Soldak Entertainment - Unique Quest System

In a new blog post, Steven Peeler discusses the dynamic nature of the quest system in their next action/RPG, which results in genuine urgency and consequences.  Here's the intro and the first of several examples:

Pretty much all rpgs have quests, so how is our quest system in our upcoming dungeon crawl different? Well frankly in most rpgs (there are exceptions of course) quests exist in a vacuum. They will sit there forever, nothing can change them and they change nothing either. Your choices don't really matter. There are no consequences to your actions. You can't really fail. Text like "hurry", "emergency", and "or else" are just flavor text and don't mean anything. And every time through a typical rpg the quests are exactly the same as the last play through.

None of this is true for our upcoming game (Depths of Peril is similar in many ways). I'm going to show this with a bunch of examples of the typical rpg and our game. These examples will overlap a bit.

Real choices:

Bonelord has taken Airik hostage and demands a ransom to be paid. In a typical rpg, if you even have the choice of whether or not you pay, either direction is going to end up with you rescuing Airik, either because the choice is phony or you have to use save games when you fail. In our game, you really do have the choice and the choices lead to different outcomes. If you pay off the ransom, you will get Airik back, but Bonelord leaves with your money and is very likely to take another hostage now that he knows he has a sucker. If you refuse, Bonelord will attack and try to kill Airik. Airik is very mortal. If he dies, he really will be dead and you might be without an important NPC for the rest of this adventure.