Glorious Alpha Two Testers!
Alpha Two testing is currently taking place five days each week. More information about Phase II and Phase III testing schedule can be found here
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 testing is currently taking place five days each week. More information about Phase II and Phase III testing schedule can be found here
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.
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I guess technically you can.
That is why some people fail exams. They have a different idea of some factual notion.
Basically, you can have your own opinion on an objective matter, it just means you are objectively wrong.
However, wrong opinions do exist. Obviously.
With that said, wrong opinions both shouldn't and can't be taken in to account on objective matters. Quests are created in an MMORPG by the content team, Intrepid can't suddenly say they are no longer responsible for making quests because some people don't consider quests to be content.
If a game is talking about all the content in their game for people to participate in, they would include quests in that discussion.
In terms of the development of the game, some people having the wrong opinion that quests arent content means nothing at all. Some people saying they do not enjoy doing quests, however, does mean something. That is something that a developer *could* act on if they wish, but someone being factually incorrect about what is and is not content is not something they could do anything with or about.
And my initial response was to the statement that quests will somehow "solve" AoC's current issues. Except they won't solve shit. And some people won't even see those quests, cause they're trees falling in the wood, while the person is pvping in a field.
No, what is strange is people assuming you can have an opinion on an objective matter.
Saying "my opinion is that this word means something other than what it means" is the language version of saying "my opinion is that 2+2=37".
Neither are things you have "opinions" on.
Someone challenging your opinion on these things isn't weird, *HAVING* an opinion on thes things is strange, and attempting to defend an opinion on these things is strange.
Quests are a must. But if i am not wrong -> all we have right now are either Subjugation/Kill Quests,
or Quests to find and bring Stuff that takes an Eternity to drop and collect - right ?
I was NEVER be able to finish the Quest with the Goblin Tra... ... "Treasures" i should bring to this one NPC near the Port-Stone of Lionhold.
Honestly.
It never dropped.
I mean OOOOONNNNEEEEE TIME i had almost everything complete. Only to then delete it in frustration after the last Item refused to drop for two Days after i massacred a "felt" Estimation of half a Million Goblins.
Who the heck am i ? Orcbolg ? lol
Seriously that Quest had to go. Too bad. I would have really loved to complete it.
Can We please have Quests where we gather Fish ?
Gather Herbs ?
Chop down XXX Sort of Tree or something ?
Break down XXX Sorts of Ore ?
Maybe a Quest that we can finally get some Gear for Ores (Mining) above Novice Level ?
I was so "stuck" during Phase 1 one some things, it wasn't even funny.
* happy suffering in filthy casual * -
✓ Occasional Roleplayer
I am in the guildless Guild so to say, lol. But i won't give up. I will find my fitting Guild "one Day".
This is technically another reminder, Intrepid.
I understand why MMORPGs need to keep those super invested grindy players happy, it's because of the sheer number of people who rely on them for information/insight about the game, even within the game. Guild management lately has been reminding me of this even more.
And I don't mean 'how to get strong', I mean 'hey did you know this thing you are talking about/asking for is actually in the game already? If you step one zone over/open a menu with a name that refers to the thing?'
When the 'A-Rank Adventurer loses interest, a lot of fumbling 'E-Ranks' suddenly stop finding your game to be as fun for 'mysterious reasons'.
i realised quickly it was because i had no OUT-OF-GAME Group i should rely on, which knows exactly what to do <- mysterious reasons.
I feel like you're talking about commissions w/o talking about commissions, cause you've just described artisanry commissions, even though so far they're only about gathering, rather than other professions.
Considering that artisanry is tightly tied to node buildings, I highly doubt we'll see quests that reward tools.
Overall, quests are like a guide, or a medium through which you experience content. They point you towards something, towards a piece of content, and they connect it all together.
Kill x, gather y, or similar quests are the lowest form, the simplest versions of it. They are hardly considered as content.
They can reward you with stuff, whether that's xp, items, or gear, just like doing any other piece of content would reward you, but the entire content there boils down to accepting a quest, and then turning it in. Everything you do in between is "other" content - not the quest content.
But there are also other types of quests, and I'd say these are more story driven. These quests would take you somewhere, expand on the lore, introduce characters, continue the storyline, etc.
You could argue the story itself is the content there, but I'd say the story and quests go together here, and you can't have one without the other.
@Ludullu made an important point, regarding this.
It also matters how the storyline and questlines work. If it's just a linear storyline, where you have to do x first, before you do y, then I understand how that's just an obstacle.
I do not think that this can just "exist in the world for you to find" though. We are talking about progressing a story, learning about new characters, learning about the lore, the world, etc.
You can stumble upon pieces of lore here and there, but not the overall storyline, which has to have some starting point and certain amount of "linearity" to it.
You can stumble upon certain bosses, NPCs, etc. - but without an overall story and lore, they just exist in the world - for no apparent reason. This is the immersion part, where quests provide exactly that, they introduce you to content, while also providing content on their own, via storytelling, adventure, exploration, combat, etc. - aka a medium through which you experience content.}
You can always explore on your own, and fight whatever mobs out there in the world, but quests provide some sort of a structure to it, while also being there to guide a player towards something, or somewhere.
Anyways, back to the actual OP, I do sort of agree.
I haven't played tested the game yet, so I'm not really able to provide an argument based on my experience in regards to these death penalties.
I do think they absolutely have to find a way to not alienate such a big portion of playerbase, which are casuals. Whenever the casuals leave, the game is as good as "dead".
I don't think the main issue are those obstacles that waste your time if you die, it's the fact that these things affect casuals the most. The big issue is the gear curve, and power curve (other than XP itself). Actually, it's all about PvP and combat, and the power of gear and items.
If gear amounts to let's say 70+ % of your power, you run into a few issues.
If casual players are not able to keep up in terms of grinding to get that gear, hardcore players are just going to steamroll these casuals in any sort of a PvP encounter. If this happens enough times, these casual players will quit. This is more so the case in PvP focused games, where the main content is going to involve PvP. In Ashes, PvP will be everywhere.
Everyone talks about how p2w killed Archeage, but it had a few other issues there as well, that were made apparent to me back when I played on the classic server (which had removed p2w elements).
You simply have players who are going to no life the game, and they will always be on top of the gear curve. You can't really fight these players, and they will just keep getting stronger, because they will win more and more battles, and get more and more gear. It's just like the rich get richer, and here they both get richer and more powerful in terms of gear.
Ultimately, hardcore guilds with hardcore players will be on top, "owning" a lot of the content out there, while casuals are left with scraps, or with nothing at all. This results in them quitting, as they have "nothing to do" - or rather, they want to do something, but they're unable to.
Are there ways to solve this? Sure.
I won't even go into all the ways you can do it, as the post will be double the length it already is. I'll just say, more content, and more variety of content.
In a way, M O D U L E S are meant to represent this. There might be some story happening on the other side of the map one day, and you don't have the time/planning to go there, so you miss a part of it. But when you do arrive there - the story is continuing.
It doesn't continue there "for no reason". It exists because some actions preceeded it.
The same can be applied to literally any point of any story, and players, imo, should just be able to enter that story at any point and through as many means as possible. To me, THAT is a true living world that doesn't wait for the player to catch up.
That is why I love the sandboxiness of mmos (well, the ones that have it) and why I mostly consider players to be the game's content. If I join a guild - they'll have had a history already, they'll have a reputation already, they'll have some accomplishments from the past - and I'm joining them in the middle of their road (or it could be nearing its end or just beginning).
I wish quests could serve the same interactive function, but it's obvious that majority of quest lovers just wanna be the MC and for the world to revolve around them (not saying you or something else here have indicated that desire). And there's also the "fomo" of it all, where if a story happens somewhere and some "MC" misses it - they'll complain that the story happened w/o them.
In a way, it's the tree in a forest example that I gave, except from the pov of someone who KNOWS it makes a sound and wants to hear it, but was unable to, for some reason.
In other words, once again, my preferences go against the majority's.
From a realistic perspective, if you have this piece of content happening in a small part of the game world for a small amount of time, there is a really good chance that the total number of developer hours spent on it will be greater than the total number of player hours spent on it.
The larger the game world, the larger the server population, the smaller the percentage of your population have the ability to experience that piece of content.
The entire notion of that strikes me as a child thinking "wouldn't it be cool if" as opposed to a responsible adult thinking "How do I make this game financially viable?".
While I don't know what form it will take, expect some form of disapointment around this system. The numbers just don't add up for any other result.
Ideally, yes, that's how it's supposed to work. Especially when we consider Ashes will (hopefully) have a dynamic world, where no 2 servers are the same, and the environment keeps changing based on player activity (are we yet to see any of that work in game?).
In a sense, such game doesn't need a set storyline, because players will affect the storyline itself, and the way it plays out in the world, rather than you playing through a pre-made story.
You don't need that many writers, etc. but you do need extra dev resources in order to make the system good and immersive.
In such a setting, quests will be boring I feel. Dynamic events that pop up will be there to "progress the story", rather than quests. Player actions will be there to do the same.
Quests will only be there as rough guides, and will mostly consist of go to X, kill Y amount of Z, etc.
I don't think you can have both an in depth and great questing system that provides content, and a dynamic world where you don't have a set storyline that's meant to play out as you progress in the game.
You could do something like GW2, where quests are like events that you and others complete together, but I don't find that particularly enjoyable. - Besides, GW2 does have a storyline that you play through via green (story) quests - which you don't even have to do.
✓ Occasional Roleplayer
I am in the guildless Guild so to say, lol. But i won't give up. I will find my fitting Guild "one Day".
Yeah but y'all are both definitely in the camp of people who played games with no complexity, so obv you're right about it in relation to those games.
Cause, as I see it, that's literally the same thing as "farm mobs like a bot", except you waste time on interacting with npcs and clicking through UI windows.
I imagine it hits the reward centers in their brain differently? I figure they must like hearing the "quest complete!" sound effect and seeing a little particle effect appear around their character.
Different people have different likes and dislikes, and even different reasons for liking the things they like.
My reason for preferring even boring, repeatable kill quests is because they offer more variety, generally.
When playing the way you prefer, a player tends to find a spot that has mobs that their class is able to easily and efficiently defeat, they find a spot as close as they can, but that is out of range of respawn location, and then just pull mob after mob. This is monotonous gameplay that is repetative at the level of minute detail.
Doing it this way isn't a requirement, but if the mobs are respawning fact enough and if the player is restoring health and mana fast enough, this is the most efficient way to work this kind of grind (which is actually what I am doing as I type this).
On the other hand, with repeatable kill quests, you talk to an NPC and they tell you what mobs you need to kill. It may or may not be mobs that are easy and efficient for your class, but you don't (or shouldn't) have the choice. You have to locate the mobs the quest giver tells you, and then you need to kill the number of them they ask for, even if the mob in question is difficult for your class. You then need to go back to the quest giver, turn in your quest and get another, for potentially a different mob type, that you then need to locate and kill as many of as the queset giver asks for.
In a well designed game, these two activities should reward roughly the same. The reward from the quest should make up for the fact that you need to travel, and that you kill over all fewer mobs in the same amount of time.
With the above in mind, it should be VERY clear to anyone paying attention that one of these activities is more varied than the other, which is why many people prefer it.
The design could be the opposite, where the mobs that you need are harder for you to kill, while quests send you to super easy mobs, but the rewards are not optimal.
Or there could be a properly balanced design where both of those things are equal. As much as I like grind, I don't want the optimal way for progression to only be "grind this mob endlessly". I want people to farm for gear parts. Those gear parts should be spread out over several locations, ideally with even several spots within those locations, all of which would have different mobs with different fun mechanics.
So, in a way, it would just be a "quest" that you just described, except it would be self-imposed, because your own-set goal is "to get this item". To get it, you need to craft it. To craft it you need to get parts, recipe and general mats. And depending on your artisan profession, all of those could be their own activities that you gotta do. And I'd personally prefer if recipes for the items you wanna craft were acquirable through quests related to the locations where you can drop the parts of the item, and those quests should include some cool puzzles and include a few of the mobs that drop the parts, so that the players that need direction - have it.
And of course Ashes is a free trade game, so there's always the option of just buying all of that shit, but imo that option should be riiiight below being the optimal choice, so that players would need to decide whether it's easier to get some money rn or go get the materials themselves.
You are talking here about how you would want to see it.
I am talking about how it is in many games - most games, in fact.
I have no reason to assume Steven is capable of reinventing the wheel in this regard, and dread to think what the result would be if he tried.
It is also worth pointing out that anyone that isn't primarily influenced by L2 is not talking about gear when talking about grinding - they are talking about experience, and to a lesser degree, coin. The notion of good gear being available via grinding on low difficulty mobs is something that MMORPG developers stopped having in their games in the mid 2000's when basic botting software got good enough for them to not be able to easily detect it.
Edit to add; the replacement for just open grinding on mobs to acquire good gear or components thereof is why quests became so much more prominent. Telling players that a given set of mobs have a rare item on them that they can farm and then sell opens up botting as an endless means of progression. Telling players that if they get a given quest up to a given point and then they can get quest updates from those same mobs removes any real desire to bot, and also adds a cap on what can be accomplished if someone would try.
There is an argument to be made that a quest update doesn't hit quite the same as getting an item to drop, but if we are talking about dozens, hundreds or thousands of kills between updates/drops, it kind of does.