Conversations make my blood boil

So far, I'm liking the game and I appreciate all the work that has gone into it so far. But I find conversations so annoying I want to avoid them at all costs. Here is what I typically see: I walk up to an NPC, I click on them and hit enter. They ask me a question. In the time it takes me to reply to the question, the NPC asks me three more questions, moves closer to me, and then begins to complain that I'm standing too close, and I should step back! It is so infuriating, it makes my blood boil. I then begin to be rude to the NPC and things quickly go nowhere. Add that to the fact that there is no visual indication which NPCs are important to talk to, and it is very frustrating.

Please remove the warning about standing too close, and don't scroll dialog off the screen until I hit enter. Unless the intent is to make us want to murder all the NPCs?

And before people tell me the conversations should be old school, I remember old school. In old school days, no one told me I was standing too close, and there was always time to take notes.

 

A lot of people seem to be troubled by it including myself. I think the UI needs a re-design to make NPC chat and Player chat more manageable. Possibly by separating the NPC conversations into a separate tab or window.

 

If you want npc chain a different tab, that can already be done. Click on the other tab, I think you right click on that tab to get a list of choices. Select what you want to get filtered.you can even create multiple tabs this time around.

 

Thanks jiirc. It wasn't very clear what the tabs did, so I've just ignored them until now.

 

I suspect one of the biggest problems is that Portalarium is expecting a little too much from it's players when it comes to NPC interactions. Pretty much every other game works on making quests easy to find and follow....Now I get that you might say "Yes Darius, but I have slightly more mental capacity than a turnip and wish for my quests to be a challenge!" and I'm with you here...but at the same time I don't want to spend half my SoTA life in vague bemusement because I'm not understanding clues...as the NPC become smarter this increasingly becomes a challenge.

For example NPC 1 may say "Adira over on tucks farm has a fine ass", this can be interpreted two different ways....but perhaps a more useful example would be "I hear there are tunnels under Kingsport"...are there? Is this information copied from a PC....do the NPCs learn that way....

You see the problem...enough rumours and seeing the wood for the trees (or Adira's ass for that matter) could become very difficult. I hope a lot of time and effort is going to be put into the "Quest Ledger" element of the UI.

Darius Falc.

 

just ask Portalarium to add question marks or exclamation points over NPCs that are important and make them glow... it's doable... they can easily add those to the NPCs... >_>

 

LOL I would, but there would be lots of angst from the fan community (refer to the overland map discussions). It seems that the big floating exclamation points have been used as an example of how this game will be different from other games. But if you made it toggleable with default off, how could people complain then? It wouldn't impact their experience at all.

 

I don't think it's simply an aesthetic problem. Making an Easy button will give an advantage to players that use it over those that don't.

I'm looking forward to questing and conversation system the way it's been described by the dev team. You're right though, it is a bit rough around the edges, but then it's still in development

 

I don't think of it as an Easy button. I think of it as a "Skipping the parts of the game I don't like" button. If you don't like crafting, you can just buy your gear, or use loot you won in combat. If you don't like combat, you can just hang around town and be a merchant or crafter or socialize with friends. If you don't like PVP, you can turn that off. If you don't want to see any other players, you can run single player online. Options for everyone.
What about options for people who don't like conversations? Other than reading a walkthrough first and figuring out who you need to talk to, then turn on Names, I'm not sure what else they could do for people like me.

 

"Adira over on tucks farm has a fine ass"
*note to self: check out the tucks farm*
~Time Lord~

 

I dunno it's not my cup of tea... I appreciate your point that people are going to play the game differently so ideally the game could bend in ways to accommodate different play styles. Question for you: instead of having an optional UI effect for floating exclamation points, how would you feel about hiring, for a small price or barter, an NPC guide that would guide you to questing NPC.? And, maybe the guide NPCs would be in easy to find areas, like taverns and whatnot.

 

That's a great idea! We could hire NPC henchmen (and henchwomen) that would function as guides and possibly help out in combat.

 

So much this, I was just in Braemer or what is the city at the south called and there is this Oracle guy walking all over the place he keeps bumping into me and spamming my chat channel when I am trying to get some info from him...

 

I think the conversation system needs to improve but please no glowing exclamation points and question marks and whatever over npcs. Sorry but there are plenty of games with that stuff already I really do not want to see it here. Also like Tarsin said even if you made it an optional toggle anyone who chose to have it toggled off would be at a disadvantage to those who had it toggled on.

 

I respect your opinions, but how is the giant floating exclamation a disadvantage to those who toggle it off? This game isn't a competition. It is a game. It is supposed to be fun. We all have different ideas of what "fun" is.
Also consider that with the exclamation point, people may be less likely to refer to walkthroughs. Walkthroughs = advantage over those who are doing it hardmode.

I have every confidence that they will fix the "Step back!" spamming, and the "scrolling way too fast" problems. This is an alpha release, after all.

 

There could be clues to quest givers that would be okay for me. Maybe if important NPCs had surnames or different animations that called a bit of attention to them.

As much as I love digging for clues, I won't even have 10 hours a week to devote to the game. A little bit of help would go a long way towards improving my personal experience.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

Yes we all have different ideas of fun. I just worry that if they put that sort of stuff in what next? Where would they draw the line? If they cave on those points people will push for more. They will argue well you already caved on the exclamation points and question marks why not go ahead and just give a minimap that shows up exactly where these quest objectives are, and so on. I mean to be honest the glowing blue and red target circles we have right now are bad enough and I am hoping they find a better solution then that. I don't want to look back at this game in several months or a year and think wow this game had so much potential but it ended up just being another generic fantasy game.

 

Referring to an earlier suggestion, if having henchpeople give us suggestions isn't feasible, maybe an in game talking pet like a parrot or raven can work... Oh wait. There IS a raven pet. Maybe the pet can be a "familiar" (cat) or homonuculus or whatever. I'm getting off topic, but it might be cool if the pets could talk.

 

I think having the important npcs having surnames to help them stand out would be a good idea. Hopefully they can come up with some solution that makes most happy.

 

I agree, I'm not fast at typeing and I am having difficulty keeping up the the Npc responses as well. Thankfully we are still in alpha so this is the perfect time to let the Dev's know so they can work on it.

I also find the Npc's lack of self awareness to be a little frustrating. For example when one of them opens the converstion by telling me to piss off and I respond by calling them a jerk they act shocked at how rude I am.