Malice entry difficulty level (Spoilers)

You can't treat this the same way one would approach leveling in WoW or the subsequent clones and simply follow a single story to victory. At the moment at least, it doesn't appear intended that you're going to find much success in simply trying to complete each virtue story line before starting up one of the others. The reality is the Love quest line is actually the hardest; it's just that the starting area for it happens to be the most complete hence why they start you there. You are going to have to approach this differently because there are LOTS of side quests in the areas for the Love and Courage quest lines BUT it takes some genuine hunting to find them all. You can sometimes tell if an NPC has a quest if they have some blue sparkly wave emote they do as you pass by.

Your death traps, aptly named I must say, can be mostly avoided by checking the quest journal and seeing how it rates your chances of success (if it gives one). The journal has been basically accurate outside of Malice for what that's worth.

As it stands right now, the path of least resistance of story order is Truth -> Courage -> Love. I don't think I had to kill a single thing in the entire Truth line, but at the same time I didn't get any experience either until the 100k at the very end. There is only one hard part in the courage quest line as you have to blitz past some 5 skull mobs to get to the zone you're supposed to go to.

 

... or Skyrim, or Baldur's Gate, or any other game out there... or any movie or book out there. You could argue that the game is more or less non-linear and it's really great in theory but it can't just throw basic story-telling principles out the window just "because". If there are deliberate road blocks where you have to progress somewhere else, then the story is disjointed rather than being non-linear.

If a princess needs saving, I want to follow it through to the end... because THAT's what's been established. If I HAVE to ignore the princess because "screw you, you can't approach this like any other game", then the game needs to communicate that in better ways than just throwing death traps my way.

In Zelda: Breath of the Wild, the story establishes a single end-goal and it opens up by giving me the task to help out different communities throughout the lands of Hyrule. I get to experience each of their stories individually and, in turn, it further strengthen my resolve to reach my end-goal. These aren't side-quests; it's all part of the main story.

Right now, Samael's is emotionally compromised and I can't do a single thing about it... and I'm supposed to believe it's okay for me to ignore that so that I can seek out the truth about some dagger on the other side of Novia? No!

If this WAS World of Warcraft, I'd talk to an NPC and it'd give me a task. I'd look at the quest log and see that it's "red" and then I'd go "Okay! I guess I can't kill 10 demon-boars just yet, I'm going to go through my list and do all the 'green' and 'yellow' quests first". Check list, check list. Done... Because they're kill X quests. When you get a story quest, you get to finish it all the way through to the end... or until the game tells you "We've arrived at the gates of hell! They won't open until we clear this entire area of quests! Go champion! Save Azeroth!"

It's not my responsibility or any other player's to go around hunting for quests to fill up their XP bar when they already have quests in their journal. This is especially true when those in your journal are the main quest(s) which were given to you at the VERY beginning of the game. The player's got nothing to do besides running around to look for quests... OF COURSE he/she will try to continue with the main story quests.

Road blocks need to make sense within the story and, ideally, should be not noticeable by the player.

But that's the problem: It's not accurate at all; even outside of Malice. From what I gather, the "chances of success" is based on your Adventure level and THAT is derived your total XP used. The moment you start to level up skills that don't give a numerical advantage (such as damage or health).. skills like [Distract] or [Escape] (etc) or spend most of your XP to focus on a single skill instead of spreading it out, the further skewed the rating gets.

Malice is just the worst offender.

 

Too lazy to edit out what I wanted to quote BUT Adventurer level is not on XP used but XP gained. IE what's in your pool was also tallied and is not removed when decay kicks in for deaths. Adventure level can be treated as any other "level" based system where it accumulates ALL adventuring related experience you gain.

Skyrim is a special case because that game is entirely level adjusted to you unless they put in a special "leveled" flag in a particular area (I think that was only for modding). The SUPER super old Baldur's Gate had you roam around towns to pick up quests and whatever else, but I don't recall if you could just stick to the story and not care.

The WoW equivalent here with the story quests would simply be that you can't even get the quest until you're XX level (grey'd out "!'s") which ... meh, doesn't really work too terribly well here. I personally don't want the story quest to have all the random helping the town's folk built into it and prefer that if I deign to bother, I could, otherwise, doing what I want. But that's my opinion and definitely not right/wrong regardless.

At this point the story seems more/less final and only side-show-bob things will be added in the future. And I completely understand that you want to be able to complete the story doing ONLY the story, but that isn't how this is set up UNLESS you're willing to grind up to a fairly high level before you even start it. When all 3 "Outskirts" maps come into existence that may actually be possible.

For what it's worth, I can't think of any modern MMO I've played that didn't require side-quests to supplement the main story experience wise. If you're talking about single player OFFLINE, then yea that could probably do with some tweaks to be more in line with what you want to see and the industry standard. As it stands the story quests aren't "long" enough to warrant a 5 skull capable character from just completing them from a MMO perspective.

 

That's even worse; you can easily be considered higher level than what your skills can actually output.

It's not that special of a case as you would think. The only difference is that they established mechanics to support their way of telling stories so that it's not jarring for players to experience them. There's less of a story-whiplash.

In Baldur's Gate, you could stick to the story but (that's the thing) the story encouraged you to do side-quests because of how the story was paced. The first chapter has you go investigating a mine because there's something afoot going on. On the way, you meet Minsc and he's distressed because his friend is in danger. Which sounds more urgent? Not only that but, if you do help him out, you get two optional group members... and (if memory serves right) Minsc tells you this before you help him.

Not sure why you had to mention that Baldur's Gate is old... because, so long as it's doing things right, age doesn't matter.

In SotA, you're in Soltown, you just witnessed the aftermath of a village being under attack. You're being sent to deliver a message to the guard who sends you to Ardoris about the recent undead attacks. "To Ardoris!" you say... or... maybe you should help out that guy with his house key first? You don't know; maybe Ardoris is a death trap? You go to Ardoris and now they say "Go to the Necropolis and find out what happens to the undead! They're attacking cities everywhere!"... so you go to the Necropolis and you're suddenly in a death trap; the monsters are too strong for you... but, as far as you know, that's what the game wants you to do! Oh hang on! Some waitress is being mistreated by her crush! That's how you get further into the Necropolis!

By leveling up because "game".

The Necropolis is a 5-skull area and it's practically the 4th objective that any new player will be charged to do right after character creation... and the Necropolis is a cakewalk compared to Malice. I sure hope you're not trying to tell me that this is "normal" or acceptable.

Now, you COULD argue that exploring the Necropolis is just another mystery similar to Baldur's Gate mine example I just gave... but the Necropolis is set up as a priority and nothing else is urgent. So why the hell would I waste my time investigating the death of a kid in the streets or help out that waitress from being mistreated when the kingdom is at stake?

Same thing happens with Malice.

I'm not saying that the side-quests shouldn't exist or whatever. I'm saying that, if those side-quests are required to do so that I can do the main quests, then that needs to be re-enforced by the story.

It's more that I want (my character) to have motivation to do the other side-quests in context to the situation at hand, rather than being forced to do so because "game". I don't have a "need" to finish a particular story unless that story encourages it.

The Elder Scrolls Oblivion is a good example of a story that encourages you to stick to the story. And that game was renown for its level-scaling. Everything is urgent. Go find Martin! Escort him quickly! We're being invaded! It encourages the player to keep moving and is forced to slog through a ton of repetitive Oblivion gates. Sure, you can do side quests to have a change of pace... but the story doesn't want you to.

If I'm supposed to jump between paths, then that needs to be re-enforced through the story and/or by leading the player to particular crossroads where the urgency can calm down (pick up a few side-quest if possible) so that the player can "switch" paths. Not have the player turn around 180 because he/she met a (literal) dead end.

Depends on what you consider "modern". The original GuildWars is one of many and the entire game revolved around doing story "missions" one after the other; doing side-quests to learn new skills and abilities or to get more mini-stories and challenges.

I'll refrain from bloating my post to give more examples because that's besides the point. It isn't that I want to stop side-questing to do the story. It's that it needs to be clear and make more sense within the story.

If those side-quests are required to do so that I can do the main quests, then that needs to be re-enforced by the story. If I'm supposed to mix-and-match the different Paths, then each of those paths should intertwine at multiple points in their respective plots. I shouldn't be falling into death traps and the journal entry giving me hints about the difficulty shouldn't be the prime way of identifying the order at which I do things.

I'm talking about the flow of a given story; regardless of medium. The story quests aren't "long" enough for a any character to get to a point where they're capable of doing 5-skull content.

 

The necropolis entry point from Novia is a 5 skull zone and you can completely by-pass all of that and go straight to the actual quest zone which is substantially less difficult. Granted obviously nobody would never know that before hand. Malice on the other hand is basically a 5 skull zone and there's no indication of this anywhere lol...

Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to defend the way they told this story as it feels SUPER disjointed for many of the reasons you mentioned. The only saving grace is that, taken as a whole (once you can actually do it lol) it's actually pretty good content wise.

IF I was in charge of it, definitely would set it up so these 3 paths are sequential instead of ... whatever the special word is for whatever we've got now where you're constantly jumping between them. The 3 starting areas are all linked together so no matter which "virtue" you started with, you could port your happy ass over once you finished the outskirts stuff.

 

Schizophrenic?