I like your second approach. But as XXChester and Acharis said, it needs a deeper purpose. A person who plays, for the most part, just scrolls down to the "todo section" (not everyone, but most of them do). A good reason to divide them is when you have the enviroment change as the quests advance -- a main quest may make the area you are in inaccessible once you finish it. So, first you do all the favours, then proceed with the main quest, content that you didn't miss out on anything.

Another example would be something like, you can visit a special shop after each quest. With the suggested dichotomy, players will be able to visit the shop at will, without having to browse through the whole NPC city, looking for the main quest.

Again, each thing you implement has to have at least one-two practical reasons, other than aesthetics.

You could devise a Hierarchy based many variables {relevance, scale, time, etc}. TechLord's Adventure Hierarchy: Objective[n] --> Task(Favor)[n]--> Quest[n] --> Story[n] --> Epic[n]. However, I would personally be more concerned about the variance of Objectives at the lowest level, than the variance between Favor and Quest at the higher level.

The idea of having quests and favours is old indeed but rarely are they named as such, and personally I like the idea of naming like this. When I initially read the OP I instantly knew exactly what the difference was between a 'quest' and a 'favour', it's pretty self explanatory really. A favour has always been regarded as a small thing which you ask somebody else to help you with: 'oh, can you do me a favour please? can you grab some milk on your way back from town?' and in a game this would translate beautiful to the small things which often villagers you meet in the taverns ask from you.

A quest on the other hand sounds like some epic journey, doesn't necessarily have to be related to the main story line but may very well have an impact, and tells me that I am going to be working at this for a while and may even have to travel far in order to complete this quest which may bring me grand rewards.



All that is pretty much obvious, and it will be the general view most gamers will have when those words crop up; but the way you implement them into the game is the other side of the same coin. You need to decide if you want favours to be something you stumble accross when making conversation with strangers in the tavern, or maybe just a villager waves you over while shouting 'hey, over here' as you walk past, and will offer you some kind of reward for helping them out; or maybe the favours are for a friend of yours who has asked you for a favour; maybe he is some kind of merchant or whatnot but his business has gone down because his main customers are pre-occupied with something, and so he wants you to go to these different people in the town (marked on your map?) to see what is bothering them and then try to help them out with it. Which your friend would then reward you for every customer he sees come back into his business.


So you see, even though the idea behind these names is a nice one indeed, you also need to think about how you are going to implement them into your game. Try to think about which one would spark more of a response from the player to activelly seek out these favours and complete them.

I haven't even said anything about UI elements; I've made no indication that quests and favors would be in completely separate places.

I suggest you start with UI here (actually, I don't see how Quests could be related to something else than UI, but maybe that's just me).

Do you have 2 buttons, one Quests and one Favours? Or do you have just one button, Quests (in which case it would be strange to put there quests and favours since you would have quests/quest and quests/favour which does not sound right at all)? Or maybe you want to call the button Missions (but that's adding far too much unneeded terminology)?

I tend to go with quest parenting rather than this kind of division:

Killing the uber lord (Master Quest)
- Finding the key to the Dark Lord's Keep (Middle Quest)
-- Scout Barrow Keep
-- Talk to the Sage from X to seek guidance
-- Explore the ruins of Y
- Acquire the master sword to beat the lord's ass (Middle Quest)
-- Endure the trial of fire
-- Endure the trial of cold
-- Endure the trial of attrition
-- (Claim the sword from the Dragon)
- Talk to the old man to receive spell meteo (Middle Quest)
-- Meditate on Mt. Koltz
-- Chase the evil Goblin from Mt. Datzu
-- Enter the caves of Z (and claim the spell)

As far as caption is concerned, a list of active quest seems relevant, which short identifiers such as this:
"Explore the ruins of Y" (Finding the key to the Dark Lord's Keep) [[Killing the uber lord!]]

Obviously, color coding would help

Note that this system complies to both scenarios:
- Quests are successive (a tertiary quest logically links to another)
- Quests are independant (several tertiary quests may be undertaken at the same time)

This system is not only good to actually display quests, its also a nice way to incorporate your plotline into your game or even think your plotline in terms of quest (which I found difficult before applying this procedure).