Journal Change?

Been popping in and out for monthly stuff, but haven't been keeping up with the news. Any word on when the Quest Journal will be updated? At the moment the quest journal we have is the only thing keeping me from actually playing the game due to how unorganized it is. Also, when the quest journal is updated will there be a quest reset option?

 

*dons his astrolabe, gazes up to the sky, compares it to his moondial calculations*
Hmmm.
*sacrifices a wolf on the altar, checks the innards vs the ancient tome, throws the spleen upon the fire, checks the smoke formations vs a scroll*
Humph.
*brews some tea, removes the hoof, tries to divine the pattern of the leaves in the cup*
Bah.


That which has been thrice promised and twice removed is yet again alluding any calls to manifest riftside.






...




...or.
They said they would but has not.
Then in last livestream when asked then it was said “we are working in the existing now” which means not yet.
Hence it seems they don’t understand how important it is. Which is kinda silly.

 

Yep @Spoon has the gist of it, I am afraid.

I too have been desperately waiting for the ever elusive quest/story overhaul, but am doubtful it will ever happen. I don't have the time nor the inclination to watch thousands of hours of these Twitch streams to try and figure out what is happening with the development of the game.

Outside of what Spoon mentioned above, the last I heard was that Lord British and Sannio were working on the story for Episode 2. I have no idea what that means for an overhaul of the clunky mess we have in Episode 1.

Sadly, I don't think they really care about the story and quests anymore; despite how important it is to a large portion of the player base.

 

Ouch. Seems like this is a touchy subject. The journal is one of the first things players see, but the more quests that pile up the harder it is to keep track of just "where" the quests are supposed to be. Bundling the quests by continent/zone and allowing us to toggle which quests are "active" in the corner of the screen would be a huge help in keeping track of everything. It had gotten to the point I didn't want to talk to any NPCs in my travels because I'm still working on quest strings from the next continent and I didn't want to just have a hundred unorganized active quests at once. In RL I'd at least tear the pages out of the journal and put them in separate folders. Do we still have to hunt down an NPC for an eraser to clear our active quests?

 

I'm not even sure that is possible, unless it is a feature that I have missed; which, admittedly, is definitely possible.

 

When you're logging in and select your character name, there's a gear in the upper right that lets you reset your quest state.

*sigh* My commenting further on the devs' priorities would serve no one any good at all, so I'm not typing the rest of this response. I'm just thinking it really really hard.

 

It oughta be forming a core component of Ep. II.

Long and short of it is, they didn't spend enough time on it prior to release, or at least didn't prioritize it properly during the "last 20%". They've admitted they dropped the ball and that's why we were told we'd get a whole new system with Ep. II.

Maybe that's what the big announcement will be?

A lot of the reviews online (from proper sources like Eurogamer etc...) mentioned the questing experience.

I personally think SotA's best shot right now is to make the big websites on Ep. II. launch with a more polished questing experience.

You need a big news outlet saying "hey this game is getting pretty epic now!".

 

Depends.

In the scenario that you have a quest that is in a bugged state that has been fixed, then yes you'd need to track down one of the NPCs of that quest line and say "hello".

However there are kinda sorta two types of journals. The old journal in text form that just fills up. Then a second on the HUD which shows active quests with hints.

Plus the blue sparkly stuff on the compass.

 

Yeah, I'm looking forward to seeing the revamped quest / journal / NPC dialog system too. Rumor has it they'll be done by the time Half Life 3 is released.

 

If I was them, I'd have a look at Journal section of the Chapter pages here for Baldur's Gate: Enhanced Edition:
https://baldursgate.fandom.com/wiki/Chapter_One

It breaks down the whole structure of the game, how the Journal is affected etc...

Spoiler alert?

 

I reset mine long time ago and redid the whole thing. And I still have things locked in the journal and quests that wont go away. I just need to throw that book out the window and start a new one.

 

The main thing we need, above all things, is an 'abandon quest' button that will reset that quest and only that quest back to its pristine, unaccepted state, so you can try it again when it screws up.

Then you can decide if you want to fight with it again or just never accept it.
Then you can abandon quests you didn't actually mean to pick up and have no intention of doing because they are only sometimes functional and rarely straightforward.

The "reset all my quest stuff" button I'm pretty sure was a one-off, and I used it months ago to erase the mess that was my quest journal after having worked through the storyline quests from the state they were in at persistence. Doing so deleted all associated quest items, including the "rewards" from the quest which are also quest items (the shroud, crown, and scepter). Even if I could reset 'all my quests' again, doing the storyline quest for the 3rd time (well 5th, actually, cause I've done it twice on an alt, too) fills me with an irrational rage. I don't want to reset the storyline quest. Or ever even think about it again.

So yes, just an abandon quest button. Its basic and absolutely baffling why we don't have this as it would reduce the number of quest related tickets, quest related forum queries, and quest related ragequits we have by like 95% if you could just abandon it when it borks and try again most people would do that and solve their problem. I have 7 tasks that I routinely go and click on to 'hide' because I have no intention of finding some NPC in some low level area I inadvertently ended up with a quest for. I've been ignoring these tasks for well over a year. I'm fairly certain at least some of them are not going to be functional.

The thing is, the quests in this are good from a narrative perspective, and are on average, more interesting than most games fetch-quests. But the journal/documentation/infrastructure is so bad that the best advice you can give a new player struggling to quest is to ignore the quests completely unless you're after the main storyline (advice: shoehorn your way through it) or a particular piece of deco, and ignore everything else. That's not how it should be!

 

Things like this are one of the big reasons I dropped support. Their priorities are haywire. Things like the Quest/UI are a 5-alarm fire, and they're working on a new level to Tatarus, which itself was a distraction from more important things.

It's like they have a restaurant, and it's engulfed in flames. They've taken a "this is fine" attitude. Their statistics show that most new people don't make it past the welcome mat. To regular people, that makes sense. That's the vantage where you see bellowing flames all over the place, and are like "nope". But for some reason they decided that the solution was to remove the welcome mat.

Meanwhile, they'll continue cleaning tables and setting silverware while the place burns down.

 

You're right, things like this are crazy. I watched the steam where they were working on a new level for Tartarus and I was shocked. I kept thinking to myself is why are they making new stuff when there is so much other things that need to be fixed. When they were first working on Tartarus, I had thought that it was going to be a new dungeon for Ep2, but no. I just end up scratching my head in disbelief.

 

Gonna end up doing that a lot around here!

 

Though I did enjoy the game, I think that it can be best summed up as "still waiting for the last 20%." It seems as though nearly every system in the game is hovering at 80%, and they keep adding more unfinished systems. We've got most of dungeons (still no craftable foyer that matches the style of the rest of the craftable components) we got booze (but booze with bonuses is "still coming"), a quest system that sort of works... and on and on.

It'd be great if they just picked one thing each month and finished it.

 

Not to get off topic, but is fishing finished? I'm not sure what it was supposed to include and what might still be missing. TY

 

there were a few fish models developed with the original set that have not been put in game yet, and i expect that fishing will tie into treasure maps when that happens.

 

You mean when the first 80% of that happens.

 

(Snicker) Beat me to it!