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Quest Handholding & Skills/Lighting VFX
ShadowVen
Member, Braver of Worlds, Kickstarter, Alpha One
Handholding/ Quest Guidance:
This was one of the questions discussed from the recent office hours. Honestly, Steven's original take on this way early on in the project is one of the reasons that Ashes had captured me and kept me interested. I don't believe that there should be much of any guidance or handholding, especially " ! " markers on the map or over the npc heads. My personal overall opinion is minimal handholding / guidance is best.
I have quite a few reasons for this, but ill list two reasons for now.
Skills & Lighting VFX :
I'm really getting tired of people constantly complaining about this. People are going crazy about this, almost to a point of laughter. The VFX are fine as is. Ultimately what needs to happen, is that Intrepid just needs to have a SETTING in place where people can adjust how much they want to see. Intrepid doesn't need to change/alter their VFX overall as a one and done thing. It needs to be adjustable downwards from where they have it at. It's fine as is and players can tone it down for their needs client side.
This was one of the questions discussed from the recent office hours. Honestly, Steven's original take on this way early on in the project is one of the reasons that Ashes had captured me and kept me interested. I don't believe that there should be much of any guidance or handholding, especially " ! " markers on the map or over the npc heads. My personal overall opinion is minimal handholding / guidance is best.
I have quite a few reasons for this, but ill list two reasons for now.
- PACE of gameplay. Within the last decade or more, a lot of players just seem to rush to endgame content. They just rush to npc's with specific color & mark indicating "MSQ" (main story quests) - and continue onwards. I'm leaning towards Steven's original viewpoint where there are no indicators on NPCs heads, and i'd prefer no pin-point "X marks the spot" indicators on the map for questing. I think the dynamic world, storyarchs, and events should keep its meaningfulness and at the same time not have my screen / map full indicators. If people don't want to read the entire storyline or message from npc's (which i get), there could be like a "HINT" (similarly to a tl;dr) summary of what they are requesting or wanting. As for new players wanting tutorial, i'm fine with markers ONLY for the tutorial to help get players adjusted to things such as locations of special buildings, such as : religious, social, caravancaries, and other important parts of the game that new players may not be used to. I'm fine with a portion of the map having shaded overlay for quests "general direction", so that players aren't 100% in the blind.
- Social Experience: I believe, and have experienced first hand in other MMOs (FF11), that not having plain-in-sight nor no brainer quest indicators / markers, lead people to conversations with other players. Yes, MANY will just ask where to go without even trying, but I believe plenty of players will give tips and/or also experience the quests together. I believe less handholding brings out more social experiences with others.
Skills & Lighting VFX :
I'm really getting tired of people constantly complaining about this. People are going crazy about this, almost to a point of laughter. The VFX are fine as is. Ultimately what needs to happen, is that Intrepid just needs to have a SETTING in place where people can adjust how much they want to see. Intrepid doesn't need to change/alter their VFX overall as a one and done thing. It needs to be adjustable downwards from where they have it at. It's fine as is and players can tone it down for their needs client side.
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Comments
and at least with the node system its gonna slow people down and make them look around and explore a bit more since they cant just go to each new higher lvl zone
this was amazing looking back at it cause it forced you into a point in the game to where you're like okay I can't farm XP cause my gear is ass and these quests are a pain.. so what do i do?
So what did I do? just about any dumb thing I could to make Gil and wasn't feeling like a chore either. I have fond memories of gathering crystals from one major city that were cheap in that area, and then taking them to another city where they weren't and kept doing this as I funded fishing and cooking tradeskills
I haven't had an experience like this outside playing ragnarok online back in the day, most MMOs quest structures are generic and give you everything you should be working for.
For me I would love to see a game stop giving out xp and money rewards, it will also make the devs create more meaningful quests sense the rewards are gone, there's no reason for trash fetch quests
It appears at this time that IS is striving to strike a balance between being helpful without being intrusive - Or as pointed out in the video, verisimilitudinous; a plausible simulation of being "real" or an organic game element.
The commission boards simulate the acts of random NPCs posting notes of interest and need. If the devs lean hard into this system we could see notes such as "Speak to <name here> for more information."
NPCs randomly running up to players is a bit trickier due to being taken out of your suspension-of-disbelief when you see the same NPC turning to a player or group of players next to you and stating the same request.
An option to turn off quest markers for quest givers would be nice but most players would leave it on as they would see randomly running around just another way to waste the little amount of time they can devote to the game.
As I stated a long time ago, quest markers for targets is a bit tricky - If I'm given a semi-specific area to look in (ex. "South of the Blue Mountains, East of the Red Desert") I can plot out a grid pattern search. But if I'm just told to look for an obscure location somewhere between points A and B then many players are going to feel that the devs are not respecting their time and effort.
And with the large amount of information that will be quickly posted on the web one can surmise that most players will most likely look up quest information out of game rather than asking random players and NPCs for more help.
Not saying it's a noble goal, it is, but IS has quite a challenge to overcome when it comes to slowing down players who are very much used to racing to "end game" without putting up too many artificial roadblocks that make those players feel like their time is being wasted
Player behavior has been normalized to race to end game. Will be interesting to see how IS adds systems to slow down the race while making those systems feel an organic part of the game.
I enjoyed FFXI a ton, however I'm not requesting it or expecting to be nearly that restricted. I'm perfectly fine with having NPC's name tags being a different color or highlight / glow for distinguishing between non quest / non crafting npc compared to quests/vendors/crafting npcs. Each type of NPC can have different highlight/glow if need be. But I just don't want to see " ! " over their heads nor on the map.
If there is a setting to toggle it on, i'd be fine with where the default state is turned off.
Again as in my OP, I don't mind slight vague help per say. For instance, a quest npc tells you to go and find and rescue a npc in an area, I wouldn't mind seeing a general greyed out overlay (if that quest is toggled on/track) over the map but not a specific point of where that npc is.
Yeah. I agree with what you said, however this "normalization to race to end game" is what imo is killing the genre. Like you said, there will be those who see "slowing down the pace" would just be a misstep from the devs wasting players time, however on the opposite side of the spectrum I think its a complete disrespect to the devs who put in all the time to create the world and quest lines to just be able to blindly skip it or fly through without acknowledging the actual game itself. To me the zoomers that rush have no intention of actually "enjoying the game", rather their focus is solely on being the "top" guild or player. They may have completed lots of content but they cant tell you the purpose of that content was.
Could not agree more. And you highlight something important which is that if you make skipping lore and storyline convenient then I’m at a disadvantage by taking the time so I’m kind of pressured into skipping it as well to be able to keep up with everyone just looking for exclamation marks.
HOWEVER, I remember the days of quest descriptions with purely verbal means of interpreting directions and it can be super difficult not to get lost if you’re using landmarks based on text.
I agree that allowing npcs to give you a generalized area highlight is a good option because if I’m talking to you IRL I can point you toward a mountain range, a valley, a lake, etc… and give you directions based on things you’ll be able to remember instead of “go west to X then north until you meet Y.”
The VFX thing is dependent on so many subjective factors such as hardware, updates, screen resolution/lighting, room darkness and color of walls reflecting light in the room. IS should definitely not try to please everybody here. We should all be complimenting and applauding their efforts and how awesome it all looks.
Not to mention, they’re developing on systems so much more powerful than probably any of us have access to and the detail they’re putting in doesn’t even fully render on our displays vs. what they see. So maybe your screen doesn’t look crisp because it can’t display the range of detail they’re implementing. Everything I’ve seen looks amazing!
You gave a great example for the shaded area over map, as with iRL one.
Also, if you think about it, going on quests is PART of the "exploration" model and/or experience. Steven had said this about exploration "It'll be easy for you to get lost in AoC. That is our goal from an exploration standpoint.[7] – Steven Sharif"
He wants everyone who plays the game to enjoy the exploration experience in take part of the full PvX platform. The way commissions can lead to side quests, events, and even Story Archs is a great motivator to want to pursue joining other people as well. Blindly following Exclamation marks and quest objective markers will remove this sense of Exploration for most people.
You have my vote; for what it's worth. Lol
I think getting lost would be cool but not if I'm actually trying hard to solve the riddle of where the quest should be (exceptions here would be fun). It'd be really cool to have some quests notorious for getting people lost/confused and being riddles but being given textual instructions referencing other landmarks just turns into like messy translating. I really like the idea of some quests being super hard to figure out though. Like if I get lost just trying to find something but the clues are really well planned so that it's just tricky then I'm happy to struggle through that. Then once I'm done I'm going to get to laugh and enjoy watching other people struggle through that gauntlet almost like a rite of passage.
Or like if you could be searching for something and have the potential to find the wrong thing that would be hilarious. If you completed a hard dungeon to recover a certain artifact that the quest giver described but you got there and missed a certain detail in the quest and picked the wrong one then got back to the quest giver and he's like "Dude I said the purple one, this is radioactive" and you die. Lol that would be great!
Yeah I agree there with Dygz, Quests objectives shouldn't be in riddles. However, I wouldn't mind for some "Treasure hunting" NPCs to have some riddles in there or even a treasure map to have some sort of riddle occasionally.
Are you saying you'd prefer being led by Quest and objective markers? Sorry if not, couldn't really tell which you were responding to.
NPCs should lie to red.
Quest Giver to Green Player 1: "Go kill 20 goblins."
Quest Giver to Green Player 2: "Go kill 20 goblins."
Quest Giver to Red Player 1: "What goblins? There are no goblins here."
Quest Giver to Green Player 3: "Go kill 20 goblins."
Tasks on the Battlepass are good enough for me.
damn I cant believe I had missed this thread until now. anyway..
i completely disagree with you. its not about hand holding or anything. i hate questing, however, there might be some important quests that need to be done. ashes is a dynamic world where the quests availability will change depending on the level of nodes, story arcs and other factors. I'm sure most people don't wanna be talking to every npc in the world every day in the off chance that a new quest has triggered. its important to know which npc are going to give you a quest, or at least, that there are npc in that area that will give you quests at a given time (maybe you have a guard or something telling you there are some citizens who need help or whatever).
another thing is, why does it bother you if someone wants to rush to max level? why is it important for you that other players play the way you want? if I wanna rush to max level, let me be. i don't go around saying "I think its problematic that people do too many quests instead of grinding mobs. I'm usually alone grinding mobs and I want people around grinding mobs with me so we can party or pvp. quests should be removed so that people grind mobs and quests are an issue in mmorpg".
also, if people want to rush to max level, they will. they will rush to max level doing quests, wether there arent indicators or not. if there arent indicators, people will simply go to third party websites to find what quests they should do and where. id rather have indicators than having to alt tab every 10 seconds.
I played a very old MMO called NexusTK which would come out with events every so often and give very minimal clues as to the whereabouts of an event questline and players had to band together and really try to figure out how to progress before the event would end. Mind you, this was a pretty small community of only a few hundred players, so everyone would post on community boards when new say commands or items required were discovered in the questline, and it was really exciting!
So yeah, I am in favor of it. Maybe Intrepid can make the visual queues of quest icons/map locations toggleable for players. I know some MMOs sometimes push out quests and firmly alert the playerbase that the questline does not have any visual indicators, which I always thought was a cool concept.
Good post!
That said, if the objective is community interaction, I think the secret is less to make people wonder where to find quests, and more to make completing the quests difficult. Much of that difficulty should be tough PvE to the point where some solo players will have to overlevel to make any headway, unless they really perfect their skill trees/equipment and technique. And a solid bunch of quests should lead you to dungeons that you can only clear if you're grouped up with a decently specialised group (doesn't always have to mean holy trinity for everything, but a reasonably efficient combination of playstyles.)
Ease players into frustration tolerance early, and reward them for doing a good job at their role.
I agree with this. IMO this is logical. In real life, if someone has a task they need help with. One that's important to them. They speak up. You see someone who has the skills to help. You don't hide. For this, finding quests should not be difficult.
Now doing the quest does not need to have golden trails that take you to each step. The NPC telling you their child went missing when they were sent to get apples in the woods. Getting pointed in a general direction also makes sense. Now the fun should be everything else. Finding a trail of things like the kids ball, maybe a spilled basket of apples a little deeper into the forest.
There is handholding and then there is making it required to look online to find something to do. That's the line I have no intrest in. I'm also not intrested in seeing a sea of ! Over everyone's heads. Get close to an NPC with a quest should have an option for a faint glow.