Most "exciting" quest yet - *yawn*...

The first traditionally is: "here take this sword, go into that basement and kill the rats"

I demand we stick to tradition... Where's my basement full of rats!??
We want rats! We want rats! ... Come on who's with me! .... Uh guys? Anyone? Damn, so much for tradition...

</end wisecrack>

 

Actually, I would find that a nice throwback. lol

 

That's one of the limitations that result from the MMO side of the game. That NPC can't disappear because there are hundreds of other people behind you waiting to do the exact same quest. Same reason why you can't just kill him. Maybe in single player offline mode they might make the world dramatically change based on actions in-game but I suspect not.

 

Thinks they mentioned somewhere they were having difficulties in having the npc go to the correct bed (which would be in their homes) . They tended to grab any open bed or something like that? Maybe an Inn has a lot of beds to jump into or they like bed swapping in the city of love?

 

Yep this is a big reason sadly we are probably never going to have a great quest system in this game.

 

WoW later created instancing in the world to get around this. I don't expect that from a small team and I also think it's overkill. Just changing the name of the NPC upon quest completion would be enough for me and should be easy to implement. Backstabby VonTraitor has been slain by the avatar. His shop is now run by his identical twin, Notbackstabby VonTraitor.

 

We can in fact do instancing but not in scenes with player homes.

 

Really cool Lum. I do think my idea of just changing the name of an NPC would help in instances where that NPC was killed/moved.

It would be nice to have some way to see the results of our quest decisions affect the actual world though. Doing certain quests in Soltown and Ardoris, for example, show no consequences upon completion. Certain guilty parties keep right on doing their thing. No consequences shown. Everything is fine. Move along.

 

I would have thought they could use some kind of 'flag' so that one player could view the scene slightly differently from another player but it seems this must be quite tricky to do in Unity. One thing that bugs me is when you pick up a quest item like a book you find in the scene and then a few seconds later it magically appears again right before your eyes.

 

But that would then require the assumption that these NPCs actually have their own houses. Is this the case? Does anyone know?

(cause if they do i wanna break in and steal stuff)

 

In Soltown, they seem to share rooms and use bunk beds! I hope Ardoris and larger city NPC's have their own homes!

 

All the classic ultimas had houses for at least MOST npcs.

Here there are so many player houses, I don't think its unreasonable to hope that there are some npc houses as well.

@Chris is this something that exists or will exist in the future?

 

So it seems that it simply doesn't work to have a basically single player story driven game in an MMO environment. The MMO mechanics simply don't allow for events, consequences and the telling of exciting adventures. This is a result of SotA being built on a MMO fundament. The story and the quests suffer from this immensely. In the end we will have standard MMO like quests like in any other MMO. No real consequences, the murderer goes unpunished, the princess gets abducted again and again, nothing really changes, everyone is doing the same things... So much for a story driven game...

I wonder what this means for the planned sieges of the cities? Weren't they supposed to be instances with burning buildings? But when instancing is not possible in scenes with player homes...

 

I believe this is possible in Unity, however it increases overhead because you need to have two versions of any NPCs or deco. Basically, if the player does not have a flag, they see NPC set A (Jon, Joe and Ann). Once they complete the quest, they now see NPC set B (Wounded Jon, Joe's Gravestone, and Sad Ann). There are 6 NPCs, but only three are visible to any given player. The same kind of flag can be used to hide items that are in your possession, when they should be "unique".

The problem comes in a multiplayer game when two different people in the same instance see different NPCs, potentially in different places. It either looks like a player is talking to nothing (which can be alleviated by linking the NPCs so they move together, but can still happen when NPCs are "removed"), or it appears that NPCs are not responding to keywords that you can see other players saying. Hopefully, the new conversation mode can help with this, so players don't really see this kind of private conversation with others, but that also drops discoverability.

tl; tr; - Possible, but not without complications.

 

Again, there are methods of achieving this. I said instancing previously but WoW used PHASING to accomplish this and it worked great.

http://et.worldofwarcraft.wikia.com/wiki/Phasing

I don't think SotA need to go this far, but they do need to take some steps if they're going to guarantee a heavily story driven multiplayer game.

It was never disclosed how player homes would be affected by sieges. Honestly, since story to @Lord British2 always comes first, I would say we should lose access to our houses until we retake/defend the city. That also provides some motivation to participate in the world.

 

I think in a lot of instances, you could just substitute a different NPC for the original. I don't know of any scenarios where this would not work. I definitely agree with the increased overhead aspects, but I feel the way this game has been marketed, it's almost a must.

 

I would really like to hear the plans the devs have for great quests and real consequences. Where is this special way RG said he found to tell a meaningful story with consequences in a multiplayer game? Right now I don't see any differences to quests of other MMOs...

 

In Soltown especially the citizens of the town don't have homes at all. Chad is not the only homeless person there, but he should be in my opinion.

 

THIS!

 

@Lord British2

a quest implementation deep dive would be very interesting and greatly appreciated