant it may be small but it’s quest because it’s predecessor was. Likewise Once Upon a Slime was a new developer who wanted to make a quest as a training exercise. This means they wanted to experience the full gamut of the quest making experience which includes stuff like the quest points and quest journal coding.

In contrast with Once Upon a time it’s only a fragment of a quest. A very good fragment but there isn’t much in the way of gameplay it’s mostly just narrative and fetch. So it’s not really weird that a developer would feel that it’s better suited as a miniquest. However it’s important to keep in mind this format is not necessarily set in stone. Once all the pieces are out they are willing to consider making the full thing a proper quest, but again it’s up in the air. Until then it’s just fragments and because it’s just fragments I can understand why it’s a miniquest.

The only one I think might be misnomered right now is Tortle Combat. It definitely has enough substance to be a quest so I am puzzled on its choice a bit. It could simply be they didn’t want the ninja anniversary to feel like something you HAVE to do. Or it could be they didn’t want to deal with quest points and quest journal stuff. Maybe they personally felt it wasn’t big or juicy enough to be considered a quest? Ultimately it’s a developer thing, they had their opinion on if it should be a quest or a miniquest and decided on the latter.

Ultimately it feels too arbitrary for me to care in the long run. As long as the content is well crafted and fun I don’t think it’s worth getting bent up over. I would maybe like Once Upon a Time to be a full quest once we have the whole thing, just because it be nice to have a new quest show the RFD style format. But The Arc miniquest series shows it can exist as a miniquest just fine and maybe in some ways it’s more honest. Quest has a certain grandeur and scope inherent to its content and reward that something like Foreshadowing lacks.

I wasn't involved in any of the specific decisions being made here, but this seems like a pretty accurate take to me.

almost 4 years ago - /u/JagexJack - Direct link

Originally posted by JagexJack

I wasn't involved in any of the specific decisions being made here, but this seems like a pretty accurate take to me.

Actually to expand on that thought, I think the underlying thing that's going on here is the set of expectations that players have, and that we feel, are associated with a piece of content that has a particular label.