Suspicious Character in Soltown Graveyard

This guy is the one from Jeanne's quest to recover a silver necklace and Stanley makes mention of grave robbers in our midst, yet when I see this Suspicious Character, nothing seems to work for interacting with him other than attacking him. Sure, he looks like a bandit, but he's simply in a graveyard with no real information to tell me he's worth attacking. Perhaps an emote to say he's rifling through graves or a taunt, or an actual dialogue that can allow me to discuss options of virtue on how I handle the quest. When I double click on him, it would just say:

"You just tried to talk to that NPC. Please wait a moment."

Nothing initially occurred to when I clicked him. Not sure if this is a bug or simply an item that might be improved.

Love it btw -- great game, keep up the great work!

 

I had hoped this one would be 'polished', but I agree it needs work. There is no reason to attack someone suspicious just for being suspicious. Questioning would be good, even if that just led to him attacking you.

 

I felt the same in the love quest:

Spoiler: Love quest spoiler

When you get to Anapa(sp?), you are told his story, which is likely to cause pity more than murderous rage. He just stands there; he doesn't attack you. The spirit talker is no help. "What do I do?" I ask... no help at all. And out of 'love' the answer is to outright attack and kill him?

And the love quest is supposed to be the most polished? Many of the quests seem to be lacking in not only reasonable keywords/clues but logic...

Another example:

Spoiler: Ardoris quest spoiler

In the quest between Sheng and his sister Cai one has to figure out what to tell Sheng in order to advance the quest. He says he tried talking to his sister but she won't listen and one has to give him an answer of what to do. The answer turns out(unless it has changed since I last did it) is to tell him to 'talk to her'. He just said he tried that and she wouldn't listen... so why on earth would I ever imagine that the right response would be to tell him to try what he just said was unsuccessful. I like puzzles, and similar challenges, but things like this are not fun but illogical pulling-ones-hair-out exercises in frustration.

 

Also of note, even though Jeanne's reaction to you after recovering the necklace from the grave robber / suspicious character changes in conversation, her bark doesn't... she still barks that her necklace is lost implying that barks should be localized to the user rather than generic for all if the intent is for them to always make sense.

ALSO, the guards Stanley, Evans and Harry remain unchanged and thing the grave robbing is still continuing.

 

Seriously? We're supposed to attack him?
No wonder I never got further in this one.

 

Spoiler

You will take a virtue hit if you do though, then get a virtue boon from delivering the necklace.
So it would rather be considered "vengeance" than anything else.

 

Sorry, but this is one example of what is wrong with the quests in SotA. How are we supposed to know this? Why can't we have another solution like talking him out of doing such "evil" things?

This is simply not fun!

 

Oh man it actually was fun when I did this quest.
I walked up to him, tried to talk to him and since that didn't work I just killed him.
Love is in the air. . . . . Lol

 

Another bad quest.. The suspicious guy should at least interact when trying to talk to him.. good thing I prefer to hit things when they don't work!

 

Sometimes I really don't understand what is going on. Is no one from the dev team playing other RPGs? Especially single player RPGs to see how other games are doing quests? Sorry if this sounds rude but this is really disappointing as I thought that the quests would be one of the best parts of SotA...

 

I agree. Having the antagonist of one of the first and most visible quests in the game be a voiceless bandit clone that you just attack with no actual encounter or dialogue was... disappointing.

 

Definitely could use a little polish...
I didn't have too bad of a time...When he didn't reply and I put the pieces together (and noticed his name was in green meaning he could be attacked) as to what was going on I just slayed him and got on with the quest.

Questions is: has anyone logged these as proper bugs or is it just being complained about here?

An easy solution would be just to either
a > have him auto attack the player when conversation ended
b> have his language prompt the spirit of vengeance to rise! riiiiise!

 

Well, that's the problem... it isn't a bug.

It's just kinda lame.

 

One hopes that someone from Port is reading this feedback forum...



The problem might be that @Lum the Mad might be one of the few, if not the only one, working on quests here.
Seems like they are busy putting in more and more quests before they really polish any one of them...

 

Yeah not a fan of the forced negative to virtue for no legit reason. The fauns keep attacking you and its bad to defend yourself. Here you murder someone in cold blood with no legit reason, and that's considered the right thing to do to resolve this quest. WTF is wrong with the devs and their sense of morality and virtue.

 

We're ****** (slips it into suggestion box)

 

It would be interesting if half the time the "suspicious character" was really just a guy going to visit his wife's grave with no malicious intent. You'd have to actually talk to him and figure it out. First time questors might have to stop and think about what is going on.

 

This really doesn't sound very Ultima-like. Quite the opposite actually.

 

This quest was indeed was indeed not very "lovely"... My idea would be, that the player observes that suspicious dude and see him entering the crypt on the graveyard... you follow him there and get a,bushed by the bandits down there and finde the necklace down there. Most likely as loot from one of the ambushers.

 

I have noticed a lot of problems with quest characters, and NPC's in general, that don't remember conversations they've had with players. There needs to be some simple checks to see whether an NPC should say something or not. If a quest is completed the quest characters can say something like 'I have nothing more that you can help me with.' Or, 'Thank you for your assistance <playername>.' Having NPC's with memories, in regards to individual players, would add so much more to the game. I still enjoy the quests, but they could definitely be improved.

 

This one's a bit odd. I wonder if they left it this way to test if we would kill someone we could not talk to, and over a lost/stolen necklace.
Yeah, that would be good if we could talk the "suspicious character" out of a life of crime or at least return the necklace. I have traveled through the crypt and been attacked by bandits and all, and defended myself, but I can't bring myself to just kill the guy walking around in the grave yard. We were told we should play our avatar as ourself, with all our feelings of what is moral. I'm just going to leave this quest "unfinished".