I am sure as we go forward quests are something that will get more and more attention from both the dev team and modders. One aspect I feel could be improved is the way we are presented with these quests. At this current moment in time we get a large picture followed by a small amount of text to which we can select yes or no from the two boxes. While this works fine I have some issues with it.
Firstly the pictures... they dominate the field of view when acepting a quest and the same ones are used again and again over the few quests we have. Because I am as focused on the picture as the text I am automatically reminded of all the other quests I have done that have used that particular picture (usually the one of the dark door and the hero on the stairs) Suddenly no matter how interesting the quests text, it has lost any feeling of uniqueness or adventure because I am thinking "oh" it is just another quest in that dark door up those stairs. Now you could expand the range of picture you have to represent your quests to give each its own unique flavour or much simpler would be to just remove the pictures from the quest screen. I know this seems like an odd thing to do, but if we had no pictures the quests text would be able to take center stage in setting up the scene for and make each quest truely unique. For me personally there would be less in the way of me using my imagination to bring the quests to life.
My second issue is any of the quests that have yes or no as options. Again I find this binary option to really suck some of the magic from the quests. But to be fair you don't always use yes/no as when we arrive at tactical battle sites in quests and are choosing if we want to enter the battle we get some nice flavoured text to choose from, so more of this would be nice.
Perhaps this is just me and others may love the pictures and the way current quests are being presented but I would feel that perhaps if done in a slightly different way then quests could feel alot more unique and special. what do you guys think on the current quest screens?
A different pic for each different quest would be awesome (any "excuse" for more Elemental art is good).
What I miss and recently discovered is that when you say no to a quest dialog that involved a fight (when you take the quest to fight the darklings but when you arrive there you go "diplomatic type"), you get some music but nothing else. It's not descriptive enough. I don't really know that I'm rejecting the quest instead of choosing an alternate path to complete the quest. And neither do I get some kind of popup saying "Brave Ma'am Procipinee ran away. Bravely ran away, away!... and Darklings slaughtered all the villagers.".
But as you said, quests will be getting more attention so there is hope.
Agreed and I think that anytime you have to stop and have the thought process "wait did that do what I thought it was going to do" your getting pulled out of the experience in a negative way. Also I think it is interesting you mention music, I hadn't really thought about it but sound effects and music can really help build up the feel of a quest... Like if the quest screen for a quest that starts in a cold damp cave had dripping water sound effects in the background while you are on the quest screen. A Good example of this are the lost memorys in the xbox 360 lost oddysey which uses text effects, sound and the players imagination the tell some really moveing and vivid stories,
www.youtube.com/watch?v=sqiRc4amcAU
I think they should nab ideas from this for Elemental.
Edit: how do you make things a hyperlink here?
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