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Phase I of Alpha Two testing will occur on weekends. Each weekend is scheduled to start on Fridays at 10 AM PT and end on Sundays at 10 PM PT. Find out more here.
Check out Alpha Two Announcements here to see the latest Alpha Two news and update notes.
Our quickest Alpha Two updates are in Discord. Testers with Alpha Two access can chat in Alpha Two channels by connecting your Discord and Intrepid accounts here.
Comments
Quest design definitely factors into this, obviously, but it's nearly impossible to design all your quests such that a player can't get lost or lose track of what to do or how to complete their objective unless you make all of your quests either incredibly simple and boring and repetitive or requiring the player to read far too much just to get a basic grasp of the required task.
Expecting players to navigate themselves and read all their quest descriptions would be an interesting design philosophy, but may not be wholly reflective of the way people tend to play MMOs.
At minimum I would say that clearly identifying questgivers and quest turn-ins, as well as clearly identifying the world location of quest objectives, is necessary.
A whole bunch of exclamation marks kinda takes me out of the game. Maybe they could yell at you as you walk by or at most have a chat bubble above their head instead of a giant exclamation mark.
EDIT: Also make it so I can read the full quest text easily while running. That will increase the chance I read it by alot. lol
This is actually very interesting. If we get NPCs who entice us to go talk to them by hearing them say things/ask for help it dismisses the need for question marks almost entirely. Excellent point.
I heard a bird ♫
What is your opinion on quest breadcrumbs (target locations highlighted, quest givers with icons above their heads, etc)? How much is too much? How much is too little?[/quote]
So to me I feel the "main story" ones, need to have some kind of "follow path". Usually better if it's not hand-holdy. The ESO experience on the exploration part is great. The ones where there are quests you can grab that are "non essential" or as in "the world exists". Another part of ESO experience, is you make a new character and it's the same story over and over. One of the things I loved the most about SWTOR (until lvl 50 pre-Hutts expansion) was that each class had their own story. And that adds SO MUCH to replayability of the game.
Another surprisingly good experience but not on the surface, was BnS. BnS suffers of the same as ESO- Same story every time. But what I liked about what they did with the story, was you had to go back to early zones at high level to defend or something was happening there. That makes you feel like the zones you've been in are an actual real part of the world.
Last but not least, what I would love in a (new) MMO (this is regarding the hand holding) is you give info from the NPC dialogue or a paper/letter that you have to read to know stuff. I have several levels of difficulty for this idea, but it'd be too long here. The gist of it is that when I press F to accept the quest, I have to go to a "location you told me to" and look for something you need, but it's not put in the way of "do this, go here grab that shiny thing come back". Players need to be made (and at the same time allowed) to do their thing with their character to make it feel you are interacting with something more real and also you pay attention to what they say, giving a place to the lore as well. The bad side of this, is making it TOO difficult, like SWL. One of the groups, Illuminati I think, had quests that were riddles and puzzles... they were so fucking intricate and the average folk would not know about it. It was kind of cool, the idea you have to "research" stuff to advance, but bro, make it something within the game, not outside.
Everquest had it pretty good, in terms of roleplaying immersion.
No quest markers on npc's head, hail the npc, see if his answer gives hints for quests (key words).
Manual talk to npc : using key words, i trigger key answers giving indications of a quest.
No automatic quest log, because it makes everyone :
-skip reading the quest.
-press 1 button and all the info is here.
Instead, what about this : (Everquest didn't have this)
Manual quest log : after talking to a NPC through key words and key answers, I write down notes from indications given by the npc, such as : who gave the quest, what to obtain, where to go, etc... in a manual log. If i forget about the quest, this manual log will remind me of it. I can update it at any time, as I found new hints during my explorations.
pros : very immersive, make players use their brain, make players explore unknown area looking for hints, makes players act as if they were their character,... it brings the "role playing game" part back into the "mmorpg" genre... too many mmorpgs are 100% focused on combat and craft and 0% on exploration and immersion.
cons : not very large-audience-friendly.
There is ultimately a balance to be struck here. There has to be some kind of guidance in game otherwise people will simply look at a guide on a 3rd party site and do the entire quest that way and even if you do everything right, some players just aren't interested in lore or quests.. A quest journal seems ideal for this and the developers can make it interesting for people who actually want to get invested in the quest without making the process basically already done for you.
I think the way to make people actually want to do quests is to make them more interactive rather than just killing a certain number of mobs or finding an item somewhere. Runescape has these sort of quests. Where instead of having thousands and thousands of cookie cutter quests it has a few hundred quests that range in difficulty from Easy to Grandmaster and all have a different assortment of minigames, bosses, and challenges. Players still use guides but they still have fun doing the quest, as did I.
I think the important thing is to make quests interesting so people feel less of a need to rely on bread crumb systems in the first place. Giving suitable rewards for doing them is also key.
When it comes to indicators about the target (area) of a quest, it really depends on how detailed the quest texts are. If there is a quest "Go to the forest and get 10 boar liver", it must be clear, which forest is ment and which type of boar drop the liver. I don't want to kill 30 boars before wondering if I kill the right boars and only the drop rate is low or if I should look for other boars.
If all of those details are clear from the quest text (or additional text in the quest log, which specifies a named area and the names of all the mobs that drop the desired item), I'm fine with no map indicator or indicator at the mobs nameplate.
Also, if the target is one item that can be picked up by multiple players and has a respawn timer (like the infamous candle quest in Archeage), there should be an indicator on the map or it has to be really clear, where the item is. There is no fun in going to the right location and not seeing the item because it has been picked up and starting to search elsewhere, only not to find it.
EDIT: I'm also fine with indicators for one type of quest and no indicators for other types (for example exploration quests)
Icons above quest givers for content please. They dont have to be marked on the map though
About reading the quest to understand it and maybe get clues etc. I think keeping it quite normal with getting objectives and such early on and while levelling. But introducing quest's that are a little more tricky in end-game and aproaching end-game. That way a grind for max level and doing alts wont be to repetitive. Just a thought!
But strongly believe that there should be markers on questgivers!
I prefer to see the locations of a quest (or area) on the map and to me it doesn't break my immersion in the game, because if an NPC can tell me to find some bandits in the southwest hills they can also scribble a circle on my map. If I have to Google some locations it does however break the immersion. Maybe talking to NPCs can give you a last known location on the map. Then you could also play with bad/old intel from NPCs on some quest locations, but I realise that might become a bit confusing
The alternative is a world where everything is vague and mysterious, pleasing a minority of the playerbase who want every quest to feel like a puzzle, and causing everyone else to play the game with the equivalent of wowhead open at all times and going straight to the comments for answers because they know it will be the fastest way to figure out how to do certain quests.
Nothing breaks immersion more than tabbing out of the game to a browser for answers, and this game probably(?) won't have addons to keep that information within the game's UI.
That being said, none of this will really matter if this game does away with the annoying filler quests: "fetch this, escort that, collect 10 bear prostates and slay 8 mold elementals, then return to me for the same reward as the last 100 quests you did." Generic objectives like that would be better off as a dynamic thing like GW2 made popular, where you wander into an area and are given some basic things to do automatically for a generic reward. If traditional quest lines are all tied to a coherent storyline relevant to that node, or are used to unlock some kind of major attunement, feature or item, then making them more 'puzzle-like' is acceptable because the reward makes the extra effort feel worthwhile.
What you are talking about is quest helpers and quest markers. If they're available, I use them. Given a choice, I'd prefer to have them on a mini-map rather than in the main viewport. They speed progression, and many people won't turn them off, so they shouldn't make the game look bad. You could also have them available for side quests, and not for main story quests, which would rely on actually following the story and reading the quest text.
But! A big problem with relying on quest texts is that they depend on both good writing and on the comprehension skills of the players, neither of which can be relied on (see paragraph one). Even the best writers will make a critical typo or misunderstand a quest or otherwise screw up now and then. If a non-native speaker is confronted with ambiguous text, then they'll be screwed without quest helpers. For example, I couldn't play Korean games on Chinese servers without quest helpers. Similarly, a Brazilian player will have difficulty playing this game without quest helpers if it hasn't been competently translated into Portuguese.
TL;DR: Without quest helpers, you will limit the audience for the game.
* Target location highlight: no, it turns questing into a braindead activity, save everyone and yourself time (and money) and don't even add quests because all players will have to do is spam skip dialog and follow arrows to an area, clear it, return and rinse & repeat so you might as well have players just grind in one spot. Giving a description of the direction players should follow makes things more organic and will have the player use their eyes/brain...aka it will make every task a possible adventure.
* "How much is too little": quest akin to "my uncle lives in the large port city south of here, go figure out where he spends his time and deliver him this cured meat. Fedex quests or "go find/talk to X npc" should best have their location highlighted. And the player can then plan their journey.
* Quest list categorization: per zone/district/area or w/e is good, seeing "i got these 3 quests to do in the salt plains and those 5 in thundering hills" still gives enough information to the player without having him be totally clueless (until he read each individual quest and manually sort them in lists, which would just make it a shore)
*Quest list difficulty: Boils down to, should the player know at a glance that one of his quests is for group / raid content ? Yes.
Should the player know at a glance that the quest is impossible for his current level ? Yes.
Since we're on the topic of quests:
*Daily quests: Personally i hate them, but i can see the merit of limiting character progression/resource/various tokens acquisition using dailies. HOWEVER it is still better to let the players play how they want !
If i for example want to tackle the "grind 500 tokens for a recipe" task in a weekend i will be much more happier to do so then HAVING to do my daily "gather 10 tokens and come back tomorrow on time like it's your job unless you want to fall behind and never catch up"
So if a form of repeatable quests has to be implemented to place a limit on player's capacity on acquisition of X, for the love of god AT LEAST weekly but PREFERABLY monthly quests where you receive the reward(s) AFTER the reset of said quest (to prevent players from feeling forced into grinding their weekly/monthly the moment they got it to obtain the reward straight away instead of actually giving them the freedom of taking all their time when they'll get the rewards only after the deadline)
I dont remember the name but there was an MMO where you could choose how many breadcrums you get.
Want to only read Quest with no UI help? fine.
Want to get arrows that guide you to your target? Also fine.
Why must we choose between one or the other. Let the people decide how much quest help they want.
Customization is the king
If an NPC says something like, "The person I want you to assassinate likes to spend her time at the falls next to the cliff south of here beyond the village," then that is perfect. No highlighting needed. People should pay attention to what NPC's are saying instead of just facerolling through the leveling process.
I think this goes for gathering-type quests too. I don't like my objectives to be shiny.
Hope my comments hope
I don’t want to spam through the NPC chat and then click a button in my journal to “track quest” and then go mindlessly travel and then mindlessly complete the objective. My gosh gaming today is so stale because that’s nearly every game.
You can say “oh just turn off your quest markers and your glowing path”. NO. You can’t expect someone to just purposefully handicap themselves when the game was built around handholding. Almost ALWAYS these games tend to have little or zero usable information to figure out the location of a quest or the item you need or who to talk to because you don’t need it, they just give you a waypoint and say there it is go get it.
1.) Basic Node quest should have something like a Quest Board where everyone can congregate and pick up w/e quests they want. Maybe the board tells them level req/group or solo/ try going north/south/east/west.
These should be your normal every day type of quest, almost like Dailies ie Go kill X # of monsters for reward Y. In your quest log/book it could give some more basic info: Monsters are usually found in caves/top of mountains. From there people should be able assume everything is in the general node area so that would mean there is no real need to spoon feed people a golden trail to their locations.
That said:
2.) I feel like Main Quests should have a little more hand holding. If there is a main quests that requires me to speak to a specific person in a specific location, there is nothing I hate more than getting lost while trying to complete said quest.
Lets say I need to speak with Jim in the Metropolis. Jim is located near the blacksmith. Yeah right. Give me his exact address so I can put it into google maps. Because I'm going to get lost. Especially if he's upstairs in some house around the corner from the blacksmith and there is no indicator on the map. And if you try and speak with the blacksmith all he knows, is how to sell you shit.
NO, gimme the damn golden breadcrumb line if that shit is going to happen, it is hindering my progress in the game.
That said:
3.) Random Exploration or Mastery quests could be where you can f... mess with people.
Let's say I've just about mastered Alchemy, I get a note in the mail that says, "To Truly master this profession please speak with Master Alchemist Jim in the forest Hut to the west" or lets say I see a hut in the forest up in the trees. Feel free to throw a jumping challenge at me, or I have to use some specially crafted potion to see said hut or some other random thing. Like you need to find the giant stone in the center of the forest, climb it and start jumping tree to tree towards the hut.
4) tl;dr
Basic quests don't need as much hand holding as a Main quest do, and Random or End Game quests should be a fun challenge to the player's knowledge as they've progressed and learned about the game.
I agree. Please do not making handholding a toggle option.
In essence, I really like the ability to miss things in the world because it makes me feel like I am really discovering things and at the very least I want the option of experiencing the game in this way even if it may not be the default mode of operation.
What is your opinion on quest breadcrumbs (target locations highlighted, quest givers with icons above their heads, etc)? How much is too much? How much is too little?
I like the idea of nothing visible over the quest giver's head (like a question mark or exclamation point - I think this is a little too arcade and cartoony).
With that said, I do like the idea of accurate direction to said person in the quest log and a marker on the players mini-map could work well (perhaps this could be toggle-able on the mini-map).
As an oldschool sandbox MMORPG player, any time I have do the quest hub thing I want to die. The whole system where I run up to an exclamation-point NPC, the NPC dumps generic text that no one has ever read to me, I have to run to a place to do the content, and then I have to run back to an NPC to get the reward. Any form of that is torture and the opposite of a video game to me. Just cut the uninteresting and unnecessary NPC-hub out of it, and have area-based tasks instead.
And even GW2's good hearts system was waay less interesting than the Dynamic Events. Similar systems are Rifts in Rift, whatever Warhammer Online had, Fate events in FF14, etc. I would be happiest if I could exclusively (and EFFICIENTLY) level up through dynamic events (which I mostly could in GW2!)
An example of a good descriptive quest would be the NPC at an expedition says "I need 10 Ridge Stalker pelts for my next trade shipment but the hunter I contracted sprained his ankle. You can find them about 2 minutes ride east on the rocky ridges along the Roiling River. They're the large grey cats with dark stripes". That gives plenty of information, but if you add a glowing line leading you there and a target indicator you would never have to read a word of text or even look at the world. You just stare at a line until you get there and kill the mobs with icons above their heads (lame). Seems like a huge waste of game development time/money to create content that will never be utilized or appreciated. To me it’s the equivalent of people staring at their phones nonstop and ignoring everything around them.
NPCs with quests could be indicated some other way than an exclamation point. Something more natural, maybe when you walk by them they make an obvious gesture to you like waving their hand and/or speaking something to you. Even a light glow around their silhouette would be more natural and unobtrusive than a punctuation mark above their heads.
Immersion is one of the biggest if not the single biggest things MMOs have lost in the last decade IMO and it’s usually due to excessive convenience. I think whatever tools are implemented for questing should serve to assist the player's engagement with the world and not replace it.
Not handholding, but not frustrating.