The Earthrise forums are host to the Question of the Week threads. This week's topic is questing. Here's some of what community manager "Moll" has to say:

Hello everyone,

I hope your weekend was fantastic. Let's jump right in with this week's question -

"We have received lots of new questions this week, and one we would like to answer this time is Commi3's question about what types of quests will be available in Earthrise. Quests will be significant portion of the PvE gameplay in our game and several separate systems will be present to make sure the player has a lot to do if he is not ready or interested to dive deeper in the PvP and economic gameplay. While Earthrise is a more complex type of game where cooperation between players is highly encouraged on many levels, we want to retain one of the important features of casual game design - we want to allow players to solo in a multiplayer environment and advance their characters without requiring them to find a group to play with. The best way to do this is through extensive amount of quests for players to toy with.

The most common and well recognized type of quests to any MMO player are the standard storyline made of main and side quests, ranging from simple FedEx or Kill Foozie tasks to complex challenges made of multiple tasks. While most of the gameplay resolve around a sandbox model where players actions are paramount, Earthrise will provide players with a complex setting and environment, along with compelling storyline where players can invest time if they desire to. These quests will develop around the conflict between Continoma and Noir and many of them will have multiple solutions in order to allow players to choose their side - or change it. While some quests will always be available for players to look back and change what they have done, most of these quests will not be repeatable.

At any time players can leave the main storyline aside to invest as much time as they want in the game generated random quests. These randomly generated quests using wide variety of templates are given out by the many smaller organizations on the island of Enterra through centralized mercenary system which players can access easily in many places rather than forcing the player to walk dozens of miles to hunt down citizens in distress. Each of these random quests is provided by one of the organizations in the game that the person in distress is associated to. Each time the player completes such a quest, his reputation to several organizations change. It's not a simple "do this and we'll all love you" proposition. While your reputation to one organization and to a small degree all friendly organizations will certainly grow, all neutral and to a larger extent all enemy organizations reputation will be lowered. Players won't have a chance to be at a good standing with all organizations in the game - they'll have to make choices and put a lot of work if they want to amend those choices later. Having a good standing towards one organization allows players to ask Favors from this organization - such as access to technology and designs the faction has monopoly on, and other great things we have in store.

We are also working on other types of quests we can't reveal at this time due to early stage of development, but when the time is right, we'll get back to the subject."

Thank you to our devs for taking time out to answer this intriguing question, and to commi3 for such a cool topic. Please feel free to discuss the questions below in this thread, and post any questions you have on our QOTW thread here. We read every question, just so you know.

See you next week!
~ M.

Check out the thread responses at the link above.