Harvest Quest: Spoilers

@Sannio

In the Friday live stream you asked for feedback on the Harvest House on the Hill quest. Here it is!

Spoiler

I think this quest has a lot of potential, but I found a few bugs or design problems that made me think more about improvement opportunities than I did having fun. See below:

1. The directions to the house on the hill are confusing. The child first says it's located on the west side of Harvest, but later explains it's to the south of Harvest by the windmills.


Luckily the house shows up on the compass for you. But it's not very clear unless you remember to look there. So I think once you get the quest the house location on the compass should light up and have those blue quest sparkly things on it. Also, Harvest is very difficult to navigate, even with the compass, and the location of the house (and windmills) are not easy to find. Even if you go up to the highest parts of the scene and look down over the town you can't see those windmills. So you may want to think about another way to describe where it's located...perhaps saying, near the west exit? I can't remember if that's even accurate now, but something that says you need to get out of the main part of the town to find it.

2. The child that gives you the quest is called child. Maybe that's a placeholder, but it seems more distracting that the child doesn't have a proper name. Near the default entrance of the scene I met another child named Sergeant, which made some sense based on his dialogue, I didn't get that same feeling when I met Child in the center of town. Also Child (like Sergeant) has a sword, and that seems odd unless it's explained in the dialogue somewhere.

3. Once I found the house on the hill I started looking for clues. I found none. Because it was morning, I had to wait a long time before anything "happened" and honestly I expected one of two things would happen, but they never did. First, I thought there would either be some kind of ghostly NPC that would show up and explain some kind of story to me, and the quest would be completed. Second, I thought perhaps the kids of the town would show up and try to scare me by making sounds and throwing things at the home (I was really hoping that might happen, I think it would've been very cool).

But nothing happened, for a long long time. In fact I was beginning to wonder if anything would happen and kept watching the top of my screen to see if it was night time yet. At dusk, something does happen, and I was loaded into a new scene, which was cool. Great I thought, here we go!

But then nothing happens again. A lot of nothing. I waited and waited through the night and nothing happened. Of course I noticed immediately that the windows and doors were blocked up with stone, but the front door took me back to Harvest! And I was really worried that I'd failed the quest by accident. And I didn't want to click on the back door because I thought that would just risk me being thrown out of the scene and failing the quest. So I waited, and waited, and waited.

I also noticed that the clock that had been on the wall was now gone. But I could hear the clock ticking still. Really distracting as nothing continued to happen. I kept thinking that whenever the ghost witch showed up, the clock would stop and I'd hear a loud GONG! sound, or maybe something would try to jump out and scare me. But again, nothing...oh the waiting.

Finally I noticed the Journal Entry had updated. Which told me that there must be something I'm supposed to be doing here. So I decided that I would try the back door out just in case. Sure enough, that was where I needed to go.

And that's when things got more interesting.

Things to consider improving:
1. Although I immediate set all the clocks to midnight, I still don't know why I was doing that.
2. After completing the quest I figured out that the platforms over the fire pit were only there to provide a short cut through other areas of the scene. But why would that exist? It seems very manufactured. It would be nice if there was some plausible reason those platforms would be there other than to serve as a shortcut.
3. When I set the last clock, I assume the gate to the ghost witch lair opened up. I don't know this because at that point I had run out of places to go, I eventually tried to jump into the fire pits (I tried everything else) and then I was teleported back to the start. When I returned to the gate it was open.
4. There's a mimic in the scene. At this point mimics are completely over used. I would suggest you guys seriously consider removing the vast majority of them because any time I see a chest in a dungeon I assume it's a mimic. What used to make me jump, now annoys me.

I think there's a lot of opportunity to make mimics fit into a scene a little better than this. I know this is very meta, but my immediate thoughts were to question how a mimic would survive down there in a place where not many people would ever visit. It would starve to death. Ideally mimics would want to be in semi-high traffic areas where they could fool new adventurers, small animals, etc... A hidden ghost witches lair that is only accessible at night wouldn't really qualify, imo.

5. The loot from the ghost witch was painfully inadequate. For someone figuring this out on his own, this took me hours to complete, and the pay off was only a few XP and some stuff I would've gotten 100 times over by grinding out levels in just about any other scene. Ideally there would be some kind of cool quest specific reward. Because Harvest is (I believe) known for pumpkins? I would suggest the reward be something pumpkin related. Maybe a special unique jack-o-lantern? This is something that would be believable that the child could give you for completing the quest, AND it would now make sense for the child to be carrying a sword! (how else would she carve a pumpkin?) She could even be carving the pumpkin in the center of town when you first meet her.

Since this seems like it would be a courage related quest, perhaps the jack-0-lantern could be called the Jack-0-lantern of courage or something.

6. Finishing the quest left me asking a more questions than I could answer.

I know the ghost witch blamed kids for the death of her daughter, but why was it underground? Why were there no kids or kid bodies there? What was the real story behind the ghost witch? Surely the child didn't know the details.

Summary:

Overall I thought this quest had a lot of potential. A lot of the problems I had were simple things that can be quickly fixed by fine tuning the dialogue. But some of these things held back the story telling and prevented a better narration that completed the beginning, middle, and end of the quest from flowing together like the quest in North Midmaer Way.

I hope this helps!

 

Sorry about all the typos in the OP, wow I must've been half asleep when I wrote that.

Spoiler

That's awesome! Good luck!

Fair enough.

I don't remember hearing a child. I may have heard something in the room with the bed and toys but I just can't remember for sure. I felt like that room was a little odd. Was it the daughters old room? Was it a holding cell for kidnapped kids? I didn't know. It seemed out of place to me.

That seems reasonable, especially if their kids are actually being taken. It also seems like the town would be much more up in arms about those events. There would be search parties forming, etc...