Glorious Alpha Two Testers!
Alpha Two Phase III testing has begun! During this phase, our realms will be open every day, and we'll only have downtime for updates and maintenance. We'll keep everyone up-to-date about downtimes in Discord.
If you have Alpha Two, you can download the game launcher here, and we encourage you to join us on our Official Discord Server for the most up to date testing news.
Alpha Two Phase III testing has begun! During this phase, our realms will be open every day, and we'll only have downtime for updates and maintenance. We'll keep everyone up-to-date about downtimes in Discord.
If you have Alpha Two, you can download the game launcher here, and we encourage you to join us on our Official Discord Server for the most up to date testing news.
About the Quests! What is, and what could be?
Tyktak
Member, Alpha Two
Hello dear Dev team
I know that this topic has already been brought to you in the previous phase of the game.
We are now a few days after the release of the alpha 3, and as an “questing” guy who prefer quests over pure bashing for leveling up I would like to give you my opinion and my suggestions over this topic.
Since the new phase just release, and I'm the type who like to take time to discover everything, wandering around a lot, trying different archetypes etc... I will only speak for the first part of the leveling (between lvl 1 to 10 for the most)
First, I will speak about the nice surprises I had:
- The beginner zone of the anvils:
I think you did a wonderful job with the first quests there, they are rather straightforward, which is nice for the beginners, and give you enough xp to lvlup to lvl 5 by the time you get to the beginner city (either hammer rest or bonefire). It's nice, give you enough time to apprehend your new character, with a good time progression in my opinion.
- The rewards for the commissions:
We can see that they have been upgrade a little bit, it’s nice cause it gives you more reason to do them,
But I think the rewards could be a little bit higher, especially concerning the xp they give. For the same lvl commission, the xp given is only 4% of your lvl in the early lvl (5 to 10) and only 2% above lvl 10, if you add to that the xp you get by killing the 20 mobs, or harvesting 20 resources, you get around 2% more (4 if you’re lucky with the rarity).
If you compare this with grinding, it’s not efficient enough in my opinion, and people won’t do them for long.
Now, let’s get to the topic of what I call the “adventures quests” which for me, regroup all the quest where you must take missions with NPC, and kill mobs, loot stuff, or look for location.
In the next part, when I will be speaking about quest, I will be speaking of the above, and won’t be counting in “commissions”, “treasure maps” or “crafting quest”
- My main concern about those quests is once again the rewards...
Once again, I find them lacking in comparison to grinding, and it’s a shame, because some of them are really nice, with a nice continuity, and nice background or storytelling. But in term of time spent, they’re not worth the experience winning.
If I take the quest “Proper Burial” that you can get in Lionhold for example.
The story is nice; you need to speak to different NPC in the first part, to learn what happen, and then you need to go to the tower on the other side of Samia’s Hope, but only at night, then when the night is here you can beat some skeletons, get 2 clues, and you need to wait again until down (night stay for almost 2 hours if I'm correct), and only at dawn can you get the last clue and come back to the starting NPC in Lionhold.
The rewards? 8000 xp, for a quest that can take you up to an hour or more if you do it for the first time.
For comparison, if you go to church of the seven (around same lvl) you need to beat 4 or 5 mobs (depending on the numbers of stars) to get the same amount of xp, so approximately 5 to 10 min.
What I'm trying to say there is that the gap between the two is too big ... If I start a character at the same time as my friends, or guild mate, but I can’t play on the same hour than them, so I decide to play solo and do the quest, and they decide to farm mobs (cause they are in group), By the time I reach lvl 8, they will already be lvl 10-12, and the gap will go on..
Once again, if you want to make sure that the game could be enjoyed by a lot of players, you need to give them an opportunity to grind their lvl even if they don’t find a group or want to spend some time solo.
- Concerning the items rewards:
There too, I think it’s lacking, not as much as the experience point, but it would be nice to be able to win a little bit more rarity items, for what I saw, you can only get uncommon (green) item through quest, when you can get all rarity with farming..
- Least topic (otherwise the post will be really too long): The dialogues and texts:
I think I won’t be mistaken to much if I say that a lot of players will be skipping dialogues with the NPC, spamming [f] and getting right the accepting the quest (Too bad for them, they will miss some good story telling)
We all do it, especially if we have already done the quest once (with another character for example)
The problem there is that some significant information's will be miss, and sometimes so significant that you won’t be able to continue the quest, or you will take a really long time to understand what need to be done.
The most problematic will be at the end of a quest, when you don’t get the information or another quest stating that you could go and see another NPC to take another quest linked to the one you just finished.
An easy solution, would be to be able to see what was said with the Npc in the quest Journal.
And furthermore, to be able to also see the dialogues of the quests you already finished.
Hoping that I have been clear in my speech despite my bad English, i would like to know if I'm the only one thinking about those elements of the game that are the quests.
I know that this topic has already been brought to you in the previous phase of the game.
We are now a few days after the release of the alpha 3, and as an “questing” guy who prefer quests over pure bashing for leveling up I would like to give you my opinion and my suggestions over this topic.
Since the new phase just release, and I'm the type who like to take time to discover everything, wandering around a lot, trying different archetypes etc... I will only speak for the first part of the leveling (between lvl 1 to 10 for the most)
First, I will speak about the nice surprises I had:
- The beginner zone of the anvils:
I think you did a wonderful job with the first quests there, they are rather straightforward, which is nice for the beginners, and give you enough xp to lvlup to lvl 5 by the time you get to the beginner city (either hammer rest or bonefire). It's nice, give you enough time to apprehend your new character, with a good time progression in my opinion.
- The rewards for the commissions:
We can see that they have been upgrade a little bit, it’s nice cause it gives you more reason to do them,
But I think the rewards could be a little bit higher, especially concerning the xp they give. For the same lvl commission, the xp given is only 4% of your lvl in the early lvl (5 to 10) and only 2% above lvl 10, if you add to that the xp you get by killing the 20 mobs, or harvesting 20 resources, you get around 2% more (4 if you’re lucky with the rarity).
If you compare this with grinding, it’s not efficient enough in my opinion, and people won’t do them for long.
Now, let’s get to the topic of what I call the “adventures quests” which for me, regroup all the quest where you must take missions with NPC, and kill mobs, loot stuff, or look for location.
In the next part, when I will be speaking about quest, I will be speaking of the above, and won’t be counting in “commissions”, “treasure maps” or “crafting quest”
- My main concern about those quests is once again the rewards...
Once again, I find them lacking in comparison to grinding, and it’s a shame, because some of them are really nice, with a nice continuity, and nice background or storytelling. But in term of time spent, they’re not worth the experience winning.
If I take the quest “Proper Burial” that you can get in Lionhold for example.
The story is nice; you need to speak to different NPC in the first part, to learn what happen, and then you need to go to the tower on the other side of Samia’s Hope, but only at night, then when the night is here you can beat some skeletons, get 2 clues, and you need to wait again until down (night stay for almost 2 hours if I'm correct), and only at dawn can you get the last clue and come back to the starting NPC in Lionhold.
The rewards? 8000 xp, for a quest that can take you up to an hour or more if you do it for the first time.
For comparison, if you go to church of the seven (around same lvl) you need to beat 4 or 5 mobs (depending on the numbers of stars) to get the same amount of xp, so approximately 5 to 10 min.
What I'm trying to say there is that the gap between the two is too big ... If I start a character at the same time as my friends, or guild mate, but I can’t play on the same hour than them, so I decide to play solo and do the quest, and they decide to farm mobs (cause they are in group), By the time I reach lvl 8, they will already be lvl 10-12, and the gap will go on..
Once again, if you want to make sure that the game could be enjoyed by a lot of players, you need to give them an opportunity to grind their lvl even if they don’t find a group or want to spend some time solo.
- Concerning the items rewards:
There too, I think it’s lacking, not as much as the experience point, but it would be nice to be able to win a little bit more rarity items, for what I saw, you can only get uncommon (green) item through quest, when you can get all rarity with farming..
- Least topic (otherwise the post will be really too long): The dialogues and texts:
I think I won’t be mistaken to much if I say that a lot of players will be skipping dialogues with the NPC, spamming [f] and getting right the accepting the quest (Too bad for them, they will miss some good story telling)
We all do it, especially if we have already done the quest once (with another character for example)
The problem there is that some significant information's will be miss, and sometimes so significant that you won’t be able to continue the quest, or you will take a really long time to understand what need to be done.
The most problematic will be at the end of a quest, when you don’t get the information or another quest stating that you could go and see another NPC to take another quest linked to the one you just finished.
An easy solution, would be to be able to see what was said with the Npc in the quest Journal.
And furthermore, to be able to also see the dialogues of the quests you already finished.
Hoping that I have been clear in my speech despite my bad English, i would like to know if I'm the only one thinking about those elements of the game that are the quests.
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