Glorious Alpha Two Testers!
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.
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
- some RP players like the immersion and reading of story lines, but many don't go into such depth or even can't if english isn't their first language. If game doesn't have simple to follow questing, decent % of player base will miss out on that and suffer.
- it doesn't have to be direct pin pointing, polygon area highlighted on the map would work good too
- if quest requires collecting/killing X of something, it would be nice to have UI tracking window showing progress.
I find quests to be detestable in all MMO's. I would much rather just set my own tasks, and find a mob that gives good drops or XP per hour on my own. I know people cry about grinding, but I personally think it is more enjoyable than questing. However, I know this is a unpopular opinion.
Since we must have quests in MMO's because people don't know how to act without them. I would say just do things the way WOW and FFXIV do it.
Things to have:
Markers above the head. A simple clear objective separated from the flavor text. The location clearly marked on the map.
Things not to have:
Automated movement. Teleports to locations. Tell me what order to do the quests in. A quest limit less than 25. Have "in world" markers (breadcrumbs or that dumbass compass from l2)
The number one thing I would hate to see is required quests. The best case scenario for me is that questing and grinding are equally viable, and I could just skip quests all together.
This is my personal feedback, shared to help the game thrive in its niche.
Or when you log in all quest you are in at the moment are whit blue cursors on the map, and those who can be taken are yellow just make a suggestion. And you can choose to see blue ones or yellow or hide them all or continuing see'in them all.
Rly don't c'now witch is better, i thing to have a choice is better than not have one or many, and don't get me wrong i c'now this is rly hard programming and stuff.
You all have my RESPECT and gratitude doing this for us, and let us be part of Exploration and Creation!!! LOVE YA ALL
Highlights:
1. prefer option for breadcrumbs if its decided its needed for casuals
2. Make it simple but meaningful, alittle wandering and less subtle hints tend to encourage community engagement (if finding another person after initial breadcrumb describe looks and location no golden path or arrow)
3. Make the juice worth the squeeze if you get feedback on the something being too tedious, up rewards or simplify
4. Stay awesome and safe
[*] A marker on the NPCs with quests is a must, just basic floating diamond above the head, or it could be that their body glows with an aura. Perhaps one type of indicator for a NPC with a Task (kill 5 Owl Bears) and a different indicator for a “Narrative Quest” the quests that are story driven. I’m neutral on if those icons would also show up on our mini-map.
[*] Wide Area highlights on the map coupled w/ descriptive quest text that will mention a POI like “go NW to find a cave that looks like the mouth of a fish faced mountain and kill the ghoul inside.”
[*] We should be able to put markers/waypoints on our own mini-maps, world maps, that way we can create our own reminders and also allow us to share our maps with other players so they can see the waypoints we have created, this makes grouping more effective.
[*] No glowing path method as it causes me to feel like I can’t explore off to the sides. Don’t even make it toggleable because as much as I don’t want it, if a toggle exists that turns it on then of course I’m forced to turn it on and use it, I can’t help but to optimize the fun out of a game if allowed to so don’t make it something that can be toggled on.
[*] I don’t really need compass indicators but I’m not against them either.
[*] The quest journal could have hyperlinks to more detailed quest hints, descriptions, pictures.
[*] During a quest your quest log on the side of the screen should keep a running tally “1/5 dragon scales collected”. In a game like AoC where you have hinted we will have many variations of the same thing, example Gold fish, Snapper, Salmon, Trout… I need to know for sure if im collecting the right items for the quest with live updates on my progress.
[*] At the end of the dungeon or maybe in two or three spots in the dungeon are teleports back to the nearest node. That way we don't have to fight our way back out of a dungeon after farming all day and we're tired and just want to eat and sleep.
How many quests are too many? For a system like AoC there is never too many. Too many is a thing that occurred in railroaded theme parks like WoW where you have zones meant only for a certain level range and so it was annoying when a zone had too many quests and before you could complete them all you got too high level and the mobs you were fighting gave you no exp, yet as a completionist you felt compelled to complete the quest anyhow. In AOC however you will never out level a node, the node hopefully progresses with you so you always need more Tasks and Narrative Quests.
I would like that the main story for your race has a marker above the NPC or on the mini map.
For side quests it would be nice if there is some indication that the NPC has a quest.
But I also like the idea of hidden quests.
2. Objection marking?
No, I do not like it when the map shows you where to go or what to pick up.
I think it should just say it in the quest log or when talking to the NPC.
It can give you a direction on where to go or a Point of interest near the location.
3. Epic Quests?
Yes, I would totally love to see quests in the world that need 8 people or maybe even a raid to complete.
4. Quest log size?
I do think there is some meaning in the size of your quest log. I think you should not be able to just pick up everything and than go and complete them. Now I do think you should have enough space so that you can pick up the quests in one town and complete those. But not go around a zone accept everything.
5. Big quest chains?
Yes, I would love it if there are quests chains like your main race quest that take you multiple days or even weeks or months to complete. And that make you travel all around the world.
6. Achievements?
Now this is maybe not really in the quest discussion. But I see achievements as a type of quest.
But I think there need to be good achievements to go for. This also allows some people who need more guidance on what to do to go out and have a goal.
Some extra: I loved how in the pre-alpha footage your quest log is tucked away behind a icon and when you click on it it scroll out and shows you the progression of your quests. I think that the UI for quests should be very clear to read when you need it. but when you are not doing quests you should also be able to hide it so that it is not in your way.
The way vanilla/classic WoW did it was great in my opinion. No real help on the map, you have to read the quests in order to achieve the objective. I also think that the auto-completion/accepting of quests is ultimately bad, as it makes them feel a lot less personal. I want to do a task for a faction/an NPC, a small adventure of sorts. It would not have had the same impact if the quest to find Mankrik's wife had auto-completed upon standing on her corpse. Finally, I think it is paramount that the questing experience is satisfactory, as they are the catalyst for a world to feel immersive and alive. Thanks for the great work Intrepid!
I think the simpler it is, the more fun it is. (minimum of indicators, minimum of navigation, minimum of light markings.)
Beauty in simplicity.
I feel like having too many info bring me to ignore what’s around me and go straight to the quest.
Plus it’s even more immersive if you don’t exactly know wich road to take unless you already knew.
I think it’s a very personal preference, having a switch to enable/disable the exact road to follow might be the best choice
Conclusion - breadcrumbs would have been a huge help, and probably kept me playing more often in the early days. It was just so frustrating. I didn’t even know I could be part of a linkshell that could have also helped me. And...this built an absolutely amazing community outside the FFXI that wanted to help, document, and create walkthroughs for just about every part of the game.
In ‘06 and ‘07 I started to look into other MMOs, I eventually gave in to the WoW movement and started playing. This was almost the polar opposite of FFXI.
Conclusion: Breadcrumbs kept me in the game more. The community definitely had a different look and feel - it was more about how finish raids, tactics to use, gameplay for PvP, etc. I played in game more, and the community in the game was more robust and interactive than outside the game.
Final thoughts: I think a hybrid approach would be best, with configurability of the UI. Let breadcrumbs be an option for those who want them. i would create simple “low/medium/high” level help settings to help filter out unwanted quests: “low - main quest only, figure out the rest yourself”, medium “main quests with important side-quests that define your characters lore”, high “kitchen sink...make sure you clean the dirty dishes”. There’s a balance to this at so many levels. In hearing your teams vision for the game, I think some breadcrumbs will be important to keep playing communing in-game, rather than “split-personality”. However, creating guides has never been easier - screen/gameplay recording is second nature for most of us, but still requires editing and some tweaks to get out there as content. I think the best approach is to create breadcrumbs with filters and get the best of both worlds.
Also some form of progress tracker where it makes sense (kill/gather x-amount quests f.e.), but no progress tracking in quests where it would give additional info (kill every single xy in area xyz quests where the progress tracker tells you how many there are in total). At most it should tell you if you're done, but even that can be too much for my taste in certain cases.
I mean this is generally more of a broad appeal vs. extremes question than what is objectively better for UX.
Having quest giver & target location markers makes it more approachable for casual players, bc they can stop mid-quest, drop the game for a while for whatever reasons and come back & instantly get a perfect understanding of what they were up to before. It'd be very boring for immersion focused players tho, because it renders the quest text and talking to the people to get a quest from them completely meaningless (efficiency wise). Even if it's just toggleable efficiency options, most will still use them since they do want to get that sweet flying mount/some other progress example.
The full commitment to breadcrumbs only on the other hand would probably force away any non hardcore player, because they just can't remember enough / (if there's a full journal) be bothered to read through every line of dialogue they ever had to find the necessary hints.
Everything in between is going to make the extremes of either side dissatisfied, so it's probably just going to be a balancing act of how hardcore it's supposed to be. Relatively obvious exceptions are do-this-first-or-we-wont-let-you-have-open-world kind of quests and full, difficult breadcrumb quests with shit rewards that couldn't also have been inferred from the breadcrumbs.
Though I hope that the midcore or someting similar AoC is aiming for (iirc from the interviews I watched) won't make you go looking for a system that bothers the least amount of players enough that they won't play, but that you search for what makes the highest amount of players enjoy it.
This makes quests not a braindead grind but something that you have to actively work on. It also encourages players to be social and ask nearby players how they figured it out.
A lot of people suggest having an option to toggle, however when it's up to the players to decide, they will always prefer to not handicap themselves so everyone will tend to the easier route.
I think Breath of the Wild did an amazing job as far as world exploration is concerned, as the points of interest themselves grabbed the player's attention while they were exploring the world and not by pointing him directly to them by a quest mark.
You might also add a system that rewards/punishes doing quests without markers/indicators. E.g. you lose half of the experience or quest reward if you toggle on the breadcrumbs, you receive double the experience or quest reward if you can do without.
On the other hand, this system might only work for the early days of the MMO. There will probably be websites with detailed information on how to successfully complete each quest, so it might not be the most sustainable system.
^This.
I said it before. Singleplayer RPGs don't show markers. You have to actively either listen to rumors or just go tlak to NPCs to get hints. Why would this work in Singleplayer but not in MMO?
If I wanted to be lazy I'd play an idle clicker on my phone
Classic WoW - there were sooo many haters thinking the classic wow system wouldnt hold up to modern day WoW. Many of its outdated features wouldnt be well received with newer players of WoW. Many thought classic wow was gonna fail within a month because its way to different from it's modern one. Lo and behold.
AoC - don't be afraid turning back the sands of time and bringing RPG and immersion on. You spoke about risk/rewards and no hand holding. If a player is stuck with a "quest" he/she can ask other fellow adventurers perhaps how to finish it.
No exclamation over heads - clues/hints in quest dialog. If NPC are anything like EQ1 - where you speak back to the NPC - keywords matters and people will need to pay attention.
No Shiny noticable object in real world, no pathing guide. Players needs to be immersed into this world and figure things out. If they get stuck, they can ask other players - thus creating more community.
NO Toggle - because everyone will always choose the easy route, so they can get their reward from the quest quicker. Make us earn our rewards - you spoke about time investment - keep your principle, your core belief throughout your game. Not everyone is gonna have a flying mount - well not everyone is gonna get that reward quest if they cant take the time to read and follow direction and explore.
They can't youtube their answer on a new game and every server and node will be different, so guides will be extremely difficult on a game like AoC.
As for new players to the genre - that makes no sense. How about all the new, first time mmo jumping into Everquest 1, where you actually had to talk back to the NPC to unlock stuff. EQ was hard mode in hindsight but for first timers, we didnt know that and learned their system right away. So new players has nothing to compare to, shouldnt have an issue with any game. We all go blindly in any game and expecting to learn the system in any game we play. So there is no need to cuddle them.
Quests can always have landmarks or direction as hints in the quest text to help player. For instances "zebra raptors have been attacking my farm! I'm not sure from where but I seen one run off towards a big fallen down oak tree to the south east! Before I lost sight of it!"
This gives us a general direction and a landmark letting us know when we are getting close. But that doesn't mean the raptors are right there either. Maybe the player will have to search the area around the oak tree before finding them. In doing so maybe finding other interesting things like a cave nearby or ruins that they will want to check out later!
the pros of this system is that
- the HUD/UI is not littered with highlights and stuff
- encourages people to read the story of each quests because of hints, ultimately, helping people to understand how the world works (for quests with lore that is world building)
Simple Quests: (Kill X bears, Delivery X item, go to Point
Intermediate Quests: (Seek out, Find X, retrieve X from baddie located at Y loc) - No exclamation marker but their name color is different. Maybe the item they need to find in the world shines when nearby. Basically we are beginning to take the training wheels off for all the players. You will see most of these quests in Node 2
Advance Quests: (multi-tier quest line, heavy lore) - They begin to be common in Node 3 and higher. Their name color is the same as the Intermediate. Everything that you need to know is in the dialog. Objects in the real world no longer shines. You gotta figure it out. Node 3 will still have your simple/intermediate quests but the advance ones is gonna require more attention to detail.
Epic Quests: No breadcrumbs - doesn't enter quest log. You need to decide if this NPC game you a rumor lore or an actual quest. Maybe it's a dead end and there was no quest, maybe there was and finally after following up on the rumor, a quest log appears or an item you can interact with, which gives you clues for the next part and may or may not enter your quest log at that point. Can appear in any Node
Story Quests: Everything On - Those wanting to learn more about the world of verra and the current story (if there is one to be told) - should have all the bread crumbs on. The reward isnt epic nor trash.
Legendary Quests: They appear in Node 1 but don't officially come to life until Node 4 or higher.
An NPC from node 1 tells you a rumor about, ohhhh let's say big foot was seen, near a cave to the south west. Nothing pop up on your quest log, no confirmation you accepted a quest. You can explore the area but don't see nothing - dead end rumor, no real quest.
Now Node 2 - that same NPC gives a bit more info about this big foot - with another location near the cave, no quest log or confirmation. But you decide to explore it - maybe you see some evidence, like a big foot imprint but that's it.
Node 3 unlock - you hear multiple NPC mentions something that sounded like big foot. Maybe that same NPC from Node 1 begins to yap about how nobody believes her rumor and but recent attack or missing people is from big foot. nothing else, no loc to explore or anything - but a description emerges from different NPC describing what they may have seen w/o saying it was big foot, they are probably thinking of something else or simply calling it a monster.
Node 4 unlocks - A billboard with random basic quests are on it. Also on this billboard is a quest (this could be locked away unless you interacted with NPC(s) from node 1-3) or just appears for everyone - a bounty to kill an unknown monster with the same descriptor from node 3, but location unknown. Now obviously if you followed the tale from Node 1 - you were given a location, if you were to explore that cave or the general area - perhaps you will run into Big foot. MAYBE there was no billboard quest - but Node 4 unlocked Big foot presence, near that cave perhaps. You kill bigfoot, have a special loot or something and bring that back to the NPC from Node 1 or authority figure for a unique reward, then upon returning to the original NPC from Node 1 who was made to look like a fool from her towns folk is now happy she wasn't crazy and also rewards you.
Make each quests different and unique. Tier level.
Depending on the reward - dictates breadcrumb or not.
Depending on Nodes, the less breadcrumbs.
Start players off with training wheels and slowly take them off.
Any players stuck or cant find a quest can, GASP - socially interact with others, thus intergrating perhaps some solo players into this awesome MMO.
IF AT ALL - following my previous post system - perhaps it's toggle for "simple and intermediate" quests but thats it. Across the board is pointless and might as well just have breadcrumbs on every quest then.
Every player is gonna complain about their time and if they can move faster to get their carrot - they are gonna do it and we wasted the time, effort, lore that the devs put in.
stick to your core belief and principle steven. Not everyone is gonna have a flying mount or that amazing carrots. Only those who put in the time and effort.
When it comes to finding a certain location or a certain npc in the world, it can be a bit boring to be told the exact location. Instead I find it more interesting if you were given clues or maybe just an approximate location on the map, and had to find it on your own from there on.
I really like a mix of the two but I love the concept of having mini games to reveal content. The ranger tracking looks fun but I am not sure if you can apply that to every class through different means.
One of my favorite combinations of crafting and questing was cartography in Ultima Online. The idea that you can find clues that lead to treasure is a long standing concept behind the breadcrumbs.
The old hag with a rumor, whispers heard in a dark alley, things overheard at a tavern (the Strider scene in LotR was epic), some random compass that points to things or the classic pirate's treasure map (Pirates of the Caribbean anyone?).
I would very much like a variety of ways in the game to pick up a point of interest to get you to explore the common areas. However the best and most rewarding things should come from exploration. How would you discover an artifact long forgotten by the world that is now only rumors or whispers if every Joe Schmo in the game knows about it?
The most exciting thing about discovering a new world is not knowing and having many means to hook my interest and pull me in different directions. Breadcrumbs yes, I want little clues in the world that will point to some adventures, not all of them. Having a NPC in every area to point you where you go and what you do next, no, absolutely not. If I wanted a theme park ride I would not be here typing now. There is plenty of that out there.
That being said there is nothing wrong with having some known resources in nodes to go to for "adventures". Be it the tavern, city hall, the guild hall, the church, library, ally ways, market, a hut out in the woods, a travelling merchant, or other players.
At the end of the day I still want every base archetype to have something like tracking that can lead to new adventures in a mini game element, I am just not sure if it can be done in context but it seems like the sense danger for tanks and the find treasures of rogues already lend to that. Also something like a cartography skill in crafting, or having each crafting have it's own resources to discover crafting related things. Not everything should rely on blind luck and exploration. Having word of mouth and artisan based elements would be pretty cool.
I enjoy talking to random NPCs at my own pace, and focusing on game world and what I want to do in it, instead of what is basically annoying flashing ads.
However I am begrudgingly accepting of static quest giver / quest target indicators if they can be enabled / disabled at will (BDO). Essentially, if someone needs assistance to find or complete a quest - they will be able to find solution on the internet regardless of whether it is marked ingame, so there's no practical difference if the game already provides them with these tools.
On another hand, making players interact with each other in positive ways (even in the form of editing / browsing a database) is something older MMORPGs exceled in, maybe by accident, by not providing much quest-related information ingame. It would definitely be great if AoC team thought about this aspect and based some of its design decisions around it. These forced positive interactions and bonds created from them is what made old MMORPGs precious and memorable, instead of disturbingly addictive.
PS:
It would also be great if we could make our own marks on map, both point-based and area-based.
no guide that holds your hand all the way trough, some quest could but most should not
I think its important to highlight a 'region' on the map for where items might be. E.g. if you had to kill mobs in an area, the map would highlight that area. If you're looking for a scroll it would do the same, just that the 'area' would be smaller (not a fixed point, but actually require you to use your eyes to locate it).
Quest Givers - I must admit the ! ? system is dated, but it works very well. I think on a map level its fine to have ! ? But in game, it could be represented better. E.g. instead of a big ! over an npc's head they could shout "Hey, kiddo? You got a sec?". I think this is a win win scenario, you retain the 'locating' aspect of ! ? on the map, while not ruining immersion with a big ! over an character's head.