A new Developer Diary featured over at IGN by Content Designer Adam Lee details Cryptic Studios' answer to Warhammer Online's Public Quest system: Open Missions.

For players familiar with Warhammer Online's public quest system, Open Missions are pretty similar. Open Missions are outdoor quests that anyone can participate in, feature multiple stages of increasing difficulty, and of course, the most important part, phat lewt at the end. A key difference is that everyone who participates gets some sort of loot no matter what, while the top three contributors get the best stuff. Contribution is determined by points earned by completing objectives, the harder the objective, the more points you earn for completing it.

Each Open Mission starts with a fairly easy stage that a solo player could do on his own. The next stage gets harder, and the one after that gets even harder, and so on up until the final objective. You may start off rescuing citizens, then have to fight a number of critters, then take down the boss, and then destroy the ship and escape! With each stage getting progressively harder, you'll need more players as you go along to actually complete the whole mission. The difficulty of the Open Missions varies from mission to mission. Some final objectives will take five players, some will require up to 20. We want to try and keep the players guessing and not repeat the same Open Mission 10 different times in 10 different locations.

Read the full Dev Diary, here.