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captainfish

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Quests are Pretty Frustrating - My thoughts on the quest system

I love the whole quest thing. When they have good hints, it can be a lot of fun trying to find all the items. Along the way you make a few "bad" choices and you get to learn some new stuff. Some quests, however, do a pretty piss poor job of letting you know what you're looking for. One example is the RPG monster quest which this list illustrates pretty well. None of these are a member of the quest group, but I'm sure you would agree that (most of them) are staples of the RPG genre. Wizards of the coast, the descendants of the creators of the genre, would certainly agree. 

One quest I'm currently going through is the Globe-trotter quest. The goal of this quest is to find a bunch of standard locations and games that relate to them. The problem is, that there are a bunch of games relating to each setting, and the clues don't give you enough information to know whether or not you are wrong. The Final Frontier's clue "SPAAAAACE" doesn't help especially when the quest doesn't include Dead Space, Homeworld, Starcraft or Buck Rogers, but these obviously have a space theme. In fact space might be one of the most common settings in video games, so to receive such a generic clue is completely useless. It also seems each item can only point to one page, thus Mass Effect (franchise) and Mass Effect (game) do not give you any points but the sequel might. This is especially a problem when a certain quest points to a platform but rewards the item as an object. To eliminate this they should add the ability for quest items to point at several pages. It would award the points for the first site visited, then show others "we would've also accepted...." On the other hand, we could remove the very low number of sites to search. If The Final Frontier had 50 sites, and the only prerequisite was sites that have space as the setting, people would still end up searching out a bunch of sites (which I believe is the goal of these quests) but they would be always working towards the solutions. This solution is more dependent on having each page have the correct concepts connected to it, but as a reward if you found a page missing the required setting, you could edit and add it, and be the first to have that count towards your quests.

If the goal is for us to find really obscure games, then the clues need to reflect that, and give helpful suggestions for each item. We should not be required to get into the head of whoever made the quest at the time through luck. If you want me to think about Legend of Kyrandia*, mention adventure games and jesters.  "SPAAAAACE" is the best example of a useless quest clue and whoever thought of it should be shot, out of a cannon, into space.

*The first Legend of Kyrandia kinda sucks. You should not put a bunch of exploration in your adventure games. It's structured more like a text adventure game, in which moving screens is equivalent to typing "N" not waiting for your dude to slowly walk across it. You should not put the ability to die in your adventure game. At one point you need to collect like 12 gems and put them all into a machine with no clues as to which ones are the correct ones and you have a limited inventory. And gems start to appear in places that you've already been to, for no goddamn reason. Just don't play it. First sequel is good, third game is kinda gimmicky.

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Quests are pretty rad

I really like the new quest system. It's kept me hooked so far. My favorite quest was the Flash in the Pan Quest. Thinking about all the failed consoles was a fun trip.

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