Quest

A Quest is an NPC-initiated event that typically leads to a reward after fulfilling a series of set conditions. In the world of MMORPGs, including Sword Art Online, quests may be completed by individual players only once, but they may be repeated by other players who later stumble upon the same quest for the first time. Certain quests can be completed more than once by the same player though and certain quests are given via a bulletin board, instead of an NPC.

Initiation of a quest begins with a gold «!» symbol that floats above NPCs. After a quest is initiated, the respective NPC's gold «!» will change into a «?», denoting a quest in progress. Certain quests have side-objectives that need to be completed before the final objective becomes available. All currently available objectives are displayed as golden «!» on the map, while the final objective that is currently unavailable is displayed as a grey «!» on the map.

The Cardinal System in Sword Art Online and ALfheim Online comes with a feature called «Automatic Quest Generation Function». With this feature, the Cardinal System automatically collects folklore and legends of the world, adapts it for the game and continues to generate infinite amounts of quests using proper names and story patterns. These quests can also lead to an "end of the world" event or one that greatly changes the terrain of the world, as the Cardinal System was given authority to change the world of Aincrad to its discretion, seeing as the world was meant to be destroyed in the end anyway. This feature has usually been disabled in ALfheim, but if activated from the management side, the Cardinal System seems to retain the authority of changing the world to its discretion without even getting permission from the management team. Examples of such quests are the Excaliber Quest in ALO and the «Witch of the West and the Three Treasures» quest in SAO. Due to this feature, just those known SAO quests in the quest database of the information shop exceed 10,000 by the time the 75th Floor is reached.

List of Quests in ALFheim Online

 * Excaliber Quest
 * Beast God Slaughter Quest