What are the ingredients of a good mission? Why? Generally speaking, good mission design seems to me to require a variety of objectives across several missions. This prevents fatigue. Timers and ambushes seem to be a no-no. They're cheap, require foreknowledge and often create frustration, and failing them leads to uninteresting results (usually death and restart). Clear, staged progress indicators also seems to be a requirement, but they shouldn't tell the player exactly how to do what's required. Insta-death (falling, traps) is usually a very bad idea, particularly in the beginning or when the player has a wide toolset because the player may need lots of room to experiment. Secondary objectives or objectives that can be accomplished out of order can enhance a mission because they give players a sense of charting their own course and owning the emission. Anything else?

My favorite missions are the ones where the designer creates a playground, gives me a target, then drops me into it without tying a string around my leg.

I don't think this type of design limits the designer's control over the game as much as it seems like it would. There are plenty of ways to manipulate the interaction or limit the player's range of options in a given situation without being so obvious. It just takes a little more design creativity.

Sorry, I guess I didn't add anything that you couldn't have guessed I would say.

Interesting objectives. I am sick and tired of escort, find the dingus, clear the fen, etc, missions. They are rarely interesting, rarely difficult in and of themselves, and they are used so often the repetition kills the fun for me. I remember two quests well out of all of Oblivion.

The one where the player is drawn into a mage's nightmare world and has to complete some tests on the trapped and incapacitated mage's behalf to free him. The tests were running a course past hidden traps, going through a maze, going through a different sort of maze, and a fight. The feel of the quest was superb and the tests, while they could have been better, were still different from most anything else in the whole game.

The other quest had the player go disrupt a countess's dinner party by casting a spell that made her party turn naked. The quest giver didnt tell the player though that he would be naked as well and that people would run after his now unarmed and unarmored self with swords drawn. It was interesting trying to get access to the party and then the events afterward were different. (The player gets his stuff back at the end, plus a reward for giving a good laugh.)

Point being, quests/missions that are more than go here, fight, bring this guy here, fight, find this item, bring it here, defend it, etc, would be refreshing.

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Original post by Wavinator Generally speaking, good mission design seems to me to require a variety of objectives across several missions. This prevents fatigue.

It's always nice when a game doesn't force you to do anything, but gives you time to explore.

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Timers and ambushes seem to be a no-no. They're cheap, require foreknowledge and often create frustration, and failing them leads to uninteresting results (usually death and restart).

I can think of several games which have used timers successfully, either by creating short trials (like Assassin's Creed), or by pushing people quickly through a level before, say, the whole place blows up. However you need to make sure that if they fail they're not going to waste more than a couple minutes per attempt. An autosave before is important, and the tolerance for success should not be that tight on normal difficulty.

I'm not really sure how 'ambushes' are viewed as a no-no. Missions without surprises seem pretty dull.

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Clear, staged progress indicators also seems to be a requirement, but they shouldn't tell the player exactly how to do what's required.

I would think most military based games would supply the player with a very strong plan for how to accomplish the objectives. Choosing to follow the plan or discover their own path is the players choice.

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Insta-death (falling, traps) is usually a very bad idea, particularly in the beginning or when the player has a wide toolset because the player may need lots of room to experiment.

There are always exceptions, but in general I agree that insta-death more often frustrates the player than anything else.

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Secondary objectives or objectives that can be accomplished out of order can enhance a mission because they give players a sense of charting their own course and owning the emission.

It's very hard to make a non-linear game that works well. Too often I play games that have lots of secondary missions, but if I choose to complete a main objective first then those secondary missions disappear. I feel robbed that the game cheated me out of play. My reaction to that is to spend my time avoiding the main plot items and doing all the secondary objectives, which are often given less attention by developers and aren't that fun by themselves.

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Anything else?

After finishing a game I usually don't remember the missions themselves, I remember the story. Adding extra objectives for the sake of objectives doesn't make a better game.

You usually use missions to grind for money - make them varied, preferably generated on the spot based upon information about the world state if possible, so that when you do a mission, it might cause other missions to be made available to you and others closed to you. I'd be a lot more fun to play around with this kind of system.

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Original post by Tangireon preferably generated on the spot based upon information about the world state if possible

That's a really neat idea. It wouldn't take much more than a simple conditional script to decide which missions and with what parameters to run, depending on what's happening.

Two groups competing with each other? Have one offer a mission to sabotage the other. Someone come up with a new weapon gadget? Have others offer missions to capture their technology. Was there a colony supported by some conquered military ship/base? That could generate extra supply demands, or cut off a trade route to another colony.

It would be especially cool to see missions being spawned because of seemingly insignificant optional actions you take in the game, such as saving a single person, or capturing (rather than killing) an important bad guy.