Dear Mr. Garriott: the questing experience...

Now that you mention it,

Spoiler

I never gave Mara's warrant (the first time and after the reset) because I thought I had to make a choice yet the ending of this quest line has Ferigs arresting Mara with the warrant I never gave. The way Mara talks makes it even easier to follow Essen's request so I never gave her a second thought.

It also seems strange that they're supposedly siblings but they all have different skin tones. One would assume that siblings would have similar skin due to genetics but it's never addressed. That's a lore thing so I'm not going to press any further on the subject but it's VERY easy to believe that it's just another slip up by the devs.

Another thing to take note is that, when Mara asks you to talk to you, you have Essen who immediately asks for an audience as well. It's assumed that you'll talk to Mara first for some reason because, when I talked to Essen, he's all like "Oh, so you've talked to Mara, eh?" and continues on mentioning the warrant I don't have.

It's one of the reasons why I avoided listing any examples in my OP; there's just too many. We could nitpick every little detail like this for months on end but what I want the dev team to be very much aware of is that it's one thing to have details that don't make sense, but another to make it frustrating or a chore to experience it. Any work dedicated to resolve these storytelling issues would be for naught if the act of gathering information out of the NPCs is a chore.

Information like:

• What do I need to do?
• How do I go about it?
• Where do I go?

For example: if an NPC is talking to me about something and mentions Ardoris, it doesn't matter if it's a generic text written based on region, that NPC HAS to be able to give me more information about Ardoris... if that NPC can't, then they shouldn't bother talking about it. Do not mention things that the NPC is not equipped to elaborate on!

It doesn't need to be super amazingly complicated either. It doesn't even need to be listed as a keyboard in the UI; it would be best if it wasn't actually. A basic "general" way of doing it would be to set it up so that if a player types a keyword, check if it matches with any keyword that the NPC has dialogue for. IF NOT, then output the generic text.

As time goes on and development continues, you can add custom-written dialogue for any number of NPCs as you see fit.

That way, if players aren't talking to the proper NPCs, they'll be still be able to get some kind of clue and not be frustrated by the constant "I don't know what you mean".

Set it up by region and by scene and then by NPC. Again: if NPC doesn't have dialogue for it, check to see if the "scene" has generic dialogue for it, if not, make sure you have generic dialogue for the region.

Example:

• NPC: "Ardoris? I don't know where that is. Maybe someone else does." (some refugee in Soltown).
• Scene: "Ardoris is a big city south west of here!" (any NPC in the Soltown scene).
• Region: "Ardoris is a metropolis where the Tempest River and Rage River meet. If you follow any road along the coast heading away from the mountains and towards the plains, you can't miss it." (any NPC in the Perennial Coast).

It might sound like a lot of work, especially when you're establishing region-based dialogue, but you're covering EVERY NPC in that area and that extra effort makes it SO MUCH easier for the players... and from there you can cherry pick which Scene or NPC will have their own scene-based dialogue or custom dialogue.[/spoiler]

 

Sure, Ultima 4 - 7.

All had quests, big and small, that affected the game in ways outside of the immediate confines of the quest. On a grand scale, towns were destroyed, and close friends died. On the small scale you might make progress on a virtue.

SOTA is an MMORPG and its quests are the bare minimum needed to saw that the game has questing. Some singleplayer RPGs from the 80s had better questing.

At the end of the day, within the design constraints of SOTA, questing is as advanced as it can get. I don't see the point of prettying up the quest system when all it does is ask you to kill 10 rats, up with a pick more lore.

Take the time that would be spent and build a reputation system, or factions, or even a system for events where players or guilds compete against each other in some way. That'd add something useful and potentially interesting to the game.

 

I think there is one oversight here with the whole discussion.

Sota is an game played while in developement (not the game itself, the story is kinda written while it is played with more "chapters" to come)

You can now put in quests in bigger scale, something maybe it needs whole guilds to solve, make it maybe a competition or an race who solves it first, make it with different possible outcome, and THEN the next chapter builds on that.

You can set the outcomes so you know there arer lets say three different ways things play out, you can make it so the three choices sync with what the team considers "right for the game" but the players do vote with the way they solve the quests in some part, it is alive.

May not be the perfect systhem but for sure novel, players truly writing history.

If it works out Sota could be around for a long time, a kind of mmorpg tele novela going for decades.

Needed, an flexible quest systhem that allows modding as needed, Do away with the chat window for quest text, make an pop up that is pleasant to read (the chat window text is something i read over because it is a chore not fun to read).

The individual quests (single or party player quests) tell the lore and story of SotA, the big ones (25players or more needed to finnish) make history!

 

While I can agree to the rest of your post, I completely disagree with this statement. They haven’t done anything with the instancing tech that they have and that’s just to name one (although a big one) of the many things they can do that fits specifically within the game’s parameters.

I don’t think it’s an oversight so much as it’s irrelevant to main points of the OP.

It doesn’t matter what SotA ultimately does with the quests themselves. The stories, the consequences, the instancing, etc. It's important and we should care about these things but what’s being criticized here is how players have to wrestle various elements of the UI and how little to no amount of information is being delivered by the NPCs. How the NPCs deliver that information is also questionable.

It's the difference between story and storytelling. A song sung by someone who's tone deaf and doesn't have a sense of rhythm; you're talking about the songs, I'm talking about the singer.

@DarkStarr also seems to be aware of it. [source]

The problem now is that both Richard Garriott and Starr Long don't seem to understand the urgency of the matter as they both seem to point to Episode 2. This isn't just some other bullet-point feature that you add to the game; it's a crucial aspect to what the game is supposed to be.

In order for SotA to be a success and reach the future that you (and many other people) are talking/dreaming about, Episode 1 needs to stand properly in its own.

Again: the content isn't the issue; it's how you get to experience it. Like I say in my OP in response to Richard's invitation to try the story again, the questing experience hasn't changed since 2014.

 

This 10000000000000000000000000 times.

You can't go "launch" a game like SotA with placeholder quest system.

Revamp, overhaul, fix it BEFORE Episode 2 and you may have a chance to have the massive amount of backers that lost hope back. (speaking from my 4th attempt to complete the story quests)

 

Thank you all for your input here!